Field Notes
Thailand is different. You don’t run out of road so quickly.
It's big enough for a road trip to exist. Big enough that you can drive for hours and end up somewhere you've never heard of. When people think of Thailand, the usual suspects come to mind: Bangkok, Phuket, Krabi, Pattaya, Chiang Mai, Koh Phi Phi. The names get repeated until they start standing in for the whole country. Thailand has seventy-seven provinces. I've been to fourteen. Which means I know almost nothing.
The plan was simple. Drive north from Bangkok. Stop along the way. Spend nights in places I’d never been to and knew nothing about. Maybe make a stop or two on the way back. I wanted to move through the country instead of over it. To pass through the provinces most people ignore. To see what sits between the names you recognise. What changes when you’re not rushing through it. And, if I was lucky, to come back with a few stories better than my driving.
It was also a way to make sense of this strange, beautiful country full of contradictions. Most of my time here has been spent in Bangkok, where things have started to feel familiar. Maybe too familiar. As many locals will tell you, Bangkok is not Thailand. Ask what is Thai, though, and the answers tend to slip the moment you try to pin them down.
This trip was as much about seeing what sits beyond the usual names as it was about confronting how much I don’t know. About being a stranger in a strange place. Not fully understanding the language. Letting small things feel like discoveries again. I liked that feeling. To be inside, yet always outside, trying to peel back the layers of a place seventy million people call home.
January is a good time. The humidity drops. The further north you drive, the cooler it gets. Days hover between fifteen and the high twenties. The sun still shows up after lunch, but it's kinder. You can step out of the car without feeling punished.
Once you leave Bangkok, the country opens up. Long highways flanked by grass fields, warehouses, factories. Every so often, a sign tells you you’ve crossed into another province, followed by what it thinks it’s known for. Usually temples. Sometimes a park.
Speed limits exist, technically. Out on the highway, most cars move faster than the signs suggest. Checkpoints and cameras are spaced in predictable places. Everyone knows roughly where they are. There's even an app that beeps as you approach. You slow down just enough to look responsible, then pick up speed again once you're through. There's an unspoken agreement between drivers, the app, and whoever put the cameras there. Everyone's in on the game.
Every now and then, the road runs through a small town. Old wooden houses. Dogs asleep in the street. Roosters wandering wherever they please. You slow down, edge around them, and move on.
When you need to stop, there's always a gas station. Nothing special, just enough: toilets, coffee, snacks. The strange thing is how identical they are, from the layout to the shops and even the smell. After a few stops, you could swear you've been here before. Maybe you have. Maybe Thailand only has one gas station and they just keep moving it.
About halfway between Bangkok and Chiang Mai sits Sukhothai, the country's first capital and, depending on who you ask, its oldest city. Often described as the birthplace of Thai art, religion, and writing. Which is a lot of pressure for a town that now mostly serves tourists passing through on their way to somewhere else.
This was my first stop. A five-hour drive north. Sukhothai isn't a big city. It's split into Old and New, though visually there isn't much to tell you which is which. If you weren't looking at a map, you'd probably miss the distinction altogether.
Most travellers come for the historical park and its ancient ruins. As with many attractions here, there are two prices. Twenty baht for locals. Two hundred for everyone else. If you speak Thai and catch the ticket seller at the right moment, maybe while she’s watching something on her phone, you might slip through. If you don’t look the part, you won’t.
Few countries do dual pricing this openly. Maybe none I’ve been to. The explanation is usually that it’s not about charging tourists more, but about giving locals a discount. Either way, it was a familiar pattern. Once, in Bangkok, I ordered noodles from a street stall. Midway through the order, the woman realised I wasn’t local and quietly swapped the menu for one with higher prices. It doesn’t matter how it’s explained. It never feels great.
On weekend evenings, a market opens behind the historical park. People sit on picnic mats laid over patches of grass by the pond, watching the sun set behind the temples. You’ll find the usual lineup: noodles, rice, snacks, desserts. All fine, nothing remarkable. Sukhothai is best known for Sukhothai noodles. Strangely, they weren’t at the market beside the main attraction.
Still, there’s a lot to like here. It’s small and easy to get around. There are markets for eating, drinking, and sitting around watching the light change over the water. Judging by the number of tourists, it’s hardly a secret. Even so, it’s quieter than Bangkok. The air feels cooler, cleaner. Bicycle lanes run everywhere. Accommodations too. Throw a rock and you’ll hit a guesthouse.
I stayed at a small BnB run by a woman in her early fifties who spoke Thai, English, Spanish, and French. Rooms were standalone wooden houses, about half a dozen in total. She also managed a rotating population of kittens, scattered on tables, chairs, sofas, and outside room doors. Guests loved it. The cats ran the place. She just facilitated.
She ran the BnB the way people hope Thailand still works: easy-going, flexible, always accommodating, with a loud, generous laugh. She checked guests in, ran the kitchen with one assistant, took orders, made drinks, and somehow still found the energy to sit around drinking and laughing with guests late into the night. At six the next morning, she was back on her feet. Two guests arriving. Two more being driven to the bus station so she could help them sort out tickets.
It’s easy to see why people enjoy travelling here, even with the extra you pay to see things. The further you get from Bangkok, the less transactional it feels. People help because it makes sense to help. Things work because someone decides to make them work.
Leaving Sukhothai, you start to see what most of the country actually looks like. Long stretches of land not shaped into anything yet. Sandy, dusty, forested. Wide patches of grass that seem to exist simply because no one has bothered them.
Every so often, the road runs through a town: mostly banks, convenience stores, supermarkets, with hardly any shade and even fewer spots for lingering outside. The kind of town where you stop for gas and keep driving.
The further you get from the capital, the rarer English becomes. It’s taught in schools, technically, but outside the bigger cities few are comfortable using it. Road signs help. Most are bilingual, enough to keep you moving, even if you can’t read the language.
No one here expects you to learn and speak the language, especially if you're just here for a few days or weeks. But it helps to know a couple of words, or at least remember that English isn't the default. I’ve seen tourists deliver full monologues in their own language to restaurant staff, then look genuinely confused when the joke doesn’t land. Out here, English isn’t a given. It’s optional. And Thailand carries on just fine without it.
Just before reaching Phrae, I stopped at a temple known for its reclining Buddha. Temples are the most popular attraction in Thailand. I’m never quite sure if that’s because they’re what travellers want to see, or simply because they’re everywhere. There are tens of thousands across the country. At some point, availability turns into significance.
This one was empty. The gates were open. No caretakers or visitors, not even a ticket booth. It felt like everyone had stepped out for lunch and forgotten to return, leaving the statues and buildings to look after themselves.
Phrae sits on the edge of where the Lanna Kingdom once was. The city is made up of narrow roads, frequent roundabouts, and small alleys lined with low bungalows and wooden houses. The architecture is anything but uniform. Each house seems to follow its own logic, its own size and colour, mostly untouched by the urge to standardise.
It’s easy to get around on foot or by bicycle, not because it was designed that way, but because there aren’t many cars.
Arriving around midday, most shops were closed. I barely saw any tourists. The only one was working on a laptop in the hotel lobby.
Phrae isn’t known for much, at least not by guidebook standards. Most people pass through on their way to Nan. Attractions are modest: a handful of temples with Burmese and Lanna influences, a couple of 19th-century teak houses turned into museums, and, if you’re willing to drive, mountains and caves a few hours out of town.
There’s a night market about two hundred metres long. It opens at five and winds down by eight. The city calls it a night early.
It’s hard to say what would make someone stay longer than a night or two. But being an ordinary residential town has its advantages. No tour buses or crowds. No elephant pants, no weed in the air. Just a place where people live, getting on with ordinary things, largely left alone. Which, after a few days in busier cities, doesn't sound half bad.
Leaving Phrae, I took a side road, convinced it would save time. It didn’t. I got boxed in behind a convoy of trucks hauling everything from fuel to vegetables to, in one case, a small family of cows.
Passing them became a waiting game. You watch the opposite lane, judge distance and nerve, then take your chances. Hesitate, and you’re stuck there for another few kilometres. It’s oddly absorbing.
Once I finally cleared the trucks, the road opened into long stretches of bends and blind curves. Then a sign appeared. A giant strawberry, bright yellow, pointing to a farm ahead. For a moment, I wondered if this part of the country had bred a new variety. Minutes later, it finally made sense. It wasn’t a yellow strawberry. The sun had simply bleached it long enough to forget what colour it used to be.
The drive into Nan is anything but scenic, lined with gas stations, truck stops, and stretches of road torn up and patched with fresh cement. Goods move steadily between cities. The kind of approach that doesn’t bother setting expectations.
Most people stay a night in the city before heading into the mountains. You know you’re near the centre when tour buses appear, followed by the OTOP signs. One Tambon One Product. A neat idea from the early 2000s, turning local skills into souvenirs. Handwoven bags, ethnic costumes, local wine, snacks sealed in plastic. Place and identity reduced to what fits in a suitcase.
Nan has become a fashionable stop over the years. People come for the views, clouds sliding through the mountains, coffee in hand, green landscapes, paddy fields, rural charm. The whole thing is packaged as “slow life.” An escape from the city. For a few days, you’re told you can live closer to nature. As we were meant to. Available, of course, at the right price.
There’s an irony in how leisure works now. We spend money to do, for pleasure, what used to be everyday life. We buy our way back to nature. We pay large sums and give up weeks of time to learn how to make bowls by hand, stitch cloth, weave baskets, or live simply in the forest. Things once done out of necessity by ordinary people have been rebranded as experiences. A luxury. A form of play, mostly reserved for those who can afford the escape.
If paying for nature isn’t your thing, you don’t have to go far. Ten minutes from the centre is Nong Nam Khrok, a wetland left behind when the Nan River wandered off. It’s now a public space for walking, jogging, fishing, or doing something that isn’t eating, drinking, or shopping.
Giant rain trees sit on small islands in the middle of the water. They’re the main attraction. Friends and couples take turns photographing one another against the backdrop, cycling through poses. Twenty, thirty shots at a time. Which, I suppose, is what friends and partners are for now. Just holding the camera and saying "one more."
On the morning I left Nan, roosters kicked off around five. It was still dark. I drove early to a national park two hours away, known mostly for a waterfall and peacocks. The road was brutal, a long run of curves that made it the hardest stretch so far.
At the park, there were no peacocks. Just the waterfall. Small, unremarkable, in the way real things often are. A fallen tree lay where it had landed. Nothing felt arranged.
A ranger wandered over, took a photo of me by the water, and smiled. I couldn't tell if he was logging visitors or making sure I wasn't about to do something stupid. Probably both.
On the way out, a family of peacocks finally appeared, crossing the path like they owned it. Online reviews warn they’re aggressive. These ignored me completely. Leave nature alone and it usually returns the favour. Problems start when you expect it to perform.
Pulling into Lampang, you get the sense this place didn’t quite follow the rest of the North. Or maybe it did, then decided to do its own thing.
It goes by a few names: Horse carriage city. Rooster city. The last paradise of Thailand. The first two are easy enough to explain. The third made me curious.
The roosters are everywhere. Painted on white ceramic bowls. Stamped onto signs. Turned into souvenirs. The horse-drawn carriages are harder to miss. Introduced over a century ago, depending on who you ask, via the Portuguese through Macau or colonial Burma. They’re still running. Still popular with tourists. Locals barely notice.
It feels like a town that worked things out early. Good food. Reasonable prices. No awards or rankings, no plaques explaining why something is good. People are patient. When you cycle, cars and motorbikes slow down and let you through. Horns are rare. Drama rarer.
The city wraps itself around a river, held steady by a dam. Buildings rarely climb past two or three storeys. There’s water in the air. You smell it before you think about it.
You can get across town in ten minutes. It’s compact and laidback. The kind of place you plan to stay a night and end up extending again and again. From the travellers I saw, it’s already an open secret. Compared to Chiang Mai up north or Bangkok down south, this doesn’t feel like a city built for tourists.
One evening, I stopped cycling to check the map. A man in his late sixties walked over and asked if I needed help. He used to sell shoes. After retiring, he started a small water distillation business here.
“Did you know Lampang has the most senior citizens in Thailand?” he asked.
I didn’t. He was right. Nearly thirty percent of the seventy thousand people here are over sixty.
I told him what I liked about the place. He waved it off. “No, no. It’s small. There’s nothing much. Just simple.”
That pretty much says it all.
What makes a city liveable, or lovable, isn't a slogan or a masterplan. It's smaller and simpler than that. Can people run into each other? Can you stop and talk, instead of moving through everything sealed inside a car? Can you walk or cycle without feeling like you're gambling with your life every five minutes?
Are there public spaces that don't require you to buy something first? Somewhere near water? Trees that weren't added later as decoration? Does the city invite you out, then give you enough reasons not to rush home?
Yes. Yes. Yes.
On the road from Lampang to Chiang Mai is Lamphun. A small city, not all that different from Lampang at first glance. Two-storey shophouses line the streets with chicken rice, khao soi, and a few northern staples, but nothing to suggest you've arrived in one of the country's oldest cities.
And yet, this is where one of Thailand’s most important temples stands. Wat Phra That Hariphunchai appears on the one-satang coin, a denomination nobody uses but everyone carries. Supposedly it houses a relic of the Buddha’s hair. At its centre rises a 46-metre chedi, wrapped in gold, impossible to miss once you’re inside.
Places like this come with an unspoken agreement. Lower your voice. Don’t draw attention. That held for most of the half hour I was there, until it didn’t.
A group of students gathered in a loose semicircle, voices rising. Their teacher had spotted a pair of Western tourists and saw an opportunity: English practice. The visitors were politely cornered and peppered with questions.
“Why are you here?”
“Do you like Lamphun?”
“What do you like?”
The answers were predictable. "Yes, very much." "It's very local." "Not too many farangs." The word never stops being funny. Farang means foreigner. It also means guava.
It wasn’t the first time on this trip I’d heard people talking about escape. In Lampang, a Belgian tourist lamented how crowded Chiang Mai has become. He’d come south to get away from it.
Standing there, watching students interview visitors inside a temple older than most cities in the country, it felt like the joke was writing itself. People leave crowded places looking for somewhere quieter, more “local,” more real. They arrive, declare it untouched, then tell their friends. Slowly, the alternative becomes the next stop.
I stood there thinking this, pretending for a moment I wasn’t doing the same thing.
The fourth most visited city in Thailand, after Bangkok, Phuket, and Pattaya. That list alone tells you what most people come to the country for. Beaches, nightlife, and whatever Pattaya is now. Chiang Mai is different. Or at least, it used to be.
For decades, backpackers, expats, and travellers seeking a slower, cultural side of Thailand have gravitated here. When people say they're heading north, this is usually what they mean. It's long been where the young come to retire. Burned-out professionals. People tired of spending half their day in traffic. Those looking for less hustle, fewer malls, a life less obsessed with buying things they don't need. An exit ramp from the rat race.
And it’s not hard to see the appeal.
Nature is right around the corner. Fifteen minutes and you're on Doi Suthep, or what locals call Chiang Mai people's backyard. Close enough to feel like you're just stepping out behind your house. An hour out and you're climbing Doi Inthanon or wandering through fields around Chiang Dao.
Stack Chiang Mai against Bangkok and the math feels obvious: fewer daily irritations, less noise, less friction in the simple act of leaving the house. You’re not wrestling crowds, traffic, and logistics from morning to night. Everything takes less effort. The absence of chaos becomes its own luxury, giving you back space, time, and a bit of mental room you didn’t realise you’d been paying for.
It’s not a small city, but it behaves like one. Fewer cars. Nobody in a hurry. Most places are twenty to thirty minutes away. That alone changes how you live.
Driving here is Bangkok-lite. Cars drift along at fifty, not a hundred. Miss a light and no one’s offended. Compared to the capital, where traffic lights and zebra crossings are largely decorative, this already feels like a different country. Motorcyclists stop at red lights. Cars slow down, let you merge, and carry on. Hardly any honking, protests, or passive aggression.
Markets spill out across the city. The centre is dense with restaurants, bars, late-night stalls, places that never quite close. The Mae Hong Son loop waits nearby, still spoken of with reverence. Waterfalls, mountains, hiking trails, side roads that seem to go on forever. There’s enough here to keep you busy for years, or at least distracted.
Chiang Mai feels busier than the last time I was here. After the pandemic, the old city was a ghost town. Rows of shuttered shops. Even the 7-Elevens were closed.
The old city tells a different story now. More tourists. More expats. More traffic. Packed into its narrow alleys are cafés, weed shops, brunch spots, money changers, tour agencies. Everything a visitor might need, arranged within walking distance of everything else. You could spend hours wandering and still feel like you’d only skimmed the surface.
The city didn’t just recover, it overshot. No longer hollow or quiet, it’s messier, louder, a little overfed. Which is why Chiang Mai starts to make more sense once you leave the walls.
A few months ago in Shanghai, a friend mentioned that more people from China were moving to Chiang Mai. I wanted to see what that looked like on the ground. So I went to the Yunnan morning market, which only runs on Fridays.
One side sells cooked food. Chinese noodles, fried beef pies, skewers over open grills. The other offers raw supply: meat, vegetables, fruit. Dried goods hauled down from further north across the border. The signs flip between Chinese and Thai, with no effort made to translate further. If you don't speak either, you're on your own.
About half the stalls are run by people speaking fluent Mandarin, or one of the many mainland dialects. It isn’t just Chinese expats. Locals shop here. Tourists wander through.
Standing there, listening to the noise bounce between languages, it stopped feeling obvious what country I was in. Chiang Mai didn’t feel like northern Thailand so much as a transit lounge with better food. Less sealed off. More open to being shaped by whoever shows up. Which might be the future of a lot of places, whether they're ready for it or not.
A fifteen-minute drive from the city takes you to the foot of Doi Suthep, where Nana Jungle Market opens every Saturday at first light.
Pop-up stalls sell bread, pastries, handmade clothes, and food from every direction. Northern Thai snacks. Burmese congee. Grilled fish wrapped in banana leaf. You get to choose between German sausages and northern Thai ones without anyone judging you.
Picnic mats spread across the ground in front of a small stage where musicians turn up to play for a few hours. It feels less like a market than a loose commune. Anyone can show up. Everyone does.
The bakery is the centre of gravity. It's the reason the market exists at all. The owners started it almost by accident, when the smell of their bread pulled neighbours in, who told friends, who brought more people. Over time, other small producers followed. Now it's a thing.
Buy a loaf or a pastry and you get a free cup of coffee at the end. I took mine and sat down at a bench. A man in his sixties wandered over, eyeing the last open seat.
We started talking. Turns out he's from Singapore. Been in Chiang Mai twelve years now, after moving around a few other cities. He's on a retirement visa and lives off the rent from a handful of properties. Enough money to keep things simple and the afternoons free.
He talked about his days like they were nothing special. A dive trip here, a temple visit there, a hike through a national park because the weather was good. None of it framed as escape or adventure. Just how time gets filled.
Listening to him, it became clearer that the real pull here isn’t the slow pace of life, the smoky, spicy sausages, or the endless loop of markets and cafés. It’s that the city ends quickly. Drive a little longer, turn a few corners, and you’re already in the middle of a forest.
Thailand has challenges so obvious you notice them almost immediately. Traffic that steals months, if not years, of your life. A widening gap between rich and poor you feel street by street. A middle class treading water, pockets full of debt instead of savings. An education system that trains people to memorise, not think. Politics that lurch, reset, and pretend nothing happened. None of this is a revelation.
But there are two things Thailand does exceptionally well: food and nature.
They’re also the two things people dream about most when planning a trip here. How much local food can I eat before I regret it? Where can I go to be surrounded by nature with as few people as possible?
Between the beaches in the south and the caves, forests, and mountains further north, Thailand has over a hundred national parks, covering a significant part of the country. In the north alone, there are enough to keep you busy for years without repeating yourself.
What surprised me was how well they work. Clear maps. Signs that make sense. Trails and stairs that feel like someone actually expects you to use them. All managed by a surprisingly lean crew. You’re not watched constantly. You’re trusted to behave. Commercial clutter is kept to a minimum. No convenience store every ten minutes. No aggressive vendors. Most parks feel close to how nature left them.
As with most things here, locals pay one price, foreigners another. You can grumble or accept that it’s part of the deal. There’s also a passport you can buy, which gets stamped at each park you visit. It turns travel into a kind of game, one stamp at a time. Proof you were there.
You can rent a simple room inside many parks, or just a patch of grass to pitch a tent. It’s inexpensive, easy, and offers a different way to move through the country.
That’s when the man I met at the market made sense. How someone could live here for over a decade and still have places left to go. If you have time, real time, Thailand gives you plenty of ways to spend it. Especially once you leave the cities behind.
Chiang Mai gives you space without cutting you off. You get peace, but also a city that functions. Traffic moves. Food feels closer to its source. Mountains, forests, and small northern towns sit within easy reach. Time and attention start to feel like they belong to you again, less hijacked by logistics.
But there's also the challenge of living somewhere with too many good reasons to be outside.
Restaurants, cafés, markets, events, waterfalls, parks, and somehow always more markets. At a certain point, not working starts to feel less like procrastination and more like the default. It takes real discipline to sit down and focus when something more tempting is always fifteen minutes away.
Bangkok wears you out, but it forces routine. Going anywhere takes effort. Plans come with friction. You do less because the city already demands so much. Chiang Mai does the opposite. You sleep in. Lunch stretches. An afternoon of work turns into a drive, a hike, a coffee that becomes another coffee.
Neither city is better. They just ask different things of you. Chiang Mai is easy in ways that can undo your discipline if you let it. Days pass without resistance. And if you’re not careful, time can disappear without much to show for it.
I kept thinking about something I’d heard before: if you want to get serious work done, live in a not-great city. Chiang Mai is not that city. It’s generous. It’s forgiving. And it will happily take as much of your time as you’re willing to give it.
If not, it’s a good place to spend time well.
After four hours of driving from Chiang Mai, I stopped for a quick lunch on the way to the final stop.
Tak feels like many of the provinces I've passed through. Low buildings, no skyline, a few temples, a river tracing one edge of the city. Familiar enough that if you dropped someone here without a map, they'd struggle to say where they were.
Could be anywhere.
The roads stretch on, wide and mostly empty. Few cars and even fewer people. Life gathers in predictable pockets: restaurants, small family-run shops, the occasional street food stall. Without a vehicle, you'd spend most of the time walking, covering long distances with little company. Just you, the heat, and the road, moving from one place to the next.
Solitude isn't something you come looking for here. It comes bundled with the town.
This place is mostly known for two things. Monkeys and old ruins. Tourists come expecting chaos. Monkeys spilling into the streets, grabbing food, stretching out their arms like they own the place.
By the time I got to the city centre, the only sign of them were posters warning people not to feed the monkeys. But no monkeys in sight.
Turns out they’d all been captured and moved to some undisclosed location after doing too much damage to shops and food stalls. Problem solved, sort of. Without the monkeys, tourists stopped coming. And without tourists, the same shops and stalls the monkeys once terrorised now sit quietly, waiting.
Stray dogs take over instead, drifting along pavements and napping in the middle of the road. Buildings look tired, not romantically old, just worn down. Some feel abandoned for decades.
The only thing that ever looks new is a 7-Eleven, stamped onto every corner like a default setting. A local once insisted it was a Thai brand. He was genuinely shocked to learn it started in the US, over a century ago.
The train station is the closest thing the city has to a living room. Students show up with backpacks and snacks, talking loudly while waiting for a slow train that will arrive whenever it feels like it. Two older men use the platform as a jogging track while couples sit along the rails, legs dangling, killing time.
Public benches are rare here, so people make do with whatever they can find, a ledge, a step, or a patch of concrete. If it holds your weight, it counts.
Outside the capital, time stops trying so hard. There’s nowhere urgent to be, no malls to wander, no traffic to escape. You sit, you wait, you watch, and somehow, that’s enough.
Here too, I stumbled on a love hotel. From the outside, you wouldn’t know it was one if you weren’t looking closely. The giveaway was its single clever detail. Thin bedsheets strung up on a rope, acting as makeshift curtains to shield the parked cars from view. Low-tech but effective. Passersby can’t see the licence plates, which keeps privacy intact and avoids awkwardness. Pretty ingenious, really.
On the drive back to Bangkok, it became clear I knew less than when I started.
The road didn’t offer conclusions or neat takeaways. It just knocked a few assumptions away. You set off thinking you’re going somewhere to understand a place. You come back realising how little you understand anything at all.
But that was never the point. The point was to keep going.
You don’t finish these trips feeling resolved or enlightened. You finish them wanting to see what’s further down the road. Maybe somewhere warmer. Saltier. Closer to the sea.
To be continued...
Road Trip #02: South Thailand.
Coming in April, assuming I make it back.
Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous
@felix.anonymous