Field Notes
Home where it costs too much to live near the sea. Where fresh seafood costs both arms and both legs. Where you can't avoid the people you'd rather avoid.
Welcome to Hua Hin. The place where everyone comes to get away from something.
Here you'll find every possible configuration of a place to sleep: condominiums, hotels, villas, bungalows, and every possible configuration of a place to eat: from pizza to schnitzel to goulash. Walk far enough and a pattern appears: restaurants, cafés, laundry shops, weed shops, more cafés, more laundry shops, more weed shops.
The masterplan here seems to have been: take the idea of a seaside resort and turn it into a city with an international food court. And throw in some weed while you're at it.
I was here for just a night before driving on to the next stop. The popular weekend market wasn't open, so I popped into another one that's supposedly where the real locals go.
Then again, it's hard to say who counts as a local in Hua Hin.
Is it the retiree from somewhere in Europe on a motorbike with a girl a quarter of his age behind? Or the group of old-timers downing beers while a local band plays old favourites from back home, such as the always inevitable Hotel California? Or the family from somewhere in East Asia, grandparents and kids in tow, trying to figure out what exactly is making that plate of som tam burn their mouths with such enthusiasm?
Who knows.
Sitting there at the market, listening to a band playing songs probably twice as old as the people playing them, surrounded by people who have lived here long enough to believe paradise means cheap booze, cheap massages, and cheap everything, the question of why so many people move here or stay this long suddenly feels like a dumb one. Almost too obvious to ask out loud.
One night isn't enough to figure this place out. I've been here before and still can't quite get it (or maybe there's nothing to get). I'll pass through again on the way back from the South.
After Hua Hin, a place where people come to stay a little too long, Chumphon feels like the opposite. Everything here is on its way somewhere else.
Driving in, the country narrows, palm trees start to appear, and then you're there. Or rather, you're already leaving.
Chumphon is known as the gateway to the South: to the islands, to the beaches, to wherever people are actually going. It is not a destination. Nobody puts it on their mood board. The town seems perfectly aware of this and perfectly fine with it. Most places in the country welcome you and your wallet with open arms. Here they're used to you being gone before they've finished blinking. They've had a lot of practice.
People here have their hands busy enough with durian and coffee. The durian grown here is considered some of the best in the country. Most of it gets exported, which means most of the people who live here probably never get to eat it. The coffee forms the base of most Thai instant coffee. Most of that leaves too. Chumphon has made a business out of producing things for everywhere else.
The town looks the part. Low buildings. Ageing shophouses. Shuttered storefronts that may or may not reopen tomorrow. A place that has always looked like it's between things.
Early the next morning I get back on the road. Just like everyone and everything else.
The durian leaves. The coffee leaves. The travellers leave.
The drive into Nakhon Si Thammarat is perhaps the most breathtaking in the South. Breathtaking in the sense that you could literally stop breathing.
It goes by several names: the roller coaster, the dragon road, the naga road. All three feel accurate.
The Khanom-Sichon coastal road is 8km of sharp curves, steep drops, and hairpin turns. It climbs, drops, climbs again. Your stomach registers each one slightly after the car does. The sea appears between the hills and then disappears. Appears again. Disappears again. Eight kilometres of this.
Eventually you arrive at a viewpoint overlooking the Gulf of Thailand. Cars and motorbikes parked along the edge, their drivers recovering. Two small huts provide shade for those who made it. Next to them, a motorbike converted into a tiny food stall selling coconut ice cream stuffed into coconut shells.
Coconut ice cream stuffed into a coconut shell.
Someone here has thought very carefully about what you need after that drive.
And they are absolutely correct.
Nakhon Si Thammarat has been here for over a thousand years. Long before Bangkok existed, this place was already trading with India, China and the Arab world. It was old when most of Southeast Asia was still figuring itself out. It has seen empires come and go.
Today it has a Lotus supermarket.
It's surprisingly difficult to notice any of this history without being told. The city looks much like many others I've passed through. Low buildings. Ageing shophouses. Shuttered shops. Sometimes it feels as if there's a warehouse somewhere in the country filled with identical shophouses, shipped out and dropped into place whenever a new downtown is required.
The one area that feels different is the old city wall. What's left of it is broken and weathered, but in the evening it becomes a public living room. A group of middle-aged men stand in a loose circle playing sepak takraw, keeping a rattan ball in the air using only their feet and knees, never letting it touch the ground. Nearby, another group does aerobics to music that has no business being played outdoors next to a collapsed city wall. In the corner, a kid kicks a football against the ancient stones as if they have been waiting several hundred years for exactly this purpose.
Next to it, a market stretches two hundred metres of the usual Thai snacks, grilled things on sticks, sweets that look like they could be drinks, and drinks that look like they could be sweets. One stall is selling guinea pigs, which feels like a product category I had not previously associated with night markets.
There's clearly been an effort by the local tourism board to help travellers navigate the city's history. A nicely illustrated brochure in English highlights the important sights. The effort deserves credit. It's certainly better than doing nothing. Whether the brochure matches reality is a slightly different conversation.
Today happens to be Makha Bucha Day, one of the most important days in the Buddhist calendar. It's also one of the most important days for people who enjoy having a drink. In Thailand, a Buddhist holiday means no alcohol can legally be sold. Not a single drop.
The thinking is that if you remove the alcohol, people might spend the day on reflection rather than intoxication.
That's fine. I can go one night without a drink. It's not that big a deal.
There’s something I start to notice as I drive further south. This part of the country starts to look wealthier. Buildings are better kept. Roads feel newer. Trees look trimmed instead of left to negotiate their own arrangements with gravity. There are fewer temples and roadside shrines, but the ones that do appear look properly maintained.
Apparently salaries are higher in parts of the South. There are also more natural resources here: rubber plantations, palm oil, fisheries. Tourism money drifts in from the nearby islands where people go to live their best beach life for a week or two before returning to wherever they came from. Whether that explains it or not, the place simply feels a little more put together.
Well, maybe with the exception of the next stop.
By most economic measures Patthalung is one of the poorer provinces in the South, but looking only at the number feels like missing the point entirely.
Driving in, the road enters wetland. Water on both sides, fishing platforms on stilts, limestone karst mountains rising out of flat land, and then the town appearing between the mountains and the lake as if it had always been exactly there.
The wetland supports an informal economy that doesn't show up in statistics. Fishing, harvesting water plants, seasonal crafts. Life runs more on the rhythm of seasons than on anything else.
To the average visitor this place probably looks rural, underdeveloped, or maybe even poor. There are few amenities and even fewer attractions to hold the attention of someone who uses TikTok as their primary oracle for deciding what's cool. There isn't even a 7-Eleven within thirty minutes, which in Thailand says more about a place than any review ever could. Not enough here for travel influencers, content creators, explorers, vloggers, or whatever they're calling themselves this week, to zoom in on and declare extraordinary. Which probably explains why Patthalung hasn't quite made the list of places people feel compelled to visit, photograph, and have opinions about.
The first is Marco Polo mode. Capture the interesting parts of a place and assemble them into a neat little package. A beautiful street. A dramatic view. A perfect café. Edited together until the place appears to be one continuous flowing moment of someone else’s best day.
Anyone who has lived anywhere long enough (or still has some sense of reality) knows this isn’t how places work. Most places are made up of ordinary, mundane, in-between moments that don’t make good content. Editing simply removes them. Crop the mundane. Zoom into the extraordinary. String it together until travelling means living life at full 8K resolution (with everything else getting in the way between you and your best life).
The second is Christopher Columbus mode. Go somewhere no one is talking about (there is almost no chance you are the first person to be talking about it). Call it a hidden gem or undiscovered or underrated. A secret corner of the world that remained secret right up until someone put it in a title with a thumbnail of themselves looking surprised.
To be fair, their intentions are good. Highlight the places people skip. Give the overlooked a moment. The people doing this are not trying to be annoying (they are occasionally annoying). Mostly they are just doing what Columbus did, except with better camera equipment and a link in bio.
I spent the night at a small homestay built entirely from wood, suspended on stilts above the lake. The place is run by a husband, a wife, their son, and three dogs who have taken on security duties. Large photo prints of fishermen line the wooden entrance panels, taken by the husband, who is a photographer.
The owner turns on a widescreen TV mounted on a bamboo pole, moves a cursor around a map of the lake, and spends the next fifteen minutes explaining the history of the wetlands, the fishing traditions, the lilies, the edible stems. This is someone who has lived here her whole life and wants you to understand the place before you go out and look at it.
Out on the water, life jacket on, the captain does a thorough job. He explains the lilies, the stems, the birds, the trees, what's edible, what blooms which season. He stops at all the right spots. Pulls out a lily stem and offers a bite. Helps take photos. Encourages you to hold your arms out as if you're cradling the sun, which is the kind of pose that requires you to briefly forget you are a person with dignity.
At the end of the tour he passes a bunch of unbloomed lilies to the owner, who places them into a vase on the breakfast table. I had declined the flowers on the boat. Several times. He brought them anyway. You have to admire the commitment. I'm just not a flowers-in-a-vase-at-breakfast kind of person, which I apparently failed to communicate clearly enough.
It's a well-worn routine. You can feel the shape of it. The lilies are real, the water is real, the karst mountains in the distance are real. But they've learned what people who come here want, and deliver it whether you came here for that or not. The place and the performance of the place are becoming two different things.
It's an awkward position to be in. It would be nice if more people visited. It would be nice if they came for what it is rather than what they'd prefer it to be. It would be nice to keep everything the same. And it would also be nice to have a few extra baht.
Patthalung hasn't fully become a product yet. But it's getting there.
Some places smell like money the moment you arrive. Songkhla is one of them. Better roads. Better buildings. Better everything. Better meaning you can more or less see where the tax money went.
Songkhla is one of the richest provinces in the South. The money doesn't come from tourists. It comes from oil, gas, and a separation plant sitting offshore that earns the province roughly 100 billion baht a year. Some of that money has been put to work in the old town, which they are currently trying to turn into somewhere worth visiting (trying being the key word here).
The old town is a grid of Sino-Portuguese shophouses, the same ones you see in Penang, Malacca, and Phuket. Same proportions. Same five-foot walkways. Same faded grandeur. Some are occupied. Some are falling apart. Most are owned by people who haven't decided what to do with them yet.
Last time I was here was just after the pandemic. Few people. Fewer shops open. The place felt like it was waiting for something. Now it feels like it's trying to become something else.
Someone somewhere is holding a clipboard with a checklist of what they think tourists want.
Penang did this first. Add murals. Add cafés. Add boutique stays and local food with better lighting. Commission an illustrated map. Put up signs. Invite the right kind of tourist, which in Songkhla's case means Malaysians who drove across the border looking for somewhere that feels like George Town but is less crowded and cheaper.
The question nobody in the clipboard meeting seems to ask is: what happens to the people who were already here?
The honest answer is they get squeezed. Not immediately. Not all at once. First the rents go up. Then the old coffee shop that's been there for forty years becomes a specialty café charging three times as much for the same drink in a nicer cup. Then the family that ran the coffee shop is somewhere else, and nobody quite knows when it happened.
This is what gentrification looks like. The official term used on the clipboard is revitalisation.
I am digressing slightly, but please indulge me, because there's a story that belongs here.
Singapore's tourism board recently built a campaign around the shophouses of Joo Chiat, a neighbourhood I know reasonably well having grown up there and spent the past fifteen years living and working there.
Someone at the board (or their creative agency) decided that a row of colourful heritage shophouses stretching no more than fifty metres (a walk that takes under a minute at a very leisurely pace) was the face of modern Singapore. Somehow, this became a global campaign for young travellers who are apparently looking for authentic, spontaneous experiences with the tagline "we don't wait for fun" (there are many jokes packed into this but they are for a different note).
Authentic, meaning old buildings that have been cleaned up enough to photograph but not so much that they stop looking old.
These shophouses are, in the language of tourism boards everywhere, a hidden gem (their words, not mine). The kind of hidden that stops being hidden the moment someone calls it hidden. Hidden, in this context, meaning fewer than forty million people have posted about it on Instagram.
A few years ago I was walking past those same shophouses when a group of tourists had gathered to take photos of the buildings. Two Japanese women came down the street, cameras around their necks, dabbing their foreheads with handkerchiefs (because Singapore's only season is humid). One looked at the buildings, then at her friend, and said: "oh, is that it?"
Yes. That's it.
Which brings us back to Songkhla.
The old town is getting there. Slowly. Whether that's good news depends on who you ask and whether they can still afford to live there. Give it a few years and a few more cafés. Then ask again, and see who's still around to answer.
While Songkhla old town is trying to become a destination, Hat Yai already is. Half a million daytrippers and weekenders from Malaysia show up every year, mostly for the food, the lower prices, and that satisfying feeling of going far enough to feel abroad but close enough to be back for dinner.
The clipboard-holding place-makers haven't done much here. Or anyone really (which also explains why the city keeps flooding and was largely left to sort itself out when it did).
About a hundred years ago Hat Yai was a small village with a population of four people. Someone changed their mind about where to put the railway. Chinese merchants followed the tracks, set up shop, and never left. Four people became four hundred thousand.
Visually it sits somewhere between Penang and Kuala Lumpur, or a slightly bigger version of Yaowarat, Bangkok's Chinatown. Denser and brighter than anywhere else in the South. Shophouse after shophouse, some freshly painted, most not, some with walls still stained yellow at shoulder height from the floods. Markets selling large quantities of everything that sounds like a good deal the more of it you buy. Nuts, tea, coffee, ointment, snacks, clothes. Some shops marked permanently closed on Google Maps, still waiting for someone to restart them, or not.
Linguistically, Hat Yai treats language the way it treats everything else. Whatever works. Thai, Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka, Malay, sometimes all in the same sentence. Shops clock you the moment you walk in and make a quick decision. Chinese-looking? Mandarin first. Still not landing? Malay. The working assumption being that anyone who looks vaguely like us probably came across the border. Which, half the time, is correct.
Cuisinetically (not a real word, I know, but visually and linguistically were having all the fun), Hat Yai is where three communities end up on the same plate. Dim sum served not on trolleys but on large trays the staff carry to your table for you to choose from. Roti canai with curry that's actually spicy, not the sweet kind soaked in condensed milk you find everywhere else. And then there's the fried chicken. Gai Tod Hat Yai, marinated in spices from the Muslim south, served with fried shallots and sticky rice, is one of the most recognisable dishes in the country. Lays even makes a Hat Yai Fried Chicken flavour. Which tells you everything about how far a street stall dish from the South can travel.
Everything about Hat Yai points to the same thing. The founding was an accident. The flooding keeps coming because nobody sorted that out either. Nothing here was designed. It just happened. Which is probably why it still feels like a city and not a checklist on a clipboard.
NatGeo describes Trang as a place "obsessed with breakfast." The BBC goes further, calling the city's enthusiasm for the first meal of the day "almost pathological." and Thailand as "utterly food-obsessed."
Let's pause for a moment.
Is there a country in Asia that doesn't describe itself as food-obsessed? Think China, Vietnam, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia. Or even my home town of Singapore (where the national dishes are all someone else's recipes, made here long enough that we've started claiming them as our own and arguing with our neighbours about it). In fact, every country that has ever been written about in a travel magazine would probably describe themselves as obsessed when it comes to food. Which culture among the 195 countries around the world doesn't enjoy eating? How Trang is described isn't an insight. It's a magic wand of words that sounds persuasive until you stop and think about what it's actually saying, which is more or less nothing.
To be fair, there's a reason. Rubber tappers here wake up at two in the morning to collect sap before the heat sets in. By the time the rest of the country is having breakfast, they've already had two. The breakfast culture in Trang didn't come from obsession. It came from work. Whether that's the same thing is a question the BBC didn't ask.
And to be fair, the food is good. Trang does have good breakfast. The dim sum here is a category of its own, known as Trang dim sum (no prizes for the naming). They have dishes here that I hadn't seen before. The flavours are stronger, more peppery, more alive than what you'd find elsewhere. But would I go as far as to say the people here are pathologically obsessed with breakfast? Probably not. They just happen to have very good breakfast dishes and the good sense to eat them in the morning.
Trang is also known for having possibly the cutest and least annoying tuk-tuk in Thailand. Unlike the engine-revving, music-blasting, pink-blue-whatever-colour-is-in-fashion-now ones in Bangkok, here they come only in pistachio green. They are known as tuk-tuk hua kop, or frog-head tuk-tuk, named for the rounded front that does, if you squint your eyes enough, do look vaguely amphibian.
Getting on one of these three-wheelers is on the checklist of most tourists coming to Thailand. You will almost always find them in any video or photo essay about the country. Like the gondola in Venice or the horse carriage in every city that still has one, they are considered a local experience. Local, in the sense that most locals avoid them.
These used to be the default choice of transport for short trips around town. Then a different kind of green arrived across Southeast Asia, one that runs on GPS and fixes prices in advance. Not necessarily cheaper, but at least you don't have to haggle, and the tip isn't voluntary so much as structurally inevitable because the tuk-tuk driver has no change (they always seem to have no change).
Today the drivers sit around the train station playing on their phones while waiting for customers who are either first-time visitors or whose phone battery has died and can't call a car. There used to be many more of them, before the green app on everyone's phone made the frog redundant.
The tuk-tuk isn't the only thing disappearing. The city's official mascot is the dugong, a gentle, endangered sea mammal that is significantly easier to find on a roundabout in the city centre than in the actual sea. Trang is a city that keeps its old coffee shops, its old dim sum restaurants, its pistachio-green frog tuk-tuks. Whether anyone noticed the irony of choosing a disappearing animal to represent all of this is unclear.
But the dugong does sit very nicely in the middle of a roundabout though, lit up at night, waiting for tourists to arrive and take a photo with it.
The drive from Trang to Krabi is the most beautiful stretch of the whole trip. Limestone karst formations begin appearing in the distance, shapes at first, the kind you consider stopping to photograph. Then there are so many that they envelop everything and taking photos loses its point. You put the camera down. The formations are forty million years old. They've been here long enough to stop caring whether anyone documents them.
For centuries Krabi existed for one purpose: sending elephants from the forests of the peninsula interior to the capital. Nobody took it seriously as a destination until 2000, when Danny Boyle and Leonardo DiCaprio made a film called The Beach and pointed a global audience at the Phi Phi Islands just offshore. What followed was thirty years of people arriving in sufficient numbers that the main beach eventually had to be closed entirely so the corals could remember what it felt like to exist without an audience.
It has since reopened. But today, the condominiums are going up faster than the corals are growing back.
The model is familiar by now. Long-stay westerners, remote workers, retirees, digital nomads, people on their third month of a one-month visa, have discovered that Thailand will treat you exceptionally well for considerably less than it costs to live wherever you came from. The weather is better. The food is cheaper. The locals are polite. Nobody asks too many questions. It is, by most measures, an excellent arrangement. Excellent, at least, for one side of it.
The hotel I stayed at had guests that were almost entirely western. Walking into breakfast as a non-westerner without a uniform on produced a specific kind of look. The "oh gosh, what, who, how, why" look. The look of someone who has spent enough time here to have forgotten that this is, in fact, Asia.
On the roads outside, men rode motorbikes without helmets, some still holding bottles of Chang, drifting left and right with the particular confidence of people who believe the rules were written for someone else. I used to think you saw the bottom of the barrel in Nana Plaza or Khao San Road. I stand corrected. They come here, near the beach, in the South, where the sun is better and the Chang is cold and nobody is watching too closely. Being here was hard. It felt kinda sad too.
The drive from Krabi replaces limestone karst mountains with empty roads that seem to stretch on forever, flanked by thick forest on both sides, and the occasional police checkpoint (they seem genuinely suspicious about why anyone would come here).
After six hours of driving through a lot of nothing, you arrive in a place that exists mostly on a map and not much in people's minds.
Which isn't completely fair. Ranong is known for a few things, some quite significant.
It has the highest rainfall of anywhere in the country (which means plenty of rainbows and the occasional fun of jumping in wet puddles).
It sits on a river that separates Thailand from Myanmar. Useful, as it turns out, for people who need to briefly leave the country and re-enter with a fresh stamp in their passport (or better known as a visa run), or to make a day trip to the islands of Myanmar, which are apparently as beautiful as the Maldives and considerably less photographed.
It has a fishing port that supplies a significant portion of the country's seafood, most of it caught and processed by Burmese workers who crossed the river to get here. Many of them have lived here for generations. Most exist on temporary permits valid for three months at a time, a cycle that never resolves into something permanent. They are essential to the economy and treated accordingly, which is to say, not particularly well and not particularly officially.
It has an old town, with life mostly centered along one long road where shops carry signs in Thai and Burmese, with the occasional lines in English and Chinese underneath, as if everyone who passed through left a note and forgot to take it down
There is a morning market called Talad Lang, where the goods come from across the border. Talad means market. Lang means lower. It is also a slang word locals reach for when they want to say something or someone is of low quality, without technically saying that. Whether the market was named for its location or something else is open to interpretation.
The guesthouse I stayed at provided a map with a long list of attractions. Restaurants, heritage buildings, local shops and cafes they thought were worth visiting. I took a walk to see if the map matched reality.
Unfortunately, as these things often are, It did not.
The attractions on the map turned out to be either permanently closed, or the kind of open where someone forgot to fix the broken windows and turn on the lights, or both. Or maybe the map just hasn't been updated in a long, long time.
The few places that were open had no one inside except the one staff member watching videos on their phone while waiting for someone to come in. Nobody came in.
Along the streets, a handful of backpackers sat outside their hostels, beer or weed in hand, looking like they were waiting for something to happen. The hostels looked like they'd had better days. The backpackers themselves too. Everyone in Ranong, it seems, is waiting for something. Nobody is entirely sure what.
That evening I walked past a bar where a few westerners in their sixties sat alone, nursing drinks, a singer somewhere inside doing their best with the songs everyone already knows. I couldn't tell if they lived here or were just passing through like everyone else.
Like the town, they looked like they'd had better days. Days where people still remembered their names, where there was a family somewhere waiting with a warm bed, a hot meal, or a dog wagging his tail by the door. Now there's Ranong, and a bar, and a song about a place you can check out of but never quite leave.
None of this is Ranong's problem.
The clipboard-holding place-makers never made it this far. And probably never will. Ranong doesn't get an illustrated tourist map with cats sponsored by Coca-cola, or street art commissioned to make it look like Penang, or boutique hotels that turned shophouses into an expensive weekend trip. It doesn't even get those metallic plaques with a story written about the heritage of the building or street. Here, the buildings just stand there, holding up whatever is left of the roof, waiting for nobody in particular. At least the dugong in Trang got a roundabout.
Ranong has the feeling of a place that was always just far enough away to be easy to forget about. And everyone has, for a very very very long time.
The rain from Ranong followed me most of the way back to Hua Hin.
On the day I left Bangkok on this road trip, the US and Israel had just begun striking Iran. By the time I was driving back, the effects were starting to show. Three gas stations in a row had run out of petrol. The attendants at each one suggested I try again tomorrow, with the calm of people who had been saying this all day.
So I stayed another night in Hua Hin, where this trip started.
After two weeks and 3,000 kilometres driving around the South, Hua Hin feels like Disneyland. The roads work. The street lamps work. There are malls and 7-Elevens. There are bakeries selling pastries with names that sound expensive in any language. There are restaurants and bars and spas, and golf courses, pretty much everything a person needs to feel like they haven't gone too far from home, while technically being somewhere else entirely. There are people riding around on scooters with the wind in their hair and a smirk on their face, like they've worked something out and would prefer you didn't.
After two weeks of broken windows, shuttered shops, old towns being turned inside out, choreographed boat tours with rehearsed flower arrangements, and maps that hadn't been updated since the windows were still intact, the appeal of a place that simply functions becomes hard to argue with. Hua Hin is comfortable in the way things are when you stop asking too many questions. Which, after two weeks of asking questions, has a certain appeal.
I get it now.
But comfortable can… get… kind of… boring.
So. What's the opposite of this.
Isaan. The northeast. A region that makes up a third of the country and a third of its people, and yet only one percent of tourists ever go. The birthplace of som tam, larb, and gai yang, dishes loved across the entire country, and which has also produced a disproportionate share of Thailand's sports stars, actors, rappers, and celebrities. It’s a region that also produces a genre of music once made fun of as country music or taxi driver music, until a Thai band started playing it at Glastonbury. Then Bangkok decided it was cool.
Yet, this is a place the rest of the country has spent decades calling backward, uneducated, and behind the times. If the south feels colonised by island-hopping, lying-on-the-beach, sunglasses-and-a-book tourists, the northeast is what happens when a country colonises itself.
And I'm going to find out why.
Except this time around, I'll go electric. Which solves one problem and introduces several others I haven't thought of yet.
To be continued...
Road Trip #03: Northeast Thailand.
Coming in July
Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous
@felix.anonymous