Pad thai is a stir-fried rice noodle dish built on a sweet-sour-salty balance of tamarind, fish sauce, and palm sugar, tossed with egg, tofu, bean sprouts, and usually shrimp or chicken, then finished with crushed peanuts and a wedge of lime. It is Thailand’s most internationally recognized dish, but it is younger than most visitors…
Pai is a small mountain town in Mae Hong Son Province, roughly a three-to-four hour drive northwest of Chiang Mai along a famously winding road, and it has built its reputation on a laid-back, nature-first pace that feels completely different from Chiang Mai’s old-city bustle. Most travelers add Pai on as a two-to-four night extension…
Railay is a small limestone peninsula in Krabi Province that you can only reach by boat, and that one fact shapes almost everything about visiting: no road traffic, no 7-Elevens on every corner, and four distinct beaches wrapped in dramatic karst cliffs that have made Railay one of the world’s best-known rock climbing destinations. Most…
Koh Tao is the smallest and least developed of the three main Gulf of Thailand islands, and it has built its reputation almost entirely around one thing: it is one of the cheapest and most popular places in the world to learn to dive. Day-trippers come for the famous Koh Nang Yuan sandbar and a…
Koh Phangan has two reputations that barely seem to belong to the same island. To one crowd it is the home of the Full Moon Party, a monthly beach rave on Haad Rin that draws thousands of backpackers. To another it is a quiet, half-undeveloped coastline of bays reachable only by boat or dirt track,…
The Phi Phi Islands sit in the Andaman Sea between Phuket and Krabi, and they are usually visited one of two ways: as a long day trip packed onto a speedboat tour, or as an overnight stay on Koh Phi Phi Don, the only inhabited island in the group. Maya Bay, the limestone cove on…
Kanchanaburi is a province about 130 km west of Bangkok, built around one of the most sobering chapters of World War II history and one of the prettiest waterfalls in the country. Most visitors come for two very different reasons on the same day: the Bridge on the River Kwai and the Thailand-Burma Death Railway,…
Pattaya is a beach resort city about two hours southeast of Bangkok on the Gulf of Thailand, and it carries two reputations at once: a long-running adult-entertainment nightlife scene centered on Walking Street, and a genuinely family-friendly side built around theme parks, a famous wooden temple, and quieter beaches just south of the main strip….
Ayutthaya was the capital of the Siamese kingdom for over 400 years, until a Burmese army burned it to the ground in 1767 — and the brick-and-stucco ruins left behind are now one of the most rewarding half-day trips from Bangkok. Most visitors see it as a single day trip: roughly 80 kilometers north of…
Chaweng is Koh Samui’s nightlife center, with most of the island’s clubs, beer bars, and beach clubs within a few streets of each other. Lamai and Bophut’s Fisherman’s Village offer quieter, lower-key alternatives — Lamai with a smaller version of Chaweng’s scene, Fisherman’s Village with relaxed beachfront bars better suited to conversation than dancing. Chaweng…
