(Happy birthday, Tache :) I had planned to spend a week on Koh Phayam (Thailand’s last unspoiled island?) whilst waiting for my Indian visa to be processed. But my train was running late and I didn’t want to arrive in Chumphon at 2:00 am so I got off the train at Prachuap Khiri Khan. Where …
We broke the journey from Chiang Mai to Laos, spending a couple of days in the relaxed, and un-Western, town of Phayao. Phayao is a three hour bus ride from CM through hilly, wooded and pretty countryside. We headed for the Jumjai Guesthouse – very nice, wooden floors and walls, very clean – and friendly …
Nicolas is in India now. We’re missing him! Our thirty day visas were running out but we weren’t (quite) ready to leave Thailand yet so a ‘visa run’ was required. We could get a minibus directly to the Myanmar border at Mae Sai or, for a couple of hundred more baht (~$7), visit the White …
I left Nicolas in Tonsai and took a minibus down into Malaysia, to Penang, for a flight back to Bangkok. The reason for this rather roundabout route was to get a 30 day entry visa for Thailand, automatically available to arrivals on international flights; this would give me a visa that expired about the same …
After Nicolas had applied for a new passport at the Canadian embassy in Bangkok (which, in all fairness, was a relatively painless procedure), and faced with a wait of up to fifteen working days (the German embassy – in Laos! – issued passports to their nationals as soon as details of the last passport were …
OMG, the food!! For years I’ve bored everyone willing to listen (and, particularly, my children who had no way to escape it) about how the food in Thailand is, without any shadow of a doubt, the best – the absolute best – food on the planet. Spicy, light, deliciously subtle and tasty… I could, and …