Thailand

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Bangkok, Without the Rookie Mistakes We landed in Bangkok at midnight in April, took the first taxi we saw, and spent 45 sweaty minutes crawling through traffic while the meter sat suspiciously off. A guy at the hostel just laughed: “April? You came in the hottest month, and you skipped the train.” He wasn’t wrong on either count. The next morning we discovered the Airport Rail Link, the air-conditioned Skytrain, and the river boats — and the city instantly got easier and cheaper. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Why Bangkok Is One of the Best Budget Destinations on Earth I landed in Bangkok on a tight three-week Asia budget and booked what I thought was a reasonable mid-priced hotel near Sukhumvit. Thirty minutes later I found out a friend had stayed a few BTS stops further out for exactly half the price, in a cleaner room, with a pool. Bangkok is like that. The best budget hotels in Bangkok are genuinely excellent — not “fine for the money” but actually good — and the gap between smart and uninformed choices is wider here than almost anywhere else in the world. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Chiang Mai, Without the Rookie Mistakes We almost booked Chiang Mai for March, purely because the flights were cheap. A friend who’d spent a winter there talked us out of it in one sentence: “You’ll land into smoke and spend the week indoors.” That’s the burning season — the part of the Chiang Mai travel guide nobody puts on the brochure — and it’s the single mistake that can quietly ruin an otherwise perfect trip. We moved the dates to December instead and got blue skies, cool evenings and a city that felt like it was showing off. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Chiang Rai, Beyond the White Temple Photo Everyone shows up in Chiang Rai for one photo — the dazzling white, mirror-flecked temple that looks like a sugar palace from a dream. We did too. What nobody told us was that we’d booked our trip for late March, walked out of the airport into a grey wall of haze, and spent the first afternoon wondering where the famous northern mountains had gone. They were right there. We just couldn’t see them through the burning-season smoke. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Koh Samui, Without the Wet-Season Surprise We almost booked Koh Samui for the last week of October, purely because the flights were cheap. A friend who’d spent a rainy season there talked us out of it in one sentence: “That’s exactly when Samui gets dumped on — you’d be watching the storm from the balcony, not the beach.” Here’s the thing most people miss: Samui sits on Thailand’s Gulf coast, so it doesn’t follow the same calendar as Phuket and the Andaman islands. When the west coast is drying out, Samui’s heaviest rain is just arriving. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Phuket Without the Rookie Mistakes We booked our first Phuket trip for late September, because the flights were almost embarrassingly cheap. The taxi driver from the airport laughed when we said we wanted to snorkel Phi Phi the next day: “Sea is big this week. Maybe Tuesday.” He was right — the west-coast beaches had red flags out, the speedboats were bouncing, and we spent two days in Old Town cafés waiting for the swell to drop. We still had a great trip. But we learned the one thing this Phuket travel guide is really about. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Cheap Flights from London to Bangkok, Starting at £370 Return I almost booked the wrong ticket. There it was, glowing on my screen one drizzly September afternoon: a Xiamen Air return for £370, the cheapest London to Bangkok fare I’d ever seen. My thumb was over the button. Then I noticed the bag allowance and the layover, did the maths, and quietly closed the tab. I’ll tell you what I booked instead in a minute, because it taught me everything about this route. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The Best Time to Visit Thailand, in One Sentence My wife nearly booked us onto a Gulf island in October. I remember her turning the laptop around in our kitchen, grinning at a half-price bungalow on Koh Samui, and me having to be the killjoy: that is the exact week the Gulf gets its heaviest rain of the year. We went two months later instead, in December, and stood on Railay Beach on the Andaman side under a sky that hadn’t seen a cloud in days, water like warm glass, paying high-season rates and not minding one bit. The lesson cost us nothing because we caught it in time. It’s the one almost everyone misses, and I’ll come back to it. ...