It begins the night before, thumb grazing a cracked phone screen from a hostel bunk that still smells of last week's bug spray. Photo after photo: bananas offered to grinning trunks, tourists in cheap disposable elephant pants, all smiling Instagram influencers. You open five tabs, close three, reopen two, and end up no closer to booking - or not booking - than when you started.
The highway north from Chiang Mai unspools like magnetic tape through rice fields and military checkpoints. You start to feel like you’re approaching the end of the road here, the end of “safe civilisation”. Here, Thailand bleeds into Laos and Myanmar with nothing more dramatic than a muddy bend of river, but every map-maker since colonial times has circled the spot in red: the Golden Triangle.
It starts with a suggestion, "just go, I ended up staying there for weeks". Next thing you know, you’re on a minivan climbing the switchbacks to Pai. Or you’re barefoot on a ferry bound for Gili Trawangan, your hair dusted in sand and regret.
Once you’ve been around a few hostels in Asia you’ll start hearing the names: Pai, Gili T, Siquijor, Pushkar, Vang Vieng—a constellation of places orbiting in your daydreams. Out here, deadlines mean the next visa run. Job titles mean nothing. Everyone is five years younger than they claim or ten years older than they look, clothed in a patchwork of stretched singlets and accesorised in hemp.
Okay, grab a Singha, ice cold if you can get it. Because we need to talk about maps. Not the paper kind, the ones in our heads. This particular brand of bullshit they drew for us in school.
Civilisation™ – the officially licensed version – kicks off somewhere sandy near the Nile. Pyramids, pharaohs. Then Greece, philosophers in robes, inventing democracy and art. Next stop, Rome. Roads, legions, aqueducts, conquering everything. Then darkness, maybe some knights, and boom, suddenly we're talking Florence and London. Neat, tidy, centred.
There’s a moment, somewhere on the winding roads of Hi Van Pass, where the engine hums beneath, the hairpin curve ahead is blind, and you’re inches from a sheer drop off a cliff into the sea below. You should slow down, play it safe. Instead, you lean in.
Riding motorbikes in Southeast Asia is the ultimate trade-off—one part liberation, one part mortal danger. It’s the closest thing to flying without wings, an open invitation to the road where you call the shots. But to many of my friends back home, it’s lunacy. A death wish on two wheels. “Are you crazy!?” they ask, horrified. I’ve seen the statistics, the numbers aren’t pretty - Thailand has one of the highest motorcycle fatality rates in the world and accidents involving tourists are a big part of it. Vietnam and Bali aren’t much better, with thousands of deaths a year, many of them foreigners who thought a rented scooter was as harmless as a bicycle.
The first thing that sticks to you in Bangkok isn’t the heat, though that comes soon enough - it’s the sheer contrast between the haves and have-nots. A Lamborghini purrs to a stop outside of ICONSiam, its driver stepping out in that latest designer outfits that cost more than the street vendor makes in a year. A few steps away, an old woman crouches beside a makeshift cart, selling mango sticky rice for a handful of baht. Over on the road, a tuk tuk driver beckons to any tourist that will look to him to offer a ride across the city for $4. The city lives in both worlds at once, without hesitation or apology.
Sukhumvit Road stretches like an artery through Bangkok’s restless heart, pumping life, commerce, and vice through its endless sprawl. Past gilding shopping malls, alongside through some of the best value for money business hotels, carved out under one of the busiest BTS lines.
It sells everything. With enough baht in your pocket you can feast like a king on street food or 5 start French restaurants. You can buy fake Rolexes, fake Ray-Bans, fake friendships. From late afternoon street vendors will display illegal vapes and sex toys for sale - including an intriguing number of strap on appendages.
