Thai Escape

There is good reason that my blog has been silent for a week. My whole family decided to go to northern Thailand for our holiday this year. So, we all packed up for a 7D6N holiday in Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai, which was filled with a lot of interesting activities. I will be writing more about the things that I did over the course of the week, after I upload some of the photographs. However, I will just put down some overall thoughts for now.

My family has only traveled to parts of southern Thailand in the past and this is our first trip north. Although we have never ever been to Bangkok before, I do think that Chiang Mai is quite a beautiful city. We had an excellent tour guide who also doubled as a baby-sitter for my niece and nephews. He told us many stories about local things including local politics. He also brought us to a lot of local places, instead of just the touristy places. So, it was quite an interesting experience.

I thoroughly enjoyed my trip there although it was really tiring and I also fell ill on the very last day. There are may things that I will take away from this trip, including several tailored suits, tailored silk shirts and other souvenirs that I bought from there. It seems like a great place to go shopping for clothes every few years as the prices are really good while the workmanship quality is quite impeccable.

One big lesson that I learned from this trip (and from my other trips around South East Asia) is that we have been exceedingly lucky. The main reason why Malaysia and Singapore has managed to emerge as leading nations in this region is not due to any magic sauce or economic miracle of our doing – it is simply because our neighbours have been far to busy shooting themselves in the foot for them to exact any sort of significant progress. In the case of Thailand, they have been rewriting their own constitution so many times that even the constitutional lawyers have trouble keeping up.

So, the only countries that I have yet to step foot into in SEA are Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar. I plan to fix that soon. I would certainly like to visit Angkor Wat some time soon and get some good photographs there. I fancy that Vietnam would be another interesting place to visit, particularly the north. As for Myanmar, I’ll just wait till the Junta sorts itself out before dropping by for a holiday.

Anyway, I’ll need to go sort through the hundreds of photographs that I took and upload the more interesting ones. Stay tuned for a more detailed account of my experiences there.