Thailand travel guide

Things to do in Thailand

• Grand PalaceTemples & culture

  Grand Palace

  The Grand Palace at opening, gold going off like a flashbulb before the heat arrives

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• Wat ArunTemples & culture

  Wat Arun

  Wat Arun's porcelain spire catching the last of the light from the Thonburi bank, four baht each way

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• AyutthayaCycling

  Ayutthaya

  Ayutthaya on a bicycle, brick stupas and mown grass and an empire cooling in the sun

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• Chiang MaiTemples & culture

  Chiang Mai

  Chiang Mai inside its moat, thirty working temples in one square kilometre of shade

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• The Mae Hong Son loopRoad trip

  The Mae Hong Son loop

  The Mae Hong Son loop unspooling into the mist, six hundred kilometres and 1,864 bends

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• KanchanaburiHistory

  Kanchanaburi

  Kanchanaburi, where the river is beautiful and the railway beside it is not

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• ErawanWild swimming

  Erawan

  Erawan's seven tiers of limestone pools, each one greener than the last

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• Raft housesLake stay

  Raft houses

  Raft houses on Cheow Lan Lake, karsts standing in still water and no signal at all

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• SimilansIsland hopping

  Similans

  The Similans in the dry season, granite boulders and water you can see thirty metres through

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• Koh TaoScuba diving

  Koh Tao

  Learning to breathe underwater off Koh Tao, cheaper here than anywhere on earth

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When to go to Thailand

• 
  Autumn 2027 / 2026September, October, NovemberAvoid

  November, on the Gulf (avoid). The Gulf's own wet month, and the trap set for anyone who reads a single national forecast and believes it. November is the finest month on the Andaman and the poorest on Koh Samui, at the same time, in the same country. If a trip crosses both coasts in November, ask whose dates those are and which half of the itinerary they were chosen to suit.

• 
  Winter 2026 / 2027December, January, FebruaryBest

  November to February (best). The great season, and the reason the Thai winter has a reputation: cool, dry and scoured clean the length of the country, the one window in which the north, the centre and the Andaman are all at their best together. It is also the most crowded and the most expensive stretch of the year, and nobody discounts anything, because nobody has to. The sleeper to Chiang Mai and the December liveaboards are spoken for weeks in advance.

• 
  Spring 2027March, April, MayGood

  March to May, in the north (avoid). Burning season, when the fields are fired and the smoke settles into the Chiang Mai valley and stays, week after week, until the city is among the worst air on the planet. The temples are all still standing and the hotels have never been cheaper, and neither of those is worth it with a child in tow or a chest that objects. This is the fact the March brochures leave out.

  March to early May, on the Andaman (good). Hot, heavy, still, and quietly the connoisseur's window. The sea lies flat, the visibility holds, and the high-season crowd has begun to thin out and go home. The Similans stay open until mid-May, and the last week before the gate closes is the emptiest good diving of the year. Songkran falls in the middle of April and stops the country dead for three days of water thrown by absolutely everyone, which is either the reason to come or the week to be elsewhere.

• 
  Summer 2027June, July, AugustGood

  Mid-May to October, on the Andaman (avoid). The south-west monsoon arrives and takes the coast back. The Similan Islands National Park closes in mid-May and does not open again until mid-October, and it is the park that sets those dates, not the boat. Swell cancels the island runs, the visibility falls out of the water, and an itinerary sold for Krabi or Khao Lak in these months is quietly offering you the half of the coast that still functions rather than the half in the photograph.

  June to October, on the Gulf (good). The other clock, and the reason a monsoon-season Thailand is still well worth buying. Koh Tao, Koh Samui and Koh Phangan sit in the shelter of the peninsula and carry on while the west coast is shut. The rain comes hard and briefly and then the afternoon returns, steaming. It is the cheapest good stretch of months in the country, and the emptiest.

Places to see in Thailand

Named things worth going out of your way for, whichever trip you end up booking.

• 

  The Grand Palace and Wat Pho

  temple

  Gold laid on gold until the eye gives up counting, and next door, behind the same long white wall, forty-six metres of reclining Buddha lying in the dim with mother-of-pearl on the soles of his feet. Walk them as one morning, because they share a boundary and an hour of heat. Come at opening or in the last of the afternoon; noon here is a punishment. Shoulders and knees covered, and pay no attention whatever to the pleasant man at the gate who tells you it is shut today. It is not, it never is, and the tuk-tuk waiting behind him has been running that same script since before you were born.

• 

  Wat Arun

  temple

  The Temple of Dawn, which is a small joke, because it is at dusk that it earns the name: the spire is crusted all over with broken Chinese porcelain, and when the light goes amber the whole tower turns to something between a sugared cake and a coral head. Cross on the little ferry for four baht, standing up with everyone else. Climb it in the morning when the steps are still cool and steep enough to make you use your hands.

• 

  Ayutthaya

  heritage

  An hour north of the capital lies the capital before it, and what is left is the most eloquent ruin in the country: brick stupas leaning out of shaved lawns, rows of Buddhas whose heads were taken in 1767, and one stone face held forever in the roots of a fig tree, growing slowly into the wood. Take a bicycle and not the coach. The ruins are strewn the length of an island and the distance between them, pedalled slowly in the heat, is the greater part of the point.

• 

  Chiang Mai's old city

  heritage

  A square kilometre with a moat around it and about thirty working temples inside, which is an absurd density and somehow never feels like one. Wat Chedi Luang and Wat Phra Singh will be on your list and deserve to be. But the pleasure of the place is everything in between: the small unvisited wat with three monks and a dog asleep in the shade, no ticket booth, no one at all, the gate standing open because it has never occurred to anybody to close it.

• 

  Doi Inthanon

  nature

  The roof of Thailand, and a gentle one: you drive nearly all of it, which is the kind of summit one can forgive. At the top, twin pagodas stand in their own weather, and a boardwalk runs out through cloud forest hung with moss and dripping quietly on itself. Go in December and take a jacket; people are always astonished to be cold in Thailand, and up here they always are.

• 

  The Mae Hong Son loop

  adventure

  Six hundred kilometres of road north-west out of Chiang Mai that climbs and turns and climbs again through Pai and Mae Hong Son and Mae Sariang, past hill villages and hot springs and valleys that hold their mist until ten in the morning. Four days if you are hurrying, seven if you have any sense. The tarmac is good and the traffic is thin. What catches people out on this road is never the surface, it is the schedule.

• 

  Pai

  town

  A wide green valley three hours north of Chiang Mai, with hot springs at one end and a canyon at the other and, in the middle, a high street that divides travellers into two camps who do not much care for each other. Come and decide for yourself. But know that the way in is 762 bends taken at speed in a minibus, and that the road has a reputation it has honestly earned.

• 

  Kanchanaburi and the Death Railway

  heritage

  A slow green river, a bridge everyone has heard of, and a cutting through rock at Hellfire Pass that Allied prisoners and conscripted Asian labourers hacked out by hand and lamplight, dying as they went. The war cemeteries are kept with terrible tenderness, row on row on watered grass. This is not a scenic stop and should not be sold as one. Give the museum at Hellfire Pass the hours it asks for; it is the finest thing here and the hardest.

• 

  Erawan Falls

  nature

  Seven tiers of limestone pools stacked up a wooded hillside west of Kanchanaburi, each one held in a bowl of pale rock, each one a slightly different green, and nearly all of them swimmable. The crowd thins with every level you climb, which is the whole arithmetic of the place. In the lower pools small fish will come and nibble your feet, unasked, and will not be talked out of it.

• 

  Khao Sok and Cheow Lan Lake

  nature

  Rainforest older than the Amazon, a green so total it swallows sound, and out of the middle of a flooded valley a scattering of limestone karsts standing in water the colour of bottle glass. You sleep on the lake itself, in raft houses tied together and moored to the rock, and they are plain on purpose: thin walls, a longtail engine for a doorbell, no signal, and at four in the morning gibbons calling across the water in a way you will think about for years.

• 

  The Similan Islands

  adventure

  Great rounded granite boulders tumbled into a sea so clear it stops looking like water and starts looking like altitude. Thirty metres of visibility is an ordinary day. You reach them by liveaboard out of Khao Lak, sleeping over the dive sites. The park shuts mid-May and opens mid-October, and it is a national park that decides that, not an operator, so the dates do not bend for anyone.

• 

  Koh Tao

  adventure

  The cheapest place on earth to be taught to breathe underwater, and crowded for precisely that reason. The water is warm and shallow and forgiving, which is what makes it such a kind classroom. The certificate is the same everywhere; the week is not. Ask how many students go down per instructor, and you will learn more from that one answer than from a hundred reviews.

• 

  Railay and the Krabi coast

  viewpoint

  Limestone cliffs going straight down into the Andaman, streaked orange and grey, hung with stalactites like a roof that never finished dripping. No road comes here; the headland forbids it, so you arrive by longtail with your bag on your knees. The climbing is among the best in the world and the beach is smaller than the photographs promise. Tonsai, around the corner, is scruffier and quieter and beloved by exactly the people you would expect.

• 

  Ko Phi Phi and Maya Bay

  beach

  The most photographed half-moon of sand in Asia, ringed by cliffs that shut out the horizon and make the sea inside them glow. It was closed for four years while the reef came back from the dead, and it reopened under rules: numbers capped, entry timed, no boats at the shoreline at all. They work. Go on the first boat of the morning, when the light is long and low and the bay is nearly your own, and it is a different place from the one that arrives at ten.

Where to base yourself in Thailand

• Bangkok

  The city that everyone lands in and too many itineraries dispose of in a night. Give it two. Stay by the river, where the old city keeps its temples and the long-tailed boats go by sounding like chainsaws in a hurry, and let the Skytrain and the metro carry you everywhere else; they glide above and below a gridlock that will otherwise eat your afternoon whole.

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• Chiang Mai and the north

  Cooler, greener, altogether slower, with the best markets in the country and a skyline made entirely of gilded finials. This is the door to the Mae Hong Son loop and to Doi Inthanon. It is also, from February into April, a valley full of smoke from the burning of the fields, and the haze can settle so thickly that the hills across the river simply stop existing. Nobody selling you a March trip will mention that.

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• Mae Hong Son and Pai

  The loop's own private country: hairpins stacked up the hillsides, hot springs steaming into cold mornings, hill villages where the road is the only street, and one valley town that is either the loveliest place in the north or entirely ruined, depending on the traveller you ask. Ridden on two wheels by most who come, and much the better for it.

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• Kanchanaburi and the west

  Two hours from Bangkok and worth a night rather than the dash there and back that most people make of it. Come for the war history, which is the reason the place is on any map at all, and stay a second day for Erawan, because it is not decent to see that river only where it is sad.

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• The Andaman coast

  Krabi, Railay, Phi Phi, Khao Lak and the Similans. Limestone towers, water like held breath, and the finest diving in the country. November to April is its season and it is glorious. Outside those months the sea gets up, the visibility falls away, the island boats stay tied to the pier, and the coast quietly closes most of what you came for.

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• The Gulf islands

  Koh Tao, Koh Samui and Koh Phangan, keeping the opposite clock entirely: sheltered and serviceable through the months when the west coast is shut, and saving their own wet spell for November, when everyone else is having the best of the year. Koh Tao is where the world learns to dive.

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Planning a trip to Thailand

Getting there

Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai and Kolkata all run straight at Bangkok, four to five hours, and you can be eating on a street corner the same evening you left home. Suvarnabhumi takes most of the world; Don Mueang, on the far side of the city, takes the low-cost carriers, and the two are not neighbours — a tight connection booked between them is an hour of motorway and a great deal of regret.

Inside the country, flying is absurdly cheap and takes an hour to almost anywhere. The night train to Chiang Mai takes thirteen and is the better memory by a wide margin: a second-class sleeper, the curtains drawn, the north assembling itself in the window at dawn. It fills up weeks ahead in December, so book it the moment you know your dates.

Getting around

Between cities, take the train or take the air. Within Bangkok, the Skytrain and the metro beat every road in the city, and a boat up the Chao Phraya beats both of them for anywhere near the old town.

In the north the scooter is simply how one moves, and the freedom of it is a great part of why people fall in love with the place. It comes with one unromantic condition. An International Driving Permit endorsed for motorcycles is a legal requirement, checkpoints on the Pai road do ask, and no insurer on earth will pay a claim for a rider who had no licence to be on the machine. Arrange it at home, where it costs almost nothing, rather than discovering the gap from a hospital bed in Chiang Mai.

What it costs

Thailand will not undercut India on much, and matches it on most things, with one loud exception: drink is taxed hard, and a beer can cost what a whole dinner does.

The street food is the great bargain of the country and the best eating in it, fifty to eighty baht a plate. A good guesthouse asks eight hundred to fifteen hundred; a comfortable hotel two to four thousand. An open water course on Koh Tao sits at nine to eleven thousand baht, and when you see one advertised well below that, the discount has been taken out of something, usually the number of students the instructor is watching at once.

Eating

Eat where the queue is and where the menu is short. A stall that has made one dish every day for twenty years will beat a restaurant with ninety laminated photographs, every time, without trying.

'Not spicy' is understood, considered, and then interpreted with tremendous generosity; mai phet said clearly still tends to arrive warmer than most kitchens at home would dare, which for an Indian palate is rarely a complaint. Vegetarians should learn one word and carry it everywhere: jay, which means strictly vegetarian, whereas asking merely for no meat will leave the fish sauce and the shrimp paste precisely where they are.

Temples and manners

Shoulders and knees covered at every temple, shoes left at the step, and never your feet pointed at a Buddha image — sit with your legs folded away behind you, as everyone around you will be doing. These are not quaint customs to be indulged. They are simply good manners in somebody else's house of worship, and they are noticed.

The monarchy is protected by a lese-majeste law that is real, enforced, and carries years in prison; it is not a subject on which a visitor offers opinions, however lightly. And at eight in the morning and six in the evening the anthem plays in public places, and the whole concourse stops where it stands. Stop with it.

What goes wrong in Thailand

The things people get wrong here often enough that they are worth saying plainly.

• “Ten days is enough for the north, Bangkok and the islands.”

  It is a beautiful plan and it is enough for two of the three. Bangkok to Chiang Mai to Krabi is two internal flights, and with the transfers and the standing about that hang off each one, it is the better part of two days, plus a third handed back to the airport at the end. Ten days across two regions is a holiday; across three it becomes a logistics exercise with scenery. Choose the mountains or the sea, and let the other one be the reason you come back.

• “June is fine, the monsoon is only afternoon showers.”

  True on the Gulf, and quite false on the Andaman. The Similan Islands National Park is closed by order from mid-May to mid-October, so a June liveaboard out of Khao Lak cannot take you anywhere near the place the photograph was taken. Before you congratulate yourself on the off-season price, find out which coast the boat is actually allowed to visit.

• “Everyone rents a scooter, I do not need the licence.”

  You need an International Driving Permit endorsed for motorcycles, and it is the very first thing an insurer asks for. Without it a claim is not reduced, it is refused outright, and a foreigner in a Chiang Mai hospital without cover is a five-figure problem being solved by telephone at four in the morning by someone who loves you. The checkpoints on the Pai road do stop tourists. Get the endorsement at home; it cannot be bought once you are there.

• “Maya Bay is closed.”

  It reopened, and it reopened with conditions: numbers capped, entry timed, and no boats at the shoreline at all — they moor behind the headland and you walk in over the spine of the island. The rules are the reason the reef came back, and they are the reason it is still worth seeing. The practical consequence is that the first boat of the day and the ten o'clock boat visit two entirely different places, and cost, as a rule, exactly the same.

• “A dive course is a dive course, so take the cheapest.”

  The certification is identical wherever you earn it. The week is not. What varies is how many students go down for every instructor, and four to one is a different education altogether from eight to one at the same price on paper. Ask that single question and listen to how readily it is answered. On Koh Tao the honest range is nine to eleven thousand baht, and a price well beneath it has been paid for somewhere out of sight.

• “March is shoulder season, so it is good value.”

  On the coast, yes, and gladly. In the north it is a mistake, and not for the weather but for the air. The price of a room in Chiang Mai does not fall in March because the season is turning. It falls because the market has finished pricing in the smoke.

• “The man outside the Grand Palace says it is shut today.”

  It is not, and it will not be tomorrow either. This is the oldest routine in Bangkok, performed with great charm, and it ends in a tuk-tuk, a gem shop and a commission. The palace opens every single day of the year. Walk past him, smiling, and buy the ticket at the gate. The same script runs at Wat Pho and again down at the pier.

Good to know

Facts about Thailand

Guides to places in Thailand

ThailandTwo very different Thailands: the limestone coast in the south and the old Lanna north. Which one a trip is depends entirely on which operator and which length you book.from ₹52,899