Archive for July, 2019

What I Learned During the Thailand Road Trip

As I’m back from my 12-day road trip across Northern Thailand, some people are asking me: what did I learn while traveling? I did observe and realize a few interesting things, which I’ll talk about here. In this trip, I went to Lampang, Phrae, Uttaradit and Sukhothai provinces. I visited 2 power plants: Mae Moh and Sikirit dam.

First, it is amazing how each city has a completely different energy. I’ve said before that Thailand was under heavy energetic attacks over the past 10 years up until recently, and that the younger generation had lost their roots, and that 35-year-old people look younger than 25-year-old people because of that. Thailand is a Buddhist country and thus should have a lot of knowledge of the soul, but that has been mostly lost in Chiang Mai and many of the places where foreigners are going to. Thailand turned into an emotional garbage dump where foreigners go to escape their problems and dump their emotional baggage there, and this has caused severe problems and is why they’re tightening on immigration policies. And I’ve heard Pai turned into a hippies town. Situation is stabilizing since the past 1 or 2 years.

So as I went to Lampang, it turns into a ghost town after 5pm as everything closes. The guy working at the hotel was eager to show me around town, and then the main bar and club of that small city are full every day of the week. Met some people who got drunk …Read More

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12-Day Road Trip into the Unseen Side of Thailand

Leaving from Chiang Mai, visiting Chae Son, Lampang, Ngao, Phrae, Uttaradit, Sikirit Dam, back to Uttaradit, Sukhothai, and back to Chiang Mai.

I’m just back form my road trip in Northern Thailand, and it has been stunningly beautiful. I posted the pictures on Instagram @etiennecharland (pictures of July 2019). Many of the places had no tourists at all, and even less foreigners, and it has overall been extremely inexpensive. It took a bit of planning, and now that this route has been planned and set, I wanted to share it. I would call this a 12-day pilgrimage into the Kingdom of Siam.

To be honest, I hadn’t traveled like this for a long time. I used to have Let’s Go travel books, but it’s bulky to carry and they don’t update it anymore so it’s outdated. Lonely Planet is still updated but to me it more feels like an index of hotels and restaurants, and doesn’t say so much about what to do or where to go, especially the non-commercial places. Trip Advisor also isn’t great at listing non-commercial places but it does have a list of top attractions. In looking for a solution to plan travels, I came up with this strategy.

How to plan: first, I looked on TripAdvisor for the top places to go in each province. Then, I checked those spots on the map with Google Maps, drew a line to visit them in sequence, and looked on the map for anything else of interest along the …Read More

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