Thailand's tourist geography has an unusual concentration problem. Bangkok, Chiang Mai, and the Phuket-Samui-Koh Tao triangle account for an estimated 85–90% of all international tourist nights in the country. The country is 513,000 square kilometres. That 85% is concentrated in perhaps 25,000 of them.
This isn't a complaint. Bangkok is one of the finest cities in the world to spend a week in. Chiang Mai is pleasant in ways that are easy to underestimate. But the distribution means that enormous, high-quality swaths of Thailand receive almost no international attention: not because they lack substance, but because the tourism infrastructure around them hasn't reached critical mass. The effect is, in places, extraordinary.
The North: Pai and the Mae Hong Son Loop
Pai is a small market town in a river valley 135 kilometres northwest of Chiang Mai, reached by a road that runs through 762 curves in 85 kilometres: the numbers are displayed on a sign at the top of the pass, a statistic that tour drivers mention with professional pride. The valley holds a different climate from the plains below: 700 metres of altitude means cool mornings, an actual winter (November through January, 12–15°C nights), and the agricultural regime that goes with it: strawberries, coffee, the highland fruits that sell in Chiang Mai markets under the Doi Kham label.
Pai itself is small, its tourist economy sized for the travellers who make it there rather than the traffic of Chiang Mai's old city. The Saturday walking street is a village-scale version of the genre. The river that runs through the valley (the Pai River, a tributary of the Salween system) is swimmable in dry season at the rock pools below the Tha Pai hot springs. The coffee shops are good, the highland growing conditions north of town produce arabica that roasters in Chiang Mai and Bangkok use as a premium single-origin rather than a blend filler.
The Mae Hong Son loop, Chiang Mai to Pai to Mae Hong Son to Mae Sariang and back to Chiang Mai, is one of Asia's exceptional road trips, covering 600 kilometres and four distinct highland valley systems. Mae Hong Son, the provincial capital, is closer to Mandalay than to Bangkok, and the Shan and Burmese architectural influences visible in its temples (Jong Kham, Jong Klang, the monasteries around the lake) reflect that geography. The town has a small airport (thirty-minute flight from Chiang Mai, four flights weekly) for those who don't want two days on the road each way.
Koh Kood: What the Gulf Islands Were
Koh Kood is the fourth-largest island in Thailand, located in the Gulf of Thailand near the Cambodian maritime border, far enough from Bangkok (eight hours overland and by boat from Trat) that it has avoided the development trajectory of Koh Samui and Koh Phangan. The beaches on its west coast, particularly Ao Khlong Phrao and Ao Bang Bao, are the quality of beach that Thailand's more famous islands once were before the infrastructure caught up. The water is clear; the resorts are low-rise and spaced far enough that you don't hear your neighbour's sound system.
The interior of Koh Kood, something most island visitors never see, is primary rainforest covering the island's central ridge. Klongchao Waterfall, accessible by longtail boat up the mangrove estuary and then a short walk, falls into a pool suitable for swimming. The village of Ban Ao Salat, on the island's northeast, is a working fishing community whose pier market operates at dawn. The island has a small Thai population (a few hundred residents year-round) and an economy that is split between tourism and fishing, rather than the pure tourist monoculture of Koh Tao or Koh Phangan.
Getting to Koh Kood requires commitment: a flight to Trat (or the ferry from Bangkok that takes 12 hours), then a speedboat from the Laem Ngop pier to the island. The difficulty of access is precisely what has kept it as it is.
Sukhothai: The Historical Park Ayutthaya Gets Credit For
Thailand's school history curriculum treats Sukhothai as the founding capital of the Thai nation: the city-state established in 1238 that developed the Thai script, early Thai Buddhism, and the political vocabulary that subsequent kingdoms inherited. Ayutthaya, its successor, receives the tourist volume (it's ninety minutes from Bangkok). Sukhothai, six hours north, receives a fraction.
The Sukhothai Historical Park covers around seventy square kilometres and contains the ruins of 193 historical structures across three zones. The central zone, enclosed within the original city walls, holds the core temples: Wat Mahathat (the largest, with the distinctive lotus-bud towers that define Sukhothai-period architecture), Wat Si Sawai (a Khmer-influenced temple from the pre-Thai period, three laterite prangs), and Wat Sa Si (a vihara on an island in an artificial lake, the composition of which reproduces the cosmological map the city was built around). The entire site can be toured by bicycle. Bicycles are hired from the park entrance for 30 baht.
The experience at Sukhothai differs from Ayutthaya in one fundamental way: at Ayutthaya, the ruins share space with a contemporary town (and share atmosphere with busloads of tourists from Bangkok). At Sukhothai, the historical park and the modern town of New Sukhothai are separated by twelve kilometres. Within the park walls, there is grass, ancient stone, and, before 9am, almost nobody.
Phang Nga Bay: The Part That Isn't James Bond Island
Phang Nga Bay is the limestone karst bay north of Phuket, photographed most famously from Ko Tapu, the needle-shaped limestone pinnacle off Khao Phing Kan island that appeared in The Man With the Golden Gun (1974) and has been called James Bond Island every day since. Ko Tapu receives approximately a thousand visitors daily in high season, the majority on speedboats from Phuket.
The rest of Phang Nga Bay receives a fraction of that. The bay contains over forty islands, most of them uninhabited, their limestone bases honeycomb-tunnelled by the sea into hongs: internal lagoons accessible only by kayak at low tide, the ceiling of the tunnel collapsing into a roofless chamber where the cliff walls rise 50 metres above water that is, inside, completely still. John Gray's Sea Canoe, operating from Phuket since 1989, built the hong-kayaking circuit that other operators now replicate. The twilight hong tours (arriving inside the lagoons at dusk and departing after dark) are the original experience, and the difference between seeing the hong in daylight and at the hour when the bats leave the cave ceiling for the night is substantial.
Khao Sok National Park, on the mainland north of the bay, is Thailand's largest remaining tract of virgin rainforest, the ecosystem that covered most of mainland Southeast Asia before the 20th century. The park contains Cheow Lan Lake, a 165-square-kilometre reservoir created in 1982 by a hydroelectric dam, with limestone karst formations rising directly from the water's surface. Raft houses anchored to the lake's edges provide overnight accommodation in the forest, one of the specific accommodations in Thailand where the morning soundscape (hornbills, gibbons, the water) replaces the sound of traffic. The road from Surat Thani to Khao Sok runs through the park's southern edge; the drive alone is worth stopping for.
A Note on the East Coast
The eastern Gulf coast (Koh Samet, Koh Chang, the Trat province mainland) is accessible from Bangkok in three to four hours and receives Thai domestic travellers in volumes that suggest it's more interesting than its international profile suggests. Koh Samet's proximity to Bangkok (three hours, including the ferry from Ban Phe) makes it a viable two-night option rather than the investment required by more distant islands. The beaches on Koh Samet's east coast are calmer, less social, and less developed than the west-facing Hat Sai Kaew that the speedboats drop at.
Koh Chang, three hours further east, is Thailand's second-largest island after Phuket, with a mountainous interior covered in forest and a coast that is still, in places, uncommercialised. The road that circuits the island's west coast is interrupted at the south by a section passable only by a sea-crossing, a gap that has prevented the development of the island's southern half entirely. The beaches there are accessed by longtail from Salak Phet village, and arrived at across water.
