The two months covered by my Thai visa were coming to an end. However, I wasn’t ready to leave Thailand. And so, a couple of days before my visa expired, I was in Chiang Khong, one of the Thai-Lao border towns on the Mekong, completely in denial of the fact that I had to leave. The days I spent in Chiang Khong melted into one. I stretched time for as long as my visa was…
Leave a CommentCategory: Thailand
It was 6:00 p.m., still light out and the Saturday Walking Street, one of Chiang Rai’s most popular night markets, was barely getting started. Hawkers were setting up their stalls and only a few visitors were walking around, slightly confused, as if witnessing a dress rehearsal. Suddenly, ceremonial music blasted from unseen loudspeakers. Everyone froze in their tracks, stood up straight and stopped whatever they were doing at the time. Not a single movement. The…
Leave a Comment
90 minutes of morning traffic photographed from the same street corner
Leave a Comment
In my final weeks in Thailand I made mandatory stops in several large towns representative of the northern provinces. As I’ve written elsewhere, cities require a special energy to explore, so whenever I had the chance I shifted gears by stopping in small, unassuming places. It was this kind of settlements, which could be explored in 1-2 days’ time until I had the feeling that I could hold them in my hand, that had helped…
Leave a Comment
I was late at the caving game: I was already 22 when I walked into my first cave. Several others followed soon and, since this first encounter, caves have been at the top of my list wherever I traveled. My fascination with them comes from what is most likely their mighty effect on any human visitor: I enter caves as matter-of-fact spaces, fully aware of the straightforward natural processes that have shaped them over eons,…
Leave a Comment
Travel is not just about elevated emotional states, which you collect and then coat with an even more uplifting layer until given the occasion to tell these stories, excitedly and without pausing to breathe, to someone back home. Travel is also about a lot of in-betweenness and empty moments: time spent waiting in bus stops, train stations, and on the couches of guest houses; time spent finding your way; time spent yearning for something –…
Leave a Comment
“Songthaew” is a word I couldn’t once say right during my two months in Thailand. The first syllable, ‘song’, was intuitive and at the same time suggestive of the second part, ‘thaew’, a tonal roller-coaster with far more vowels than one might think. It is a vital word to know in certain areas in Northern Thailand, where this repurposed pickup truck with two plain benches covered by a tarp is the only means of public…
Leave a Comment
I can’t exactly point out the moment when I was taken with Mae Sot, a small boomtown on the border of Thailand and Burma. Maybe it was on the evening on my arrival, after traveling on an empty yet remarkably modern highway in the mountains and stumbling upon parking lots filled with music and joyful people. Or maybe the next morning, when I rode my bike the wrong way for kilometers on a busy street, and instead of hearing “You farang, learn to drive!” I was greeted…
Leave a Comment