Tag: Asia travel

Chiang Mai rewards preparation more than most Thai destinations. Planning a trip to Chiang Mai comes down to settling two questions, both months in advance. First, dates: between February and April, the air ranges from tolerable to downright dangerous depending on the year you visit. Then, paperwork: Thailand’s visa exemption […]

Chiang Mai fits its five most useful neighborhoods into a few square kilometers, which should make choosing easy, but does not. A ten-minute Grab ride separates a walled old city where you can walk from one major temple to the next, a café district beneath a flight path, and a […]

Chiang Mai is a small city surrounded by a vast expanse of mountains. You can walk around the old town in a morning. Everything else happens on the roads climbing out of the urban area, and that is where a week is either well spent or quietly wasted. What ruins […]

Chiang Mai’s signature dish is eaten during office hours. Khao soi, the bowl of coconut curry noodles that draws most travelers north, comes out of kitchens that open around 8 am and close between 2 pm and 5 pm. Five places worth crossing the city for shut their doors within […]

Chiang Mai has more than three hundred temples, and by the fourth you will stop really looking at them. Temple fatigue is the real danger here, not the heat or the crowds. One traveler almost walked past Wat Phra Singh in February 2026: he had already visited three wats that […]

Chiang Mai is not a miniature Bangkok. Northern Thailand’s largest city spent more than two and a half centuries as the capital of its own kingdom. It still fits inside a square of moats, a wooded ridge rises just behind it, and it moves at a pace that surprises those […]