Thailand

The World Traveller Series — Special Edition

by Brett Hayhoe

This entry has nothing to do with Pride. And yet Thailand may be one of the proudest countries I have ever set foot in — proud of its culture, its history, its people, and its extraordinary capacity to make a visitor feel not merely welcome but genuinely embraced.

Thailand earned its place in the World Traveller Series as a Special Edition because it defies easy summary. It is not one place but many — a country of stunning contrasts, each region distinct in character, all of them unified by something that can only be described as a beautiful soul. That soul is most visibly expressed in its people: gracious, warm, funny, and possessed of a generosity that has nothing to do with what they can get from you.

Add to that a value for money that borders on the embarrassing — for the Western traveller, at least — and you begin to understand why so many people go once and spend the rest of their lives finding reasons to go back.

I am one of them.

As a member of the media since the age of seventeen, invitations to review accommodation, experiences, and destinations have been a welcome feature of the professional life. Thailand arrived in exactly that fashion — several properties to review, a travel companion named Brian, and absolutely no idea that this first trip would become the foundation of many, many more.

Bangkok — Gateway and Constant

Bangkok is, at its most honest, essentially just another enormous city — pollution, political unrest, bars, clubs, saunas, and hotels of staggering elegance existing in cheerful proximity to everything else. The traffic is legendary. The heat is non-negotiable. The noise is constant.

And yet it pulls you in. There is an energy to Bangkok that is entirely its own — a city that operates at full throttle around the clock, where the extraordinary sits next to the mundane without either seeming to notice. Strip bars and street food and silk shops and five-star rooftop pools, all within a few blocks of each other. Bangkok does not curate itself for the visitor’s comfort. It simply is what it is, in every direction at once.

From that first trip onward, Bangkok became the ritual first night in Thailand — a single evening to decompress from the flight, absorb the heat, eat something magnificent from a street vendor, and prepare. Because the real destination, for this particular traveller, was always just a taxi ride south.

Chiang Mai — The North, and Its Elephants

Chiang Mai is a different country from Bangkok in everything but name. The former capital of the ancient Lanna Kingdom sits in a cooler, greener north, ringed by mountains, its old city centre still enclosed within a moat and the remnants of ancient walls. The pace is slower. The air is better. The temples are everywhere and quietly magnificent.

The highlight — and it is a genuine highlight, one of those travel experiences that lodges itself permanently in the memory — was the elephant sanctuary. These were not performing animals in the conventional sense, and yet perform they did: playing soccer with a casual authority that suggested they had been robbed of a professional career, painting with brushes held delicately in their trunks, and stealing visitors’ hats with a comic timing that indicated they knew exactly what they were doing and found it hilarious. To be in the company of these animals, at close quarters, on their terms, is something that resists adequate description.

The snake farm was also visited. It was fine. When in Rome.

The nightlife in Chiang Mai, it must be said, lacked the voltage of other parts of the country — but what it never lacked was the warmth and openness of the Thai people themselves. That quality, that particular brand of affectionate welcome, was present everywhere and in everyone. Embracing, in every sense of the word.

Koh Samui — The Island, the Rainbow Flag, and the Night That Followed

Koh Samui is quaint, cute, and inviting — a Gulf of Thailand island that wears its beauty without making too much fuss about it. Coconut palms, warm water, the kind of sunsets that feel almost artificially perfect.

It was on the Koh Samui leg of the trip that Brian and I made the unfortunate decision to dine at an Italian restaurant. The less said about that experience, the better. What matters is what came after.

Back at the accommodation, in need of somewhat more congenial company, we stepped onto the balcony to assess the situation. Looked up. And there, flying from the building directly next door, was the universal signal — the one that LGBTIQA+ travellers the world over have learned to read at fifty paces, in any language, under any sky.

The rainbow flag.

What followed was a night of being thoroughly entertained by a couple of lovely gentlemen, a Thai drag show of considerable ambition, and accommodation well-suited to the task of entertaining said gentlemen until morning. Details, as they say, are available on request — though the rating on this publication would not survive them.

Pattaya — The Foundation of Everything

That concluded the review portion of the trip. What followed was several days of pure fun, relaxation, and enjoyment — and the place in which all of that unfolded was Pattaya.

Brian was, at the time, considering retiring to Thailand, and had a home there for us to stay in. It turned out to be precisely what the doctor ordered: a base, a refuge, and the foundation from which every subsequent Thailand trip would be built.

Brian showed me the tourist parts of Pattaya, of which there are considerably more than any reasonable itinerary can accommodate. Suffice to say that fun is available in Pattaya twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and the only limiting factor is the human body’s finite capacity for decadence.

It was in Pattaya that I met Duane — and it was Duane who became the reason for returning to Thailand again and again across the better part of a decade that followed.

The Return Trips — A Decade of Thailand

The pattern, once established, rarely varied: first night in Bangkok, then a taxi south to Pattaya. Initially to Boyztown — that most unapologetically gay of precincts — and later to a hotel that friends had built near Sansuk, a gay sauna of considerable reputation. The accommodation was first class. The entertainment at Sansuk was first class. Not one trip across the half-dozen or so years of travelling together with Duane was a disappointment.

I could fill a hundred entries with what happened across those trips. The dining. The drinking. The beach. The strip bars of Bangkok and Pattaya, visited with the enthusiasm they deserved. The various nights of what one might diplomatically call horizontal tango. My night with a gorgeous Lady Boy, which deserves its own essay and will not be getting one here. Walking Street, which has to be experienced to be believed. A relationship — brief but real — with a young man whose full Thai name was magnificent and entirely unpronounceable, and who abbreviated it patiently for the benefit of his foreign friends despite my many lectures imploring him to stop the practice.

And the daily routine: a quiet, private dalliance with a sauna owner who shall remain nameless; hundreds of hours in local saunas, bars, and clubs; the particular pleasure of being a regular rather than a tourist, recognised and welcomed rather than assessed and tolerated.

If any of this were documented in full, the rating on this publication — and every subsequent one — would need immediate reclassification. Consider this the heavily edited highlights.

Conclusion

Thailand does something to a person that is difficult to explain to someone who has not been. It gets into you. Not just the beauty of the place — the temples, the islands, the food, the light in the early morning over the Chao Phraya — but the people. The Thai people carry a warmth that is not performance and not strategy. It is simply who they are. And for a traveller who has moved through a great many countries and a great many crowds, that quality is rarer than it should be.

The trips stopped, eventually. Covid did what wars and economics and sheer distance had not managed to do: it reprogrammed a traveller into something more closely resembling a homebody. The brain, once rewired toward stillness, does not easily find its way back to motion. Health has added its own complications.

And so these entries serve a purpose beyond the editorial. They are, in the most honest sense, a retrospective diary — the record of a life lived with considerable appetite, in places that gave back everything that was brought to them and then some.

Thailand gave back more than most.

I miss it. I miss the people. I miss the particular quality of a Bangkok evening and a Pattaya night and a Chiang Mai morning. Perhaps one day the body will cooperate and the tickets will be booked again.

Until then — there is always the writing.

The World Traveller Series is published in Q Magazine and on Ask Brett at bretthayhoe.me, where each entry is also available as a podcast episode.