A Thailand Trail. The background and advance plan.

If the truth be told, it's all Melvin Bragg's fault, the omniscient presenter of "In Our Time". On Thursday 23rd June he hosted a discussion on Radio 4 entitled "Angkor Wat". I was hooked. Here was a place that I had to visit. Angkor Wat is, of course located in the north west of Cambodia which is fairly adjacent for Thailand and all the delights that country can offer to tourists. In fact all bar four days of the planned holiday will be in Thailand so I propose to start with some general information on that country using the UK as a comparator. They have similarly sized populations, but at 200,000 sq miles Thailand has roughly twice the land area. The United Nations have devised their Human Development Index which attempts to measure how "civilised" a country is according to various measures like levels of education, health provision, income, life expectancy, happiness, etc, etc. Norway has consistently come top of the list for years. Thailand is 66th and UK is 18th out of a total of 191 countries. At 66th, Thailand is considerably more developed than its neighbours with Vietnam at 115, Laos 139, Cambodia 146 and Myanmar 149.

The flags of both countries use the same three colours, red,white and blue of course. 

 

The Union Flag represents the three countries that form the Union. Wales is not represented as it was already colonised at the time the first Union Flag was designed. In the Thai flag, shown above,  the colours are symbolic, red represents the people,  the white, religion and blue, the monarchy. Speaking of religion Thailand is 94% Buddhist, 4% Muslim, 1% Christian and the rest composed of various oriental religions. 

Atheists registered as 0.003% of the population so I might be struggling to find like-minded people. 

Both UK and Thailand are Monarchies with interesting parallels. Constitutionally the UK is a monarchy and Parliamentary democracy whereas Thailand in the late C20 has swung between democracy and military rule with at least 12 changes of constitution and several coups. King Rama lX who died in 2016 reigned for 70 years and 126 days and was then the second longest reigning monarch in history (the longest being Louis XlV). He was pipped into third place by UK's Elizabeth ll when she died in 2022. Here is the present King. One has to be careful what one says because they have quite strictly enforced lese- majeste laws with prison sentences of between 3 and 15 years, (Not sure how Harry would fare if the roles were reversed).

Climatically, Thailand can be said to have two seasons, hot and hotter! Officially however it has three. The hot, from March to May, the rainy season from about June to October and the "cool" November to February. We'll be there for a month, the last two weeks in January and the first two in February. We can expect highs of 30 and lows of 20.

For about £2,500 per person you can buy a holiday called The Thailand Triple. This consists of a week split between Bangkok and Chiang Mae in the north west and a week on an island in the south west. This mirrors some of what we have planned but we are also adding several day trips from Bangkok and the visit to Cambodia to include the Angkor Wat complex and Phnom Penh. This will take four weeks and should cost well under £1500 each when all the bills are added up. 

Above you can see a downloaded image of part of the Angkor Wat temple complex. A visit here is a major driver for the holiday. 

We will,  by and large be staying in hotels which are remarkably good value. We are not talking bamboo with en suite gecko here, but properly built concrete and carpets. Room prices vary between £10 to £150 per room per night. I set a budget of about £35 which gets you a room and breakfast.  The rooms that I have booked are equipped with a large bed, fridge, flat screen tv, air con, wifi and a seating area. The hotels have outdoor swimming pools with sun loungers and spa facilities 

The exception to this is our accommodation on Ko Samui. This is a beach resort on an island where we will be staying in a bungalow for a week. 

If you want to find out some more details of how the holiday unwraps or even unravels then keep an eye on this site. I shall be posting blogs every few days with the occasional nudge on Facebook.