Urban Giraffe

Living in Guangzhou provides me with the opportunity of exploring parts of the world far removed from what I call ‘home’. Much of South-East Asia is temptingly within my fingertips and fortunately a lot of low-cost airlines have sprouted up. One just happens to fly from Macau (a few hours South of Guangzhou) to Bangkok. Perfect. A few clicks later, the usual ‘don’t press anything otherwise we’ll bill you twice’ credit card waiting screen, and I have a flight.

The question now is simple: what do I do when I’m there?

The obvious answer is to buy a Lonely Planet and dutifully follow its recommendation. The only trouble is, I can’t find an English one in Guangzhou.

No sweat, there’s always the internet.

It’s at this stage you realise how hopelessly inadequate the internet is. Sure there are hundreds of travel sites and guides and countless agents trying to sell you things, but there’s very little concrete information upon which you can plan a holiday.

It’s very easy to spend several days in a haze of frustration as you try and cobble something together. I did just that. Internal flights were looked at, along with varying scales of hotels, tours, popular destinations, reviews, forums, and tips. Out of all this an indistinct picture was formed. Hotels and flights were eventually booked, and the plan was put into action. Airport food was consumed, mistakes were made, and fun was had.

So ends the holiday.

So why tell me?

After returning back to China I decided to put my experiences into words and provide an informal (and very limited) guide to Thailand. This is that guide, and it is an assimilation of lots of information, condensed into a form that may be useful to potential visitors of Thailand.

Basically I’ve decided to branch out into sub-standard travel guides.

You can download this guide as a PDF, along with a Thai language cheatsheet, containing useful words and phrases.

Macau »

Map courtesy of Nations Online