Thailand in four stages

Three years ago, we were about to leave for Thailand — but then a small bug threw a spanner in our potential Pad Thai. Indeed, my girlfriend was pregnant and the chance that she was stung by a mosquito in Thailand that can transmit the Zika virus was too great that the Belgian government did not recommend traveling to Asia.

Not that I really minded, because I was a bit skeptical at first. When I was 23, I had given a lecture in New Delhi and my first visit to Asia had left me with mixed feelings. India is a beautiful country in many ways, but just a little less so in others.

With that experience in mind, I had already formed an image of Thailand beforehand. Street hawkers who cling to you and keep following you. Places full of backpackers “looking for themselves” and a tourism industry that even makes them look up to in Venice. Now that we ended up in Thailand three years after that first attempt, I have discovered that, as is often the case, those preconceptions are not always true — or at least not in the places where we were.

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Bangkok

The first thing I noticed when I drove from the airport to Bangkok were the billboards the size of football fields. They promote things that most Thais can only dream of. The towers that loomed at the end of the horizon reminded me of the city of my life: Sao Paulo. The one city I really love — restless, contradictory, alive, a place to disappear into.

Bangkok also quickly showed me some of her abandonment. From the stalls where food inspection should not visit to Gomp, a neighborhood that seems invented by the Instagram algorithm. I ate pancakes there that are so soft that it almost looked like I was shoving clouds in.

Tips

• Take the boat to sail down the Chao Phraya (for a part). There are tourist boats, but also ferries that use Thai as a means of transport.
• Visit the Grand Palace — and watch out for scammers who stand a few hundred meters from the complex and tell you that it “exceptionally only opens in the afternoon today and it's best to take a tuk tuk somewhere else first”. I had read about it online, then one came to me myself. No thanks, bye.
• Taxis and, of course, tuk tuks in Bangkok are super cheap, even for longer distances.
• Choose a hotel with a swimming pool.

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Ayutthaya

Some cities are so special that Unesco has decided to classify them as a “World Heritage Site”. Bath and Prague, for instance, or Bruges. Ayutthaya is also one of the lucky ones, thanks to its beautiful monuments and temples. Because we visited them early in the morning and there was almost no Chinese group in Thailand, there was no cat except for a pack of street dogs.

The grass was trimmed to the millimeter, but as soon as you leave the temples, you end up in a different world. One of visible poverty and degradation. And that's a shame, because with a good vision of sustainable tourism, the city — a big lost village — could benefit. Now Ayutthaya seems to be mainly targeting buses, tourists coming on and off from Bangkok for one day, but there are plenty of temples to stay at least one night. It guesthouse where we stayed for three days is already a step in the right direction. It was so beautiful there that I already had my girlfriend there married, while I would normally only do that on Koh Kood.

Tips

• Visit the temples very early in the morning, except Wat Chaiwatthanaram, which is most beautiful at sunset.
• Almost all sites are within walking distance of each other. However, a tuk tuk will stop every three hundred meters to ask if you don't want a ride.

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Pattaya

Because we couldn't hike from Ayutthaya to Koh Kood in one trip with our daughter, we decided to break the stage into two parts. As a result, we were also able to visit an elephant sanctuary on the road, where I could once again experience what powerful animals they are.

The city of Pattaya is exactly what I had previously feared Thailand would be like — but luckily it's the only place we came across like that. Touristy, loud, retired Germans and British people with a Thai 'girlfriend' who could have been my sister.

To fill the half day we had left, we visited Sanctuary of Truth. A wooden palace on the beach, built in 1981, is the toy of Lek Viriyaphant, a Thai businessman who wanted to make a building with a certain religious approach — but with a religion as if it were written by a ten-year-old. “There are four gods, for each element there is one. As humanity, we are one and must not pollute the Earth, 'superficial things like that. As if the Beers brothers were organizing Tomorrowland here — I wouldn't be surprised if that ever happens again.

In itself, the gigantic wooden structure is quite impressive, and if it had just stood near the sea, it would have been fantastic. Unfortunately. Indeed, an equally large commercial spectacle has been built around the Sanctuary, with elephant rides, souvenir shops... A glimpse into hell.

Tips

• Don't stay here too long.
• Check carefully which elephant sanctuary you are visiting. A golden tip I got from Anthony Caere added is: “if human contact between elephants and humans is possible, then it is probably a tourist trap'. An Lemmens sent me on the other hand that, of course, it is even better to see elephants in the wild from a distance.
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Koh Kood

“Get out of Bangkok as soon as possible and head to one of the islands,” was a comment I had often heard beforehand. I'm glad I ignored the first part of that tip but followed the second part.

It's there that I was really sold and fell in love with Thailand. Days that mainly consisted of reading and playing in the sea with my daughter. Before my eyes, it grows faster than bamboo. For hours, she carried water to the sea and sand to the beach. She fell asleep to me after first jumping exuberantly for ten minutes. There was sand in the bed, carried between her little toes, but I took the itch at night with great pleasure.

Every night, I sat in front of the sea, writing a beer and doing some work — for now, the two don't feel like one. Hopefully they never do that.

Tips

• Book your transport to the island via 12 GB. We traveled by bus from Pattaya and then a ferry; on the way back, we took the ferry and a bus to Bangkok.