Explore Thailand

Bangkok

The most visited city on earth for much of the past decade, Bangkok assaults the senses with Grand Palace gold, Wat Pho's reclining Buddha, and a street-food scene so extraordinary that noodle carts in traffic jams have earned Michelin nods. The city shifts without transition from ancient royal temples to rooftop cocktail bars and fluorescent-lit night markets, and the chaos of the Chao Phraya's long-tails is somehow as meditative as the wats.

Chiang Mai

Northern Thailand's cultural capital clusters more than 300 Buddhist temples within a square moat of ancient walls, including the gilded spire of Wat Chedi Luang at the heart of the Old City. Beyond the temples, Doi Inthanon — Thailand's highest peak — looms an hour's drive south, and the valley's hill-tribe villages, elephant sanctuaries, and cooking schools draw travellers who come for a week and extend to a month.

Phuket

Thailand's largest island combines mega-resort beaches at Patong and Kata with a surprisingly elegant Old Town of Sino-Portuguese shophouses, galleries, and coffee bars that the crowds mostly miss. The surrounding Andaman Sea offers some of Southeast Asia's finest snorkelling and the gateway to the Similan Islands — among the world's top dive sites — in the waters beyond.

Krabi

Krabi's defining feature is its limestone karsts — great grey teeth rising sheer from the Andaman Sea and festooned with jungle vegetation — that make every boat trip from Ao Nang feel cinematic. Railay Beach, accessible only by longtail because cliffs block the road, shelters some of Thailand's most iconic rock-climbing routes alongside white-sand beaches enclosed by cathedral walls of stone.

Koh Samui

The Gulf of Thailand's most famous island balances the party beach at Chaweng with family-friendly Bophut Fisherman's Village and the surreal Big Buddha watching over the northern coast. Samui's inland is a genuine surprise: coconut groves, waterfalls, and a profoundly serene hilltop temple complex at Wat Plai Laem that most beach visitors never reach.

Ayutthaya

For 417 years — from 1350 to its sacking by the Burmese in 1767 — Ayutthaya was the capital of one of Southeast Asia's most powerful kingdoms, and the ruins it left are staggering: headless Buddhas in red-brick temple complexes, prangs rising from flood plains, and a decapitated stone face slowly swallowed by banyan roots at Wat Mahathat. Just 80 km north of Bangkok and easily visited by train, it is the single most important archaeological site in Thailand.

Chiang Rai

The northernmost major city in Thailand sits within view of Myanmar and the Mekong River, and it is anchored by one of the country's most otherworldly landmarks: the dazzling white Wat Rong Khun (White Temple), built by local artist Chalermchai Kositpipat from 1997 and still under construction. The Golden Triangle — where Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar converge at the Mekong — and the dramatically terraced Doi Mae Salong tea plantations fill out a day's drive from the city.

Koh Tao

A tiny island of just 21 square kilometres that has become one of the world's premier places to learn scuba diving — cheap dive courses, warm clear water, reliable visibility, and whale sharks passing by from March to May. Above the waterline, Koh Tao is a quieter, more affordable alternative to its neighbours, with jungle trails connecting small bays and a sunset view from the Koh Nang Yuan viewpoint that justifies the climb alone.

Ko Pha Ngan

The Full Moon Party on Haad Rin beach — a monthly gathering of up to 30,000 people painting each other fluorescent and dancing until dawn — has made Ko Pha Ngan famous, but the island north of Koh Samui also has a quiet, meditative other half: yoga retreats in the hills, secluded northern beaches reachable only by boat, and emerald bays where the party crowd never arrives.

Hua Hin

Thailand's first beach resort, patronised by the Royal Family since King Rama VII built a summer palace here in 1926, Hua Hin has a calm confidence that the flashier southern islands lack — a proper night market, seafood restaurants on a working pier, polo grounds, and a heritage railway station that functions as a museum piece you can catch a train from. It is the preferred beach escape for Bangkok residents who know what they're doing.

Pattaya

Pattaya's reputation precedes itself — a beach resort purpose-built for recreational excess, originally by American GIs during the Vietnam War — and the famous Walking Street delivers exactly what you'd expect after dark. What travellers discover is that Pattaya Viewpoint, the sanctuary of Truth's ornate wooden temple, and the nearby island of Koh Larn offer genuinely spectacular scenery quite separate from the nightlife that made the city's name.

Kanchanaburi

The Bridge on the River Kwai, built by Allied POW and Asian forced labourers under the Japanese occupation during World War II, stands at the edge of this riverside town three hours west of Bangkok as a solemn reminder of one of the war's most brutal episodes. The JEATH War Museum, Allied war cemeteries, and the Death Railway route through limestone gorges north of town make Kanchanaburi one of the most moving historical destinations in Southeast Asia.

Koh Phi Phi

The two islands of Koh Phi Phi form one of the most photographed seascapes in Asia: sheer limestone walls plunging into lagoons of improbable turquoise, Maya Bay (closed for environmental recovery) still visible from the cliffs above. The main village on Phi Phi Don is lively and party-oriented; the surrounding waters — snorkelled at dawn before the speedboats arrive — are genuinely breathtaking.

Sukhothai

The Kingdom of Sukhothai (1238–1438) is credited with establishing the foundations of Thai identity — script, art, religion — and the ruins of its ancient capital, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991, are best explored at dawn by bicycle when mist still rolls across lotus ponds and between the crumbling temple chedis. Wat Mahathat at the centre of the historic park, with its 200 ruined temples, lotus-bud spires, and giant seated Buddhas, is the most complete expression of the Sukhothai style anywhere.

Pai

A small mountain town in a river valley three hours northwest of Chiang Mai on a road of 762 switchbacks, Pai has been luring backpackers with its chilled-out atmosphere, hot springs, waterfalls, and striking hill-tribe villages since the 1990s — and somehow, despite its fame, still feels more like a village than a resort. The surrounding countryside of Mae Hong Son province, with its Burmese-influenced temples and fog-shrouded ranges, is among the most scenically spectacular in Thailand.

Koh Lanta

Koh Lanta Yai draws travellers who want Krabi's Andaman coast scenery without Krabi's crowds: a long, flat island of long beaches, mangrove channels, and Mu Ko Lanta National Park protecting its southern cape. The old Lanta Town at the island's eastern tip — wooden stilted houses on a Muslim fishing pier — preserves a way of life that Phuket traded away decades ago.

Koh Chang

Thailand's third-largest island, tucked into the Gulf of Thailand near the Cambodian border, packs jungle-covered mountains, waterfalls, and a scuba-diving ecosystem into a coastline ringed by sandy bays that remain less developed than the headline islands. The western coast from White Sand Beach south to Lonely Beach covers the full spectrum from family resort to budget backpacker, with elephant camps in the forest above.

Lopburi

The monkey city: Lopburi is famous for the troop of macaques that have colonised the 17th-century Khmer-Khmer-Lopburi temple of Phra Prang Sam Yot and the surrounding streets, treating the ancient sanctuary as their personal playground. Beyond the monkey theatre, Lopburi holds genuine historical weight as an ancient Khmer and Dvaravati capital whose pre-Ayutthaya monuments predate most of Bangkok's history by six centuries.

Lampang

The only town in Thailand where horse-drawn carriages still operate as taxis, Lampang retains a Burmese-influenced heritage in its teak temples — Wat Phra That Lampang Luang is one of the finest Lanna-style temple complexes in the north — and hosts the Thai Elephant Conservation Center, the country's premier elephant hospital and breeding programme. At a fraction of Chiang Mai's pace and tourist volume, it rewards travellers who allow an extra day.

Nakhon Ratchasima (Korat)

The gateway to the Isan plateau, Nakhon Ratchasima is the largest city in northeastern Thailand and a base for Khao Yai National Park — a UNESCO-listed forest complex of elephants, hornbills, and gibbons just 90 minutes from the city. The Phimai Historical Park, 60 km to the north, shelters one of the finest Khmer temple complexes outside Cambodia, pre-dating Angkor Wat in architectural scale and connected to it by an ancient royal highway.

Ayutthaya served as the Siamese capital from 1350 until the Burmese sacked it in 1767, and the ruins left behind — 185 square kilometres of prangs, chedis, and headless Buddhas in red-brick temple complexes — document the height of a civilisation that ruled over much of Southeast Asia. The famous image of a stone Buddha head enveloped by banyan roots at Wat Mahathat has become one of Asia's most reproduced photographs.

Sukhothai (1238–1438) is considered the cradle of Thai civilisation — the kingdom that codified the Thai alphabet, established Theravada Buddhism as the state religion, and developed the distinctive lotus-bud architectural style visible across its 200 ruined temples. The associated historic towns of Si Satchanalai and Kamphaeng Phet expand the property to include three related royal cities from the same era.

Covering 6,222 square kilometres of the Western Forest Complex along the Thai-Myanmar border, these two interconnected sanctuaries protect one of mainland Southeast Asia's largest intact forest ecosystems — home to tigers, elephants, clouded leopards, banteng, and gaur in numbers found almost nowhere else in the region. The sanctuaries' strict protection, with no human settlements permitted inside, gives them a wildness that Thailand's other protected areas have lost.

Discovered accidentally in 1966 when an American student tripped over a potsherd, Ban Chiang rewrote the history of Southeast Asian civilisation: the bronze-age culture that buried its dead with exquisitely painted spiral-patterned pottery here was producing metal tools and rice agriculture as early as 2100 BCE, centuries before similar technology appeared in China. The site museum in the village of Ban Chiang in Udon Thani province displays human skeletal remains still in situ.

This four-park complex stretching from the Cambodian border to the Khao Yai plateau covers 6,155 square kilometres of lowland and montane forest supporting Asia's largest mainland populations of elephants, with tigers, dholes, and banteng completing an almost complete large-mammal assemblage. Khao Yai's accessibility — under three hours from Bangkok — makes it the most visited national park in Thailand, where wild elephants regularly cross the road in front of tourist vehicles.

Inscribed in 2021 after a decades-long campaign marred by controversy over the forced resettlement of Karen hill-tribe communities, Kaeng Krachan protects Thailand's largest national park: 2,900 square kilometres of misty forest on the Myanmar border harbouring over 400 bird species and 57 mammal species including tigers and elephants. The park's Panoenthung viewpoint, where clouds fill the valleys at dawn while peaks rise above them, is one of the most dramatic vistas in Thailand.

Inscribed in 2023, Si Thep in Phetchabun province preserves an exceptional example of Dvaravati urban planning from the 7th–9th centuries CE: a double-walled city of 4.7 square kilometres with reservoirs, moats, and monumental brick sanctuaries whose distinctive architectural style influenced Buddhist art and architecture across mainland Southeast Asia. The site's relative obscurity belies its importance as one of the best-preserved examples of the Dvaravati civilisation that preceded the Khmer and Sukhothai kingdoms.

Thailand's most recent UNESCO inscription (2024), Phu Phrabat in Udon Thani province is a sandstone plateau of extraordinary rock formations — natural mushroom-shaped boulders and sheltered overhangs — that were adapted from at least the Dvaravati period (7th–9th centuries CE) as sacred Buddhist sites by placing sīma boundary stones to consecrate ordination halls. The site documents the unique Thai tradition of using natural rock formations as the physical substrates for religious architecture, a practice that continued through the Lanna period.