No Reservations

This article was published in Nikkei Asia here in April 2023.

Though only a stone's throw from the border, I was sure that this village must still be in Thailand - I just couldn't work out why everything looked and sounded so Chinese. Even the name, Ban Rak Thai, translated as "the home that loves Thais" which seemed to imply that the place itself had some kind of separate nationality. After a bit of digging, I found out that what I had in fact stumbled upon was a legacy of the Chinese Civil War.

As Mao Zedong closed in on victory over the Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, in the late 1940s, his opponents famously retreated to Taiwan in the far east. But what was much less well-known, at least to me, was that a small, cut-off band of them were also pushed out of China to the far west, and ended up settling right here in northern Thailand. It was the kind of delightful, accidental discovery that perfectly illustrated the advantages of traveling without any reservations - a forgotten village at the end of a road, at the end of a country, and the sort of place I never would have heard about in advance or included on a fixed itinerary.

Admittedly, I was adopting this new style of travel by necessity, rather than by design, having repeatedly postponed my festive season travel planning until the season itself had already arrived. With all airline and bus seats full, escaping from Bangkok for the holidays was going to mean going under my own steam. Thankfully I owned a hardy old motorcycle, so a ride up to northern Thailand struck me as just the ticket.

Such spontaneous decision-making also highlighted to me how much time I normally spend weighing up different destinations in advance, including trawling through online reviews to find that one hotel boasting entirely positive reviews.

I decided to dispense with guidebooks too after riding into Pai, a couple of hours' north of Chiang Mai. It had been billed as a kind of tropical hilltop Shangri La, and no doubt it once was. But I now found a bustling town overrun with bubble-tea shops and hipster cafes touting the "Pai high" after Thailand's recent relaxation of restrictions on cannabis use.

Ditching travel planning also allowed me to escape my own internal echo chamber. Psychologists tell us that we are notoriously bad at accurately predicting what we will like, despite being convinced that we're brilliant at it. One thing I did know for sure was that crowds and group activities were not my preferred holiday environment. So the Doi Inthanon National Park, home of Thailand's highest point, sounded perfect.

Things deteriorated as soon as I entered the protected area however, as I found myself riding past dozens of campsites with hundreds of tents, their guy-ropes almost touching. That seemed to defeat the main rationale for camping - compensating for a lack of amenities with a lack of humans.

I was then ambushed at the summit by both low clouds and a clouds of smoke and a cacophony of sizzling and boiling. A mass of food stalls had set up shop there and were hawking assorted Thai treats to crowds of hungry local tourists, from pork belly stew to curried fish custard. This rather surreal mountain-top scene was enhanced by the fact that a large percentage of the crowd had decided to celebrate a rare opportunity for donning cold weather clothing by dressing up in furry animal "onesies."

There were cats, dogs, pandas, crocodiles, and even a unicorn. I chatted, snacked and laughed with a variety of different creatures and, as the only foreigner there, was also asked to guest star in a number of group selfies. I soon forgot about the view I'd come to see, and also about what I had thought I did and didn't like.

There are also downsides to the no-reservations approach however, as I found out when trying to get a hotel room on Christmas Day by just walking in, ending up billeted in what looked suspiciously like a storeroom. Or when a foray down a side road to visit some pretty Shan villages became a six-hour odyssey, the road turning into a dried-up riverbed and getting me lost deep in the jungle.

But as I loaded my bike on a truck at the end of the journey and boarded the sleeper train back to Bangkok, I realised that, had I planned it all out, not only would I have avoided those downsides, but also missed most of the upsides too.

And they lack of any itinerary also ensured that I was experiencing everything in the moment as I rode my motorcycle through the hills, rather than perpetually anticipating the next thing on my list. It meant I also got a proper holiday from my own head.

I walked down the line of bunks in the train carriage, each equipped with its own little yellow privacy curtain. As I arrived at my berth, I was greeted by a smiling Thai couple and their daughter who were billeted next to me. I climbed into my cozy bed and snuggled up to watch the world slide by outside my window.

I was concluding that Thailand really is the perfect place for no-reservations travel, its inherent flexibility and sociability meaning there is always someone ready to help you. As a hand appeared from the upper berth offering me a dip into a packet of dried mango, I realised that I might even get converted to group camping too.