No Reservations

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

Though only a stone's throw from the Myanmar border, I was sure the 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, or "the home that loves Thais," seemed to imply that the place itself had some kind of separate nationality.

After a bit of digging, I realized that I had stumbled on a legacy of the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party), a small group of whom were pushed west out of China by Mao Zedong's forces during the Chinese civil war and settled right here.

It was the kind of accidental find that beautifully showcased the benefits of impromptu travel, or "winging it," with no reservations made in advance -- a lost village at the end of a road, at the end of a country, and somewhere that would have never made it onto any planned itinerary.

Admittedly, I was adopting this new style of travel by necessity, rather than design, after a hectic holiday period arrived before I'd had time to hit any travel booking sites.

Amid the wave of post-pandemic "revenge travel" that seemed to have filled every available domestic airline seat, I realized that getting away would mean doing so under my own steam. As the owner of a hardy old motorcycle, an overland journey from Bangkok up to northern Thailand was one of the few viable options left.

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, and 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 -- a lack of amenities being compensated for by a lack of humans.

I was then ambushed at the summit by both low clouds and a sizzling, boiling and smoking sensory assault. A mass of food stalls were hawking assorted Thai treats, from pork belly stew to curried fish custard, to eager crowds of local tourists. The festive atmosphere was enhanced by the fact that a large percentage of the crowd had decided to celebrate the rare opportunity for cold weather clothing by donning 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 were of course some downsides to my new, no-reservations policy, as I found when trying to get a hotel room on Christmas Day by just walking in, and ended 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 realized that, had I planned it all out, not only would I have avoided the downsides, but also missed most of the upsides.

And "no reservations" 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. That meant I also actually got a proper holiday from my 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 pulled the curtain shut, snuggling up to watch the world slide by outside my window.

I realized 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 realized I might even get converted to communal camping too.