No Reservations
This article was published in Nikkei Asia here in April 2023.
Though only a stone's throw from the border, I was pretty sure that this lakeside village was still in Thailand, leaving me at a loss as to why everything looked and sounded like I’d crossed into China’s Yunnan Province instead. Even the name, Ban Rak Thai, translated as "the village that loves Thailand", seeming to imply that it itself had some kind of separate nationality.
Some online sleuthing eventually revealed the intriguing answer: I’d stumbled into a bizarre, living relic of the Chinese Civil War. As Mao Zedong’s forces swept towards victory in the late 1940s, the Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, were forced to retreat to Taiwan. But what was much less well-known, at least to me, was that a small contingent of them - the so-called Lost Army - also got cut off in the rugged southwest of the country. They were forced to retreat over the border with Burma and eventually also breached a second frontier to arrive here in Northern Thailand. At this point they decided that enough was enough and to make it their new home, trading their rifles for tea bushes and establishing a culturally-distinct enclave that their descendants keep alive to this day - as the Chinese signs, tea houses and red lanterns all around me proudly paid testament to.
My arrival there was purely by chance and the accidental discovery was, I reckoned, quite the ringing endorsement of my new policy of traveling with no reservations. Admittedly I’d adopted this modus operandi by necessity rather than choice, having repeatedly postponed my festive season travel planning until the season itself had already arrived. With all airline and bus seats full, my only option for escape from Bangkok had been to depart under my own steam, so I had strapped my bags onto the back of my motorcycle and hit the highway out of the city with only the distinctly vague “northern Thailand” as my destination and not a hotel booking to my name. But at least I’d saved myself the countless hours that normally would have been spent weighing up alternative itineraries and getting bogged down in endless reviews.
A couple of days’ riding later, somewhere north of Chiang Mai, the name “Pai” on a road sign up ahead rang a bell. I remembered reading about this remote tropical hilltop Shangri La in an old magazine and so decided I would spend a couple of nights there. No doubt it was once exactly as described in that article - right before it was published that is. What I now rode into was instead a buzzing hive of foreign backpackers, overflowing with bubble-tea shops and hipster cafes touting the "Pai High", courtesy of Thailand's recent relaxation of restrictions on cannabis use. Its teeming streets were exactly the opposite of what I was looking for but, thankfully, with no reservations pinning me down I was free to just gun the throttle and continue on through and out the other side.
I resolved to just take the smallest, most scenic roads I could find from now on in the hope of ending up somewhere wonderful that no other foreigner had heard of. So I motored on through hills, forests and rice paddies until the road petered out at the Burmese border just before sunset, presenting me with exactly what I’d been looking for: the glorious enigma that is Ban Rak Thai, a place I never would have found in any guidebook.
After a couple of delightful days there, I continued on my journey and reached a national park, and with it promises of peace, quiet, and fresh mountain air. But as I followed the narrow road into it, I discovered that most of the rest of Thailand had already had the same idea. Every camping spot was jam-packed with tents pitched guy rope to guy rope, new neighbours sharing snacks or engaging in impromptu games of badminton. This clearly violated the sacred pact of camping as far as I was concerned, whereby one sacrifices standard essentials such as running water and a comfy bed in return for peace, solitude, and an absolute zero risk of unplanned group activities. Thankfully, I managed to find a small cottage to bed down in for the night instead.
I set out early the next morning to ensure that I finally got some alone time watching the sun rise from the highest peak in the park (and in fact in the whole of Thailand), Doi Inthanon. I should note at this point that its summit soars to only 2,500 metres, making it rather modest by conventional mountaineering standards, and that there is also a road going all the way up to the top. Nevertheless, I was still feeling quite adventurous as I loaded my bike up in the dark at 4am. Snaking upwards through the jungle, I caught glimpses of red lights through the trees ahead and presumed that I was about to come upon a temple or a ranger station. But as I rounded the next corner, I instead found myself at the end of a huge traffic jam, tail lights twinkling like misplaced Christmas baubles all the way up the mountain.
Cursing, I weaved my way skyward through the gridlock and arrived at the top half an hour later, shuddering in the now overly fresh mountain air. Determined to still find a peaceful spot to watch the break of dawn, I headed down a promising little path that looked like it could lead to a decent vantage point. As the first light started to penetrate the morning mist, I also heard a waterfall up ahead - things were really starting to look up. But, one again, my senses had deceived me: the mist promptly revealed itself to be cooking smoke and the falling water to be the sound of sizzling. My quaint little path led not to a secluded viewpoint but rather to a clearing where a couple of dozen improvised stalls were merrily hawking an eclectic assortment of Thai treats to hungry fellow pilgrims, from pork belly stew to curried fish custard.
I was standing shivering, out of ideas and almost of curses, when I heard someone calling out to me. I turned round to politely refuse whatever delicacy they were proffering and instead found a portly middle-aged lady waving me over from behind her charcoal grill, miming that I should come to warm my shaking hands over it. Despite the cold, I could feel my heart already beginning to melt at her kindness.
My new friend had an infectious laugh as she helped me toast my palms and I repaid her by helping to cajole potential customers to eat at her stall. I got chatting with a few of them and it was remarkable what fine spirits everyone seemed to be in despite the foul weather and the near-zero visibility meaning we’d all schlepped up there in vain. People were joking about our common predicament as they snacked, chatted, and savoured the rare experience of actually feeling cold in Thailand. A decent percentage of them had decided to mark this special occasion by dressing up in furry animal "onesies" - I spotted cats, dogs, pandas, crocodiles, and even a unicorn. As the only foreigner up there, I was requested to guest star in a number of group selfies and soon forgot about the amazing view and glorious solitude I'd been anticipating and instead found myself reveling in the kind of spontaneous group activities that I normally so recoiled from.
That’s not to say that there weren’t also downsides to my complete lack of planning for the trip. For example, a fruitless search for a hotel room on Christmas Day led to me eventually being billeted in what looked suspiciously like a storeroom. Then a foray down a side road in search of some photogenic Shan villages turned into a six-hour odyssey as the road morphed into a dried-up riverbed and got me lost deep in the jungle, needing some friendly local hunters to get me back on the right track.
But as I dropped off my bike in Chiang Mai to be trucked home at the end of my adventures and boarded the sleeper train back to Bangkok myself, I concluded that the upsides of no reservations still far outweighed the downsides. The real unspoiled gems were not going to jump out of Google or the guidebook, no, they had to be discovered through serendipity. And my preconceptions about places - and even my own preferences - had proved wholly unreliable, meaning I needed to go see for myself if something was really my cup of tea. The beauty of no reservations was that, if it was, then I was free to stay as long as I fancied and, if it wasn’t, well, then I could just move on straight away, no harm done. No reservations also meant much more time spent doing rather than planning, and that I avoided spending my hours on the road in constant anticipation of the next thing coming up, instead actually enjoying the here and now.
As I walked down the line of bunks in the train carriage, it dawned on me that Thailand really is quite the perfect place for this kind of serendipitous travel, thanks to its inherent flexibility and sociability - a conclusion that was immediately confirmed by the warm greeting I received from the smiling Thai couple billeted next to me. I climbed in to my berth and snuggled up to watch the world glide by outside my window. As a hand appeared through my curtain offering me a piece of dried mango, I realised that I might even come around to the idea of communal camping too.
