Thailand is one of the best destinations for pleasure-seekers who are travelling on a budget. With over 39 million international tourists every year, Thailand offers a wide range of activities from daily massages and island-hopping adventures to Michelin-starred street food and a superb night-life. With so many activities to choose from, picking which ones to do can be quite a task.
So, here’s a list of four things you shouldn’t miss when you are in Thailand:
Visiting the Grand Palace
Want to know what it feels like to be a Thai royalty? Visit the Grand Palace. Located at the heart of the capital, Bangkok, the Grand Palace is a 200-year-old, gold-tipped, complex building that used to be the official residence of the Kings of Thailand from 1782 up to 1925. The Grand Palace boasts extravagant, heavily-detailed and colourful architectural buildings that will bring you back in time and make you feel like Southeast Asian nobility. Wanderlust mentioned the Emerald Buddha and the nearby Wat Pho, which houses the largest reclining Buddha in Thailand, as the places you shouldn’t dare miss when visiting the Grand Palace. Once in the palace premises, you will be required to wear long skirts or trousers.
Although the dress code does not permit the use of jeans, you can always rent the right clothing from vendors in the area.
Scuba Diving
Home to beautiful beaches such as the widely-popular Maya Beach, which was the location for the 2000 Leonardo Di Caprio film, ‘The Beach’, Thailand is the perfect destination for people who love water adventures such as scuba diving, snorkelling, white water rafting, parasailing, windsurfing, and many others. Listed as one of the top ten diving destinations in the world, scuba diving in Phuket is definitely an adventure you wouldn’t want to miss. Both novice and experienced divers can look forward to the amazing underwater sceneries such as the fascinating King Cruiser wreck close to the Anemone Reef and the famous Shark Point that houses lots of tropical fish, colourful soft corals and sea fans and — you guessed it — sharks!!!
Testing your luck at a hotel casino
In ExpatBets’ guide to casinos in Thailand, they explain that there are actually no casinos in Bangkok; instead, travellers are advised to go to the casinos near the borders of Thailand. Poipet, which is a boomtown in the border of Cambodia and Thailand, houses a string of casinos where you can test out your luck. Thai passport holders can easily go to Poipet without having their passports stamped while tourists have to acquire a different tourist visa from Cambodian Immigration upon arrival. The tourist visa only costs $30 and permits one to stay in Cambodia for up to 30 days. Once in Poipet, you can visit the most famous casino, Crown Casino, which was built in 1999.
Attending the Wonderfruit Festival
Want to be part of something meaningful whilst having fun? Go and attend the transformative and eco-conscious Wonderfruit Festival in Pattaya. The Evening Standard’s guide to this popular festival (dubbed as ‘The Burning Man of the East’) mentioned that the festival founder, Pete Phornprapha, started the festival with the aim of changing the world by creating a ‘sustainable creative experience’ and inspiring them to take this ethos with them home. Staying true to its goals, the Wonderfruit Festival keeps its carbon footprint neutral by using sustainable materials such as bamboo and hemp, on top of local materials for the entire four-day party.
This post was written and submitted by Bianca Ramirez, an aspiring travel writer based out of Manila, Philippines. She first traveled out of the country to visit Singapore in 2017 and has since been traveling around Asia whenever her schedule and budget allow it. Thailand has been her favorite country to visit by far, and she enjoys writing about her travels whenever she can.