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There is a one-and-a-half-hour flight from Bangkok to Luang Prabang. Skip it. The overland version takes the better part of a week and it is a pretty memorable trip that I can highly recommend.

You start with the night train to Chiang Mai from Bangkok. Book a second-class air-conditioned sleeper ahead of time, because the tickets (and especially the lower berths) sell out fast. You board in Bangkok in the early evening, and wake up as the track winds into the hills near Chiang Mai. It is a night of travel that costs you no daylight, which is the whole trick. Some food can be bought during the ride, but it's always a good idea to pack something.

Give Chiang Mai a few days. Doi Suthep before the tour buses, the old city on foot, one market (like Siri Wattana Market, which is my personal favorite for local foods) where the food is the point and not the souvenirs. It is worth a few days on its own, so do not rush it just to get to the border.

When you are ready to cross, take a bus or taxi to Chiang Khong (specifically the Thai-Lao friendship bridge). It is six or seven hours by bus, and about five hours by taxi. Cross the border into Laos and stay in Huay Xai for a night. Laos gives most nationalities a visa on arrival, so bring clean US dollar bills or Thai Baht and a passport photo, and check your own passport rules (see here) before you go.

View from the Thai-Laos Friendship Bridge

From Huay Xai you take the slow boat. Two days on the Mekong with a night in Pakbeng in the middle. The boat leaves late morning and gets you into Pakbeng by evening, then it is back on the water the next morning and into Luang Prabang before dark. The ticket is a seat and nothing else, so carry cash, bring water and something to eat.

Slow boats in Huay Xai

There's also the possibility of taking a more luxurious slow boat. I haven't taken it myself, but as you can imagine, it costs more and is missing some of the adventure.

We booked our rooms in Pakbeng in advance, but you can probably find a room when you land rather than booking blind. The river does what it wants with the timing depending on the season, so depending on that the ride to Pakbeng can take a bit longer than expected.

Pakbeng in the evening

What I would avoid: booking a tour together with the slowboat trip. It's easy to coordinate by yourself and it's a bit of an adventure. Some tours will start at 4 or 5 AM in Chiang Mai and stop for a temple in Chiang Rai, before continuing on to the border. This is not worth it in my opinion.

The reason to go slow is simple. You arrive in Luang Prabang having watched the country change around you, the hills flattening into the river, the towns getting smaller, instead of stepping off a plane into it.

If you have done this route yourself, did you do something differently or did it look similar?

Additional information:

1. Sleeper train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai https://12go.asia/en/train/Bangkok/Chiang-Mai/?z=15839495

2. Route from Chiang Mai to Huay Xai https://12go.asia/en/travel/Chiang-Mai/Huay-Xai/?z=15839495

3. After crossing the border to Laos, you'll need to take a taxi to Huay Xai. You don't need to book this in advance, there will be drivers waiting there.

4. Hotel in Huay Xai that I stayed at https://www.agoda.com/partners/partnersearch.aspx?pcs=1&cid=1965974&hl=en-us&hid=47001358

5. Slow boat from Huay Xai to Luang Prabang https://12go.asia/en/travel/Huay-Xai/Luang-Prabang/?z=15839495 (you'll see it listed on that page)

6. In Luang Prabang you'll find a lot of different accomodations. We stayed in a hostel that wasn't great, so I'll leave it off from this list.

Disclaimer: Some of these links may be affiliate links.

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Drop your rough Thailand itinerary in the comments and we'll poke holes in it before you book anything.

The more you give us, the better the feedback. Include:

• How many days you have, and rough dates or month
• Cities and islands you're thinking about, in the order you'd do them
• Anything already booked (flights, hotels)
• Your budget range and travel style

The most common problem we see is too many stops in too few days, where half the trip gets eaten by travel and check-in mornings. Second most common is picking the wrong island for the season. We'll tell you straight if that's you.

New to all of this and don't have a plan yet? That's fine, say where you're flying in and out of and how long you have, and we'll get you started.

Planning a trip to Thailand and not sure where to start or how to fit everything in?

Drop your itinerary questions here. Whether you're figuring out how many days to spend in each place, what to skip, how to get between cities, or whether your plan is realistic, I'll do my best to help.

Include:

• How many days you have
• What you've already confirmed (flights, hotels, etc.)
• What kind of trip you're after (beaches, temples, food, nightlife, mix of everything)

No question is too basic. Ask away.

TLDR; Look for restaurants with a yellow flag and the Thai word เจ on it (you can also type this into Google Maps)

I'm not vegetarian myself but I travel with someone who is, and after years of watching the same conversation play out at food stalls I've got a fairly clear picture of which parts of this country are easy for it and which parts quietly aren't. Chiang Mai is the easiest city in Thailand by a long way, and it isn't close. The north has an old Buddhist vegetarian tradition so cheap jay canteens are everywhere and nobody needs the concept explained, and on top of that twenty years of yoga schools and remote workers have produced a whole layer of vegan cafés. Very few places in Asia have both. If you're building an itinerary and this matters to you, weight it north.

Bangkok is easy too, but only in certain areas. Chinatown is the real answer: the Chinese-Thai vegetarian shops off Yaowarat have been going for generations, everything in the building is meat-free, and there's nothing to negotiate. University areas around Samyan do cheap, clearly labelled jay stalls. Sukhumvit has the proper sit-down vegan restaurants at four or five times the price. The islands split in two, with Koh Phangan being effortless and expensive because of the Srithanu wellness scene, and everywhere smaller being fried rice with vegetables for the fifth night running.

The part nobody mentions is Isaan and small provincial towns. Every town does have a jay shop, usually more than one, but they're daytime businesses. They sell rice and pre-made curries out of trays and close when the trays are empty, often by early afternoon. By 7pm your options are whatever you can talk a stir-fry stall into, and that wok has been doing pork all evening. So the fix isn't a restaurant list, it's a schedule: eat your real meal at lunch and treat dinner as the flexible one.

And here's the thing that catches almost everyone. Thai curry paste contains fermented shrimp paste. Green, red, massaman, panang, nearly all of it. It's ground in before the dish exists, so a vendor asked to make a green curry "without meat" will pull the chicken out and hand you a bowl of shrimp-paste curry, completely sincerely, because that's the question you asked. Same story with oyster sauce in stir-fries and pork broth under noodle soups that look entirely vegetable. The answer isn't better phrasing. It's picking kitchens where the whole operation is jay, which is why the yellow เจ flag matters more than anything you can say.

Look for places with this flag

Happy to answer questions if anyone's planning a trip and worried about this. I wrote up the longer version with the city-by-city detail and what I'd actually order here: https://thai-travel-guide.com/blog/eating-vegetarian-in-thailand

Planning a trip to Thailand and not sure where to start or how to fit everything in?

Drop your itinerary questions here. Whether you're figuring out how many days to spend in each place, what to skip, how to get between cities, or whether your plan is realistic, I'll do my best to help.

Include:

• How many days you have
• What you've already confirmed (flights, hotels, etc.)
• What kind of trip you're after (beaches, temples, food, nightlife, mix of everything)

No question is too basic. Ask away.

Planning a trip to Thailand and not sure where to start or how to fit everything in?

Drop your itinerary questions here. Whether you're figuring out how many days to spend in each place, what to skip, how to get between cities, or whether your plan is realistic, I'll do my best to help.

Include:

• How many days you have
• What you've already confirmed (flights, hotels, etc.)
• What kind of trip you're after (beaches, temples, food, nightlife, mix of everything)

No question is too basic. Ask away.

Planning a trip to Thailand and not sure where to start or how to fit everything in?

Drop your itinerary questions here. Whether you're figuring out how many days to spend in each place, what to skip, how to get between cities, or whether your plan is realistic, I'll do my best to help.

Include:

• How many days you have
• What you've already confirmed (flights, hotels, etc.)
• What kind of trip you're after (beaches, temples, food, nightlife, mix of everything)

No question is too basic. Ask away.

Most "best time to visit Thailand" advice gives you one average temperature for the whole country and calls it a day. That's close to useless. Thailand isn't one climate. The Gulf islands run on a different monsoon than the Andaman coast, so the same week can be perfect on Koh Samui and a washout in Phuket. And a month that looks great on a weather chart, like March up north, is actually burning season, when the air around Chiang Mai and Pai gets bad enough that you don't want to be hiking in it. A temperature average will never warn you about that.

So I built a planner that does. You put in your travel dates and it gives you an at-a-glance verdict for each region for those exact days: good to go, or avoid, and the reason why. Then you assign a place to each day and it builds the itinerary out, with the transport legs between your stops. The part I actually care about is that it mixes the seasonal weather with a set of overrides I've added by hand, so it catches the things the raw numbers miss. Burning season is the obvious one, but there are a few others where the weather looks fine and the reality on the ground isn't.

Two honest caveats. It's built on seasonal averages, not a live forecast, and the tool says so up front. And it's about a dozen curated places for now, which I'm expanding. It's free, there's no signup, and you can save plans in your browser to come back to.

It's here if you want to try it: www.thai-travel-guide.com/planner. I'd genuinely like feedback from people who know Thailand well, especially if you spot a month or a place where my verdict is wrong. Tell me and I'll fix it.

The Bridge on the River Kwai is smaller than you expect, and it's the least interesting thing in Kanchanaburi. You've seen the film, or absorbed it secondhand, and then you arrive to a modest steel bridge with souvenir stalls at one end and a queue for the same photo at the other. I once watched a tour group spend eleven minutes there, bus to bus, before rolling on to a lunch stop. Eleven minutes, for a three-hour round trip from Bangkok.

That's the standard Kanchanaburi experience and it's a waste. This is a province with two national parks, a seven-tier waterfall that makes the bridge look like a warm-up act, one of the most affecting war cemeteries in Asia, and guesthouses that float on the river. The fix is simple: stay the night, two if you can. Get to Erawan's upper waterfall tiers by about 9am, before the tour buses arrive and the lower pools fill up. Sleep in a fan-cooled raft room on the Maenam Kwai strip, which costs almost nothing and is better than it sounds once the river breeze does the job the air conditioner would have. If you're there for the train, the line past town becomes the actual Death Railway, running over the Wang Pho viaduct on a wooden trestle bolted to a cliff.

The history is worth doing properly, not in eleven minutes. Around 100,000 people died building the Thailand-Burma Railway, most of them Asian labourers whose names went unrecorded. It's hard to know what a number like that means until you're standing in the war cemetery reading ages off headstones and realising you've been walking a while and still haven't reached the end of it.

I wrote the full guide, with the waterfalls, the raft houses, and how to do the history right, here: www.thai-travel-guide.com/blog/kanchanaburi. Happy to answer questions if you're planning a trip.

Everyone knows Phangan for the Full Moon Party at Haad Rin, and that reputation is deserved: it's a genuinely huge, chaotic beach party held roughly monthly, and it dominates how the island gets talked about. But the west coast around Srithanu has quietly become one of the bigger yoga and wellness centers in Asia, all studios and health food cafes and sunset bars, and it has almost nothing in common with Haad Rin beyond being on the same island.

There's no airport, so every route runs through Koh Samui or the mainland and finishes with a ferry, which is a bigger logistical step than people expect for how famous the island is.

If you're coming for the party, book Haad Rin and expect inflated prices and minimum-stay requirements around the actual date. If you're coming for the other version of the island, Srithanu or the quieter Thong Nai Pan bays up northeast are what you actually want, and you can time your visit to avoid the crowds entirely.

Full guide to both sides of the island and the ferry routes in is at www.thai-travel-guide.com/destinations/koh-phangan. Ask if you're trying to time a visit around, or away from, Full Moon.

This trips up more people than it should: Samui is in the Gulf, so its dry season is roughly February to April and it stays reasonably good through the middle of the year, while the Andaman coast (Phuket, Krabi) is in full monsoon. The wet season on Samui is October to December, which is exactly when the Andaman side is at its best. If you're combining both in one trip, the order matters.

Chaweng is the main beach and the busiest, Lamai is the calmer second option with basically the same sand, Bophut's Fisherman's Village is the boutique dining strip, and Maenam up on the north coast is where you go for lower prices and a proper slow pace.

Samui has its own airport, which is convenient but genuinely more expensive than flying into Surat Thani and taking the ferry across, if budget matters more than time to you.

Full area guide and the flight versus ferry cost comparison is at thai-travel-guide.com/destinations/koh-samui. Ask if you're planning a Samui plus Phangan combination.

Planning a trip to Thailand and not sure where to start or how to fit everything in?

Drop your itinerary questions here. Whether you're figuring out how many days to spend in each place, what to skip, how to get between cities, or whether your plan is realistic, I'll do my best to help.

Include:

• How many days you have
• What you've already confirmed (flights, hotels, etc.)
• What kind of trip you're after (beaches, temples, food, nightlife, mix of everything)

No question is too basic. Ask away.

Koh Chang sits in the eastern Gulf near the Cambodian border, but climatically it runs on the same rain pattern as Phuket rather than the flipped Gulf calendar that Koh Samui uses. That means the wet season here (roughly May to October) is genuinely wet, some of the heaviest rainfall totals of any Thai coast, not the "still mostly fine" version you get on Samui in the same months.

There's no airport, so it's a flight to Trat plus a short car ferry, or a longer bus and ferry combination from Bangkok, which keeps the numbers down compared to Phuket or Samui. White Sand Beach up north has the most going on; Lonely Beach is the backpacker strip with actual nightlife; Bang Bao is a stilted fishing pier village at the south end that's worth the trip on its own.

If you're going in the dry season (November to April) it's a genuinely underrated island. If you're going in July or August, know what you're booking into.

Full breakdown of the west coast beaches and the real rain numbers is at www.thai-travel-guide.com/destinations/koh-chang. Ask if you're deciding between this and Koh Samet for an eastern seaboard trip.

This is the island between Phuket and Krabi that every cross-bay boat sails past on the way to somewhere more famous. It's a Muslim fishing and rubber-farming community with no airport, a handful of resorts, and long stretches of coast with nobody on them.

The appeal is specific: you get the same Phang Nga Bay limestone scenery as the famous James Bond Island day trips, but from the quiet side, without the tour boat crowds. It's about two hours door to door from Phuket airport, boat included, so it's not actually hard to get to, it's just not where the marketing budget goes.

Worth knowing before you book: this is a conservative island, not a party destination. Dress modestly away from your resort and don't expect much nightlife or alcohol outside the hotels.

Full guide to the three coastal areas and how the Phuket and Krabi boat routes work is at www.thai-travel-guide.com/destinations/koh-yao-yai. Ask if you're weighing it against Koh Yao Noi, its sister island just north.

There's no nightlife strip, no jet ski touts, and barely a town beyond a small old quarter on the far side of the island. What Lanta has instead is a single road running the whole west coast, with beaches that get quieter as you go south: Klong Dao near the pier village is the family default, Long Beach is the longest stretch of sand, and by the time you're at Kantiang Bay near the national park you're basically at the end of the road.

Getting there is part of the filter. It's a flight to Krabi, then a couple of hours by van including a short car ferry crossing, so it screens out the people who just want the nearest beach to an airport. That's exactly why it stays calm even in high season.

A meaningful chunk of the island's businesses close from around June to October, so if you're going in the green season, check ahead rather than assuming everything's open.

Full beach-by-beach breakdown is at www.thai-travel-guide.com/destinations/koh-lanta. Ask if you're trying to figure out how many nights actually makes sense here.

People book "Krabi" expecting a beach town and end up in Krabi Town, which is the provincial capital on a mangrove river with genuinely no sand nearby. The beaches are real, they're just called Ao Nang and Railay, not Krabi.

Ao Nang is the resort strip and the practical base: hotels, restaurants, and the longtail boats that go everywhere from there. Railay is the one people are actually picturing when they picture Krabi, and it has no road access at all, cliffs on every side, boat only, 10-15 minutes from Ao Nang. Krabi Town itself is worth a night if you're catching an early ferry, not more than that.

Same Andaman dry season as Phuket (November to April), and Railay accommodation books out well ahead of that window if you're set on staying there specifically.

I put together the full area guide plus how the longtail boat pricing actually works at www.thai-travel-guide.com/destinations/krabi. Ask if you're deciding between basing yourself in Ao Nang or actually staying on Railay itself.

Phuket is Thailand's largest island and it's connected to the mainland by a bridge, so it functions more like a small province than a single resort. That matters because the west-coast beaches are genuinely different places, not just different hotel clusters.

Patong is the loud one, and it does nightlife better than anywhere else on the island, but it's not representative of Phuket if that's not what you're after. Kata and Karon are the sweet spot for most first-timers: real beaches, a full range of hotels, close enough to Patong for a night out. Further north, Bang Tao and Surin are quieter and more upmarket. Phuket Old Town is inland, no beach, but it's the most characterful part of the island and I'd push almost anyone to spend at least one night there.

Andaman season runs opposite to what people assume: dry and calm November through April, wet May through October, so the "when to go" question matters more here than on the Gulf side.

Full stay-area map and the day trip breakdown (Phi Phi vs Phang Nga Bay) is at www.thai-travel-guide.com/destinations/phuket. Ask if you're trying to decide between Phuket and Krabi as a base.