A place to try.
There is a new restaurant in Korat called Jungle Jungle. It’s not easy to find but follow Google Map, it’s kind of opposite Home Pro on the bypass road, in a small street. The owner is Jeang and the food combines fusion, foreign and Thai style. We recommend the signature dishes.
Location: https://g.page/jungle-jungle-eat-meet?share
Thailand is a wonderful country to live in or visit, but staying healthy requires some awareness and preparation — especially for newcomers. The good news is that Thailand has excellent healthcare infrastructure, particularly in Bangkok and major cities. With a few sensible precautions, most expatriates live healthy, active lives here for years.
Thai street food is generally safe and absolutely delicious — but some common-sense rules will keep you healthy:
Before arriving in Thailand, consult a travel doctor about the following vaccinations and preventive measures:
Malaria risk in Thailand is primarily in forested border regions with Myanmar, Cambodia, and Malaysia. Most cities, tourist areas, and Korat/Isaan are considered low or no risk. If you are trekking in remote border areas, take prophylaxis medication and use DEET-based insect repellent. For more information on trekking in Southeast Asia, see our article on trekking in Nepal as a comparative experience.
Dengue is endemic throughout Thailand and is the most common tropical infection affecting expats. Unlike malaria, there is no widely available prophylaxis — prevention is entirely through avoiding mosquito bites. Use repellent, wear long sleeves at dawn and dusk, and ensure accommodation has window screens. Symptoms include sudden high fever, severe headache, joint pain, and a skin rash. See a doctor immediately if suspected.
Thailand is hot year-round. Heat exhaustion and sunstroke are real risks, particularly for new arrivals. Stay hydrated, avoid strenuous outdoor activity during peak midday heat, use sunscreen (SPF 50+), and wear a hat. Acclimatise gradually — especially if you arrive during hot season (March–May).
Thailand has a network of government hospitals (โรงพยาบาลรัฐ) that are affordable but often crowded. Quality ranges widely. Emergency care at major government hospitals (such as Maharat Nakhon Ratchasima Hospital in Korat) is generally good.
For expats and those with health insurance, private hospitals in Thailand offer excellent care at a fraction of the cost of private healthcare in Western countries. Major private hospital groups include Bangkok Hospital, Bumrungrad International, Samitivej, and local provincial private hospitals. In Korat, Bangkok Hospital Korat is highly regarded.
Comprehensive health insurance is strongly recommended for all expats in Thailand. Consider:
Expatriate life, while rewarding, can also bring challenges: cultural isolation, language barriers, and the disruption of moving country. Take care of your mental health by:
External resources: Thai Ministry of Public Health | WHO Thailand
Myanmar (Burma) – Neighboring Cultural Destination. Myanmar borders Thailand to the west and northwest. Notable attractions include Bagan (ancient temples), Inle Lake, Yangon, and Mandalay. Popular spot for locals and expatriates in the region.
Have questions about living or working in Thailand? Contact Sebastien Brousseau – French-speaking lawyer based in Korat (Nakhon Ratchasima).
Few places in the world combine natural beauty with accessibility quite like Koh Phi Phi. These twin islands — Phi Phi Don and the uninhabited Phi Phi Le — sit in the Andaman Sea between Phuket and Krabi, surrounded by limestone cliffs plunging into crystal-clear turquoise water. It is easy to see why they became famous worldwide.
Phi Phi Don is the larger and only inhabited island of the pair. Its unique geography — two mountain masses connected by a narrow, flat isthmus — means the village, beaches, and most accommodation are concentrated in a small area. This concentration gives Phi Phi Don an energetic, vibrant atmosphere that contrasts sharply with the surrounding natural beauty.
Main areas:
Phi Phi Le is a protected area with no permanent residents. It is famous for Maya Bay — the beach made iconic by the film “The Beach” (2000). After years of environmental damage from mass tourism, Maya Bay was closed to visitors for several years for ecological restoration and has reopened with strict visitor limits. The bay’s waters are again recovering their clarity and marine life.
Day trips to Phi Phi Le include snorkeling in the clear waters, exploring the Viking Cave (famous for swiftlet nests), and taking in the dramatic limestone scenery.
There is no airport on Koh Phi Phi. All access is by ferry:
Book ferries in advance during high season (November-April) as boats fill up quickly. All boats arrive at the main pier in Tonsai Village.
Visiting Koh Phi Phi from central Thailand? If you are based in Korat (Nakhon Ratchasima) or the Isaan region, the most practical route is to fly from Korat (or Khon Kaen) to Krabi or Phuket, then take the ferry. Driving from Korat to Krabi takes approximately 10-12 hours.
For more on Isaan and central Thailand: Isaan: Northeast Thailand.
Koh Phi Phi deserves its reputation. Despite the crowds in high season, the natural beauty remains extraordinary — and the more remote beaches and dive sites still offer genuine tranquility. Visit responsibly, support the local restoration efforts, and take the time to explore beyond the main beach. These islands will stay with you long after you leave.
George Town, Penang — a UNESCO city of shophouses, clan houses, street art, and the best food in Malaysia by a mile. After two visits in the same year, here is what makes Penang the multicultural Asian heritage town most travellers skip.
Originally shared on Facebook · May 2019 · George Town, Penang — first of two visits that year
Penang is one of those places I keep returning to without quite planning to. I went in May 2019. I went again in June. Both times I told myself I would only stay a few days. Both times I stayed longer. George Town is a small UNESCO city that does not work very hard to impress you, which is exactly why it does.
If you have done the major Southeast Asian cities — Bangkok, Singapore, Saigon, KL — and you are looking for somewhere slower, older, and visibly multicultural, Penang is the answer.
George Town’s UNESCO World Heritage status (granted in 2008, jointly with Melaka) is not really about a single monument. It is about the whole city. Shophouses, clan houses, Chinese temples, mosques, Hindu temples, colonial-era civic buildings, and a street grid that has barely changed since the 19th century. Penang sat at the crossroads of the Straits of Malacca trade routes for two centuries. Chinese, Indian, Malay, and European communities all left their architecture on top of each other.
Walk a single street — Armenian Street, for example — and you will pass a Chinese clan association, a 100-year-old shophouse turned into a coffee shop, a small Indian restaurant, a Hokkien temple, and one of the famous street murals. None of it is a museum piece. People still live here.
George Town’s street art started as a 2012 commission by Lithuanian artist Ernest Zacharevic to celebrate the city’s heritage. It snowballed. Today the murals — and the wrought-iron caricatures by Sculpture at Work scattered through the old town — are part of the city’s identity. The most famous ones (the kids on a bicycle, the boy on the chair) are everywhere on Instagram. The good news is the second-tier murals, away from the main lanes, are often more interesting and you can photograph them without queueing.
I usually walk Penang street art slowly. Two or three murals an hour. Coffee in between. That is the right pace. Trying to “see them all” misses the point of the city.
If you have one priority in Penang, make it food.
Char kuey teow (flat noodles, prawns, blood cockles, Chinese sausage, chives, wok-fired in pork lard) is a dish people argue about. Penang’s version, made on the street by people who have been doing it for thirty years, is the version. Assam laksa — sour fish noodle soup with mint, ginger flower, and tamarind — is unique to Penang and is one of the great noodle soups in Asia. Hokkien mee, curry mee, lor bak, oyster omelette, cendol, ais kacang. Every one of these is at hawker centres for under 10 ringgit.
The Indian Muslim food is its own category. Nasi kandar — rice with a selection of curries — is a Penang invention. The original places (Line Clear, Hameediyah) are open until 3 a.m. and have been serving the same plates for decades. Roti canai for breakfast. Murtabak for dinner. Teh tarik any time.
The Indian South Indian food, around Little India, is some of the best banana leaf rice you will eat outside of Tamil Nadu.
This is a food city. Three meals a day, four if you can manage it, and you will still leave with a list of things you did not get to.
The Khoo Kongsi (Khoo clan house) is the photograph everyone takes. It deserves it. Built in 1906, restored in the 1990s, it is one of the most ornate Chinese clan temples in Southeast Asia. The Cheah, Yeoh, Lim, and Tan clan houses are all worth a visit. Each one is a slightly different version of the same idea — a wealthy Chinese family that built a clan compound around a temple to anchor a community.
The clan jetties (Chew Jetty, Lim Jetty, Tan Jetty) on the waterfront are the residential version. Wooden walkways out into the water with houses still inhabited by descendants of the families who built them. They are touristic now but they are also still real. People live there.
You can spend a whole trip inside George Town and not be wrong, but a few half-day excursions are worth it.
Penang Hill, accessed by funicular, gives you a cool view of the island and George Town from 800 metres up. Go in the morning before the haze.
Kek Lok Si is the largest Buddhist temple in Malaysia. The complex is built into a hillside, with pagodas, statues, and a 30-metre bronze Kuan Yin at the top. It is large, slightly chaotic, and at Chinese New Year it lights up in a way that has to be seen.
The beaches at Batu Ferringhi, on the north coast of the island, are fine. They are not Phuket. They are not the Perhentians. They are 30 minutes from George Town and they exist.
Penang has a quality that places like Singapore traded away decades ago — it has not been polished into a single, marketable surface. The shophouses still have peeling paint. The hawker centres still have plastic stools. The clan houses are not behind glass. The food is the food, not “Asian fusion.” The history is layered without being curated for visitors.
It is also genuinely multicultural in the everyday sense. Friday calls to prayer drift across streets where people are buying char kuey teow. Indian Hindu festivals close roads that lead to Chinese temples. Malay families sit at hawker centres next to Hokkien grandfathers. Nobody is performing it for the tourist economy. It is just how the city works.
That, more than the food and the architecture, is why I keep returning.
If you are travelling Asia and looking for a slower, older, more multicultural counterpoint to the big-city itinerary, Penang earns the detour. I have been back twice in one year and I would go again tomorrow.
Sebastien H. Brousseau is a Canadian lawyer, permanent resident of Thailand since 2014, and founder of ThaiLawOnline.com. He has lived in Thailand continuously since 2006 and writes about travel, culture, and life in Southeast Asia.
My first introduction to Japan was not Tokyo or Kyoto — it was five days in Okinawa in December 2018 with Natha. Subtropical island weather, Shuri Castle, Churaumi Aquarium, goya champuru, awamori, and the half-not-Japan culture of the old Ryukyu Kingdom.
Okinawa was my first real introduction to Japan. Most people start with Tokyo and Kyoto. I started with the subtropical southern islands, in December, with Natha. It was the right way around. Mainland Japan came a few months later , Tokyo, Taiwan, the world tour for my 50th birthday, but Okinawa is the trip I think about more often.
If you have already done Japan and you want a different version of it, this is the one.
The Ryukyu Kingdom was independent from Japan until the late 19th century. The islands have their own dialect, their own architecture, their own music, their own martial art (karate started here), their own food traditions, and their own slower pace. Today they are politically and administratively Japan, but the cultural atmosphere is distinct.
You notice this within a day. The pace on the streets of Naha is closer to a Southeast Asian island than to Tokyo. The temples and shrines have a different look — red tile roofs, more colour, more Chinese influence. The food is heavier on pork, on bitter melon (goya), on ingredients you do not find on the menu in Osaka.
This is the appeal. If you have done Japan and you want to step half-out of it, Okinawa lets you do that without leaving the country.
December in Okinawa is one of the best-kept secrets in regional travel. Mainland Japan is cold. Bangkok is dry but starting to warm up. Okinawa, in December, sits in the high teens to low twenties Celsius — sweater weather in the morning, t-shirt weather in the afternoon, sunny most days. The summer heat is gone, the typhoon season is over, and the tourist crowds are mostly Japanese on short domestic trips.
Five days, December 8–13, was an ideal length. We had time for the city, the cultural sites, and a few of the islands without rushing.
Naha is the Okinawan capital. It is small by mainland Japan standards but it is the cultural and political heart of the islands. Kokusai Street is the main shopping spine — touristic, crowded, fine for a couple of hours. The First Public Market, a few blocks south, is more interesting: wet market downstairs, food court upstairs, where you can buy raw seafood from the stalls and have it cooked for you on the second floor.
Shuri Castle was the residence of the Ryukyu kings for 450 years. It was destroyed in World War II, restored in the 1990s, and tragically burned down again in 2019. We visited the year before that fire. The reconstruction is now ongoing again. If you go now, you see the castle in the middle of being rebuilt. The site itself is still extraordinary — the walls, the gates, the views over the city — and the small museum at the base does a good job of explaining the kingdom that once ruled here.
The Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium, on the northern part of the main island, is the kind of attraction I would normally skip. I am glad we did not. The main tank — one of the largest in the world — holds whale sharks and manta rays in a volume of water that makes you stop talking when you walk into the room. The aquarium overall is well-designed and the day trip up the coast to reach it is worth the drive on its own.
Allow a half day for the aquarium. Combine it with the surrounding Ocean Expo Park if you have time.
Okinawan food is its own cuisine. The defining dish is goya champuru — bitter melon stir-fried with pork, tofu, and egg. Goya is genuinely bitter. People who say “it is not actually that bitter” are lying. It is bitter. It is also good in a way that becomes addictive after the first few bites. After 21 years in Thailand, I have a high tolerance for bitter melon (mara) — Okinawan goya is the same thing, prepared with a Japanese sensibility.
The other Okinawan staples worth ordering: rafute (slow-braised pork belly), Okinawa soba (thicker noodles, distinct from mainland Japanese soba), umi-budo (sea grapes — a kind of seaweed that pops like caviar), and any of the pork dishes which the Okinawans have built a cuisine around.
Awamori is the local distilled spirit, made from indica rice, aged in clay pots, served on the rocks or with water. Stronger than sake. Smoother than shochu. The good aged ones are excellent. We bought a bottle to bring back.
The southern parts of the main island, around Naha, are developed. The further north you go, the quieter it gets. Onna village, the Cape Manzamo cliffs, the Kouri Bridge across to a smaller island, the long northern coastline — there is a slow-driving, beach-hopping version of Okinawa that you can do on a self-drive day.
The water is clear. The reefs are still there. December is too cool for serious swimming for most people but the beaches themselves are at their best — empty, calm, photographable.
Okinawa was a quiet trip. Five days, a relatively new partner, a country I had never been to, a culture I had not researched in advance. The combination of those things — a calm relationship in a place where neither of us had any baggage — is the version of travel I keep trying to repeat.
It was also the year that ended a difficult chapter for me personally. The previous decade had been domestic Thailand, marriage, work, and the slow accumulation of a life. 2018 was a reset. Okinawa was a soft, generous, not-quite-Japan way to close the year. I came back to Bangkok with a clearer head than I had had in a long time. That is not what most people associate with Japanese travel — Japan is normally a place you visit for the sharp aesthetics, the precise food, the temples. Okinawa was none of that. It was warm, slow, and quietly different.
Of all the trips I took during the late 2010s, Okinawa is the one I would repeat first. December is the right month. The Ryukyu version of Japan is the right version to start with. And five days, with somebody you like, in a place where you do not need to perform, is one of the best forms travel still takes.
In the everyday life of Isaan people, in addition to garnments, there are many things made of silk or cotton textiles which used for many functions such as mattrasses, pillows, blankets, ceremonials flags (tung) and Buddhist canvas paintaings (Prabot paintings).
Textiles play an important role in the society. For instance, when a child is bord a pa-oom is used as a blanket or mattrass in the craddle. In some families, Phakkhao ma (mans loincloth) is used as a baby cadle instead of a local bamboo basketry cadle bu tying in between two poles.
Generally in Roi-Et, men wear pants with a wide waist but tied up with a cord or long cloth while working or staying at home. When going out for making merit or joining a ceremony, they wear silk sarongs and shirts with short sleeves and place a sabai (sash) over the shoulder. Women wear cotton, madame long tube skirts in blue with design. However, if they go out they wear silk mudmee (Ikat) and blouse with a sabai or sash wrapped around the body as a shoulder.
When a man is ordained into the monkhood, he is drssed in a special costume. Hw wears long tube lower garnment with strapping in front of the waist, a long sleeve shirt and wearing a special pointed cloth hat or cover his head with a phamon square piece of cloth which is decorated with khid technique for protecting him from the sunlight and for beauty.
In a wedding ceremony, it is a big job for the woman who will be the bride. She has to prepare many things which will be the souvenirs for the bridegroom parents and relatives who come on the wedding day. She has to weave Pja sin for the bridegroom’s mother, sarong and sabai or pha khao ma for bridegroom’s father, amke khid mattress and pillows for herselfs and relatives.
When a man dies, the family has to arrange a cremation ceremony. Many pieces of cloth are used to cover the corpses and the coffin. Some pierce are offered to the monks as making merit for the dead.
All these indicates the textile weaving has an important role in a woman’s life in the past and even in the present day.
Few historical sites in Southeast Asia carry the weight of memory that Kanchanaburi does. The Bridge on the River Kwai — made famous worldwide by David Lean’s 1957 film — is the central symbol of a chapter of World War II history that unfolded in the jungles of western Thailand: the construction of the Death Railway by Allied prisoners of war and Asian forced laborers under Japanese Imperial Army command.
Visiting Kanchanaburi is not just a tourist experience — it is an encounter with one of the 20th century’s darkest episodes, and a place of genuine reflection and remembrance.
Following the fall of Singapore in February 1942, Japan found itself controlling hundreds of thousands of Allied prisoners of war. Japan needed a railway connecting Bangkok to Rangoon (Yangon) to supply its military operations in Burma — a route that required building through some of the most difficult jungle terrain in Asia.
The construction of the 415-km Thailand-Burma Railway between 1942 and 1943 used approximately 250,000 Asian romusha (forced laborers) and around 61,000 Allied POWs. Working in brutal conditions — intense heat, monsoon rains, insufficient food and medicine — an estimated 90,000-100,000 Asian laborers died, along with approximately 12,000-16,000 Allied prisoners.
The railway’s darkest section was the “Hellfire Pass” cutting (Konyu Cutting), where POWs worked by torchlight through the night, giving the pass its name.
The actual bridge in Kanchanaburi spans the Khwae Yai River (the “River Kwai” of the film, though the film’s plot is largely fictional). The current bridge is a post-war reconstruction — the original was bombed by Allied aircraft in 1945. The round spans on the bridge are original; the square spans are post-war replacements.
Trains still run across the bridge on the original Death Railway route — one of the more sobering train rides you can take, knowing the history of the tracks you travel.
Kanchanaburi offers a day or two of deeply meaningful sightseeing:
From Bangkok: 2.5-3 hours by bus from the Southern Bus Terminal, or about 3 hours by train from Thonburi station. Day trips from Bangkok are possible but a night in Kanchanaburi gives you more time to appreciate the sites.
From Korat (Isaan): Approximately 4-5 hours drive via the central plains. A worthwhile detour when travelling between Isaan and Bangkok.
David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) won seven Academy Awards and made the bridge internationally famous. However, the film is largely fictional — the fictional British colonel (Colonel Nicholson) who collaborates with the Japanese to build a perfect bridge would have been seen as a traitor in reality. The actual British POW commanders resisted Japanese orders and sabotaged the railway where possible. Visit the museums with the film in mind but don’t mistake it for history.
Kanchanaburi is one of those rare places where history is not just displayed but genuinely felt. The cemeteries, the bridge, the museum testimonies — they create an encounter with the past that is both sobering and important. It is well worth the journey from Bangkok or as a stop on the way between central and northern Thailand.