Welcome to Thailand, the country of a thousand contradictions and a unique co-existence. Discover its fantastic architecture, its cultural values and lifestyle, and most of all the beauty of its people. Exotic but also cosmopolitan. Thailand offers fantastic value for money.
Much of the early writing on Thailand gave emphasis to its unique cultural and traditional values and lifestyle, examples of its fantastic – in the real sense of the word! - architecture and the beauty of its people. It emphasized these things almost to the point of the exclusion of just about everything else.
Thailand today cannot be summarized in a word. If any word comes even close it would be be 'co-existence'. That's not just because of a population which compresses a number of different nationalities, nor a population that, if one wanted to be pedantic, has quite an incredible range of religious beliefs – albeit they are housed under the marvelously accommodating umbrella of Buddhism – but because the old exits with the new, and, for the most part, does so very happily indeed.
Most visitors see Bangkok first. And Bangkok is the immediate perception of this co-existence: shimmering temples (wat) in place in any fairytale, smog, and congestion, bewitching parks, multi-story hotels, chaotic traffic with everything from Mercedes to street barrows, open-air markets and glittering boutiques and department stores.
Possibly it is the only Asian city with such co-existence: others have either demolished the old or somehow segregated the past to a separate section that is, as it were, not on tourist display.
Old Asia Hands can still lament changes in Thailand. But the truth is that, in the main, she has made them while cherishing her own past, her own culture, her own traditions. Thailand has indeed a colorful history. And cherishing this history very strongly.
What immediate contrasts are evident in Bangkok, become more evident away from Bangkok. Great green panoramas of rice fields, monasteries secluded in mountain mists, steamy jungle that hides ancients cities, the cool foothills of the Himalayas where working elephants have easily kept mechanization at bay…
Thailand is less well-known than some of her Asian neighbors because she was never part of the British Raj or any other Raj: and, despite being at the crossroads of a turbulent area, she has not been conquered by any Western nation.
This is reflected in her people. And, while it is popular or a bevy of countries to promote their people as their greatest asset, most visitors to Thailand would nominate the Thai people as the country's major asset; and that in a country that offers intrinsically every type of attraction you can think of – except snow and ice (but I was told they working on it).
Thailand geography. In the cartographic jigsaw puzzle of South East Asia, the Kingdom of Thailand is a county about the size of France, lying between 5 and 21 degrees north of the equator.
Make no mistake: there have been a modicum of first-time visitors, especially first-time visitors to Asia or had tasted Asia in somewhere such as Singapore, who have fled to the airport as soon as possible after arriving in Bangkok.
But they have been very few; as witnessed by the fact that now Thailand is one of world tourism's great success stories – and she has become so without the huge promotional budgets available to many of her more-Westernized competitors.
Almost surely, the reasons will be quite obvious to you.
