Sarah Thornton

I moved to Bangkok in January 2008 with a journalism degree and a freelance contract to write a monthly column for Travel Asia, a print magazine that covered budget travel across Southeast Asia. Before that, I spent two years reporting on backpacker trails from Hanoi to Bali, filing stories for outlets like Go World Travel, Matador Network, and a handful of inflight magazines. Bangkok was supposed to be a six-month assignment. Sixteen years later I am still here, still taking notes.

I started covering day trips from Bangkok in 2010 after a frustrating morning at Damnoen Saduak. I had sent three friends there with directions I pulled from a guidebook that was already two years out of date. The bus schedule had changed, the boat pier had moved, and they spent four hours in a songthaew going the wrong direction. That afternoon I sat down and mapped every transport option myself. The spreadsheet became a blog post. The blog post became this site.

Since then my Thailand travel writing has appeared in Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia, The Telegraph, CNN Travel, and Lonely Planet's Thailand guidebook as a contributing writer for the Bangkok and Central Plains chapters. I have been quoted as a Bangkok logistics source in The New York Times travel section and have contributed radio segments on Thai cultural sites for the BBC World Service's The Travel Show. In 2018 I was a panelist at the Thailand Travel and Tourism Summit in Bangkok, speaking on independent travel media in Southeast Asia. My photography from Thai temple sites has been licensed by Getty Images for editorial use since 2015.

Every tour, transport route, and attraction on this site gets visited in person, unannounced, and paid for at full price. I do not accept complimentary tours, hosted press trips, or discounted rates from operators. When I review a day trip, I take the same bus or train a reader would take, buy the same ticket, eat at the same roadside stalls. I time everything: how long the van takes versus what the brochure says, whether the lunch stop gives you 20 minutes or 45, if the guide skips the temple you were promised. I check bathroom cleanliness at rest stops, test whether the air conditioning works on the minibus, and note whether the driver checks his phone while navigating a curve. I revisit major destinations at least twice a year because things change fast in Thailand: a pier relocates, a temple closes for restoration, a new expressway cuts the drive time by half an hour. When I cannot personally revisit a site within the review cycle, I mark the article with a last-verified date so readers know exactly how fresh the information is.

In April 2012 I took a local bus from Bangkok's Southern Terminal to the Mae Klong railway market. The bus broke down in Samut Sakhon at 38 degrees Celsius. I sat on a plastic stool next to a woman selling grilled squid, and she told me, in a mix of Thai and hand gestures, that the railway market gets four trains a day, not six as every guidebook claimed. She was right. I updated the site that night from an internet cafe in Mahachai.

During the 2011 Bangkok floods I watched the Chao Phraya rise two metres above its banks from my apartment in Banglamphu. For six weeks every river pier in the city was underwater. When the water receded, I spent a month revisiting every riverside attraction and Chao Phraya ferry stop we cover on the site. Half the pier access points had been rebuilt in different locations. That experience changed how I think about travel guides: if you are not checking things in person, you are publishing fiction.

In November 2019 I took a group of visiting family to Ayutthaya by train. Third class, no air conditioning, windows open. A monk sat across from us and spent the entire ninety-minute journey explaining the history of Wat Mahathat in near-perfect English. He had been a university lecturer in Chiang Mai before ordaining. You do not get that on a private minibus. That is why I always recommend the train for Ayutthaya, and why every recommendation on this site comes from showing up, paying attention, and letting Thailand do the talking.

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