The Secret Map
Travel Essays by Simon Slater
Category: Thailand
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Yaowarat, Bangkok’s Chinatown, is many things all at once. It’s crumbling walls. It’s stacked neon signs. It’s colours upon colours. It’s stuffing your face past the point of being full because it’s Thai tea slushie and it’s dumplings and it’s just one more and I’m done. It’s feeling slightly guilty that the locals are hustling…
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What happens when you cross an aquarium with a butchers? You get a wet market. Arrive early to Khlong Toei Market and you’ll find hundreds of the capital’s restaurateurs and street food vendors alike rubbing shoulders, literally – buyers are as squeezed in as the fish themselves. It’s quite the adrenaline rush to walk through…
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Phitsanolok, northern Thailand. December 2024. Still plenty of fights. So read a text message from Mark, a fellow Brit I’d bumped into as I was on my second crawl under a long boat inside a temple, for luck, I’d been told. I knew of Mark before our paths had crossed as the hostel he ran…
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South Thailand, September 2022 The concept of ‘The Secret Map’, the name of this platform, is about taking the road less travelled. Arriving at Patongon, Thailand’s largest island’s provincial capital, via a night train from Bangkok, is as beaten a path as it gets. But I wasn’t just there to explore. I was on the…
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Bangkok, September 2022. Thailand is best avoided in September. At least that’s what I’ve read. Between the suffocating oven heat, the shirt-soaking humidity, and the daily blitzes of sheet rain, holidaying here in the cooler dry season makes a lot more sense. That said, flights and accommodation are cheaper, the thinning out of the tourist…
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It was nine years before the following images were taken that I first stepped off a plane and onto the Asian continent. Disorientating yet intoxicating in the first week or so on my first visit, each return to South East Asia feels like a homecoming these days. Tracing canals, boat-hopping, following train tracks or veering…
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North Thailand, early December 2015. Stumbling upon a news article the day before I arrived in Chiang Rai, I learned about The Golden Horse Temple, set on a steep limestone mountain near the Golden Triangle – the former heroin capital of the world on the borders of Burma and Laos. The legend goes that the formerly…
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Having paid a flying visit to Thailand’s second city previously, on my second visit to southeast Asia I planned to combine a dental procedure with an extended stay in Chiang Mai, where there are jaw-dropping temples and mouth-watering dishes around every corner, not to mention monks galore. I happened to arrive at the beginning of a week-long…
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“One of our major flaws, and causes of unhappiness, is that we find it hard to take note of what is always around us. We suffer because we lose sight of the value of what is before us and yearn, often unfairly, for the imagined attraction elsewhere.” – Alan De Botton It was during a…
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“You’ve not been to the real Bangkok unless you’ve been to a ping pong show.” So said a young German backpacker I found myself sitting next to in a hostel in Sukhamvit, Bangkok. We were in a city of over 8 million people, with over 14 million in the surrounding area. An international business and…
The Secret Map 