Bangkok, the river, and four nights in the north

Arrive Bangkok

Met at Suvarnabhumi and driven in. The road takes 45 minutes at night and can take ninety in the Friday evening build-up, which is the honest range rather than the brochure number. Nothing is scheduled today.

If you land with an evening in hand, the walk worth taking is the riverfront between the Oriental pier and Talat Noi: godowns, a Chinese shrine, and the last few boatyards still working the bank.

Bangkok from the water

The Grand Palace and Wat Pho at opening, in that order, because the palace fills first and empties last. Wat Pho holds the 46-metre reclining Buddha and the country's oldest school of massage, and a half-hour on one of its tables is the correct use of the hour after lunch.

The afternoon is spent on the river and the canals behind it: a long-tail up Khlong Bangkok Yai, past houses on stilts that the city has not yet bought, and back on the public express boat, which costs a few baht and is how the city commutes.

Dinner in Chinatown along Yaowarat, where the good stalls set up after dark and the queue tells you which they are.

Ayutthaya by train, then west to the river

Out to the station for the morning train north. Bangkok to Ayutthaya is about an hour, the fastest express does it in 48 minutes, and there are 27 departures a day between 04:15 and 23:05, so the timing bends to your breakfast rather than the other way round.

Ayutthaya was the Siamese capital for 417 years and was destroyed in 1767. What stands is brick without its plaster, which is why the ruins photograph the way they do. Three sites is the right number in a morning; a car and guide meet the train and carry you between them.

After lunch, two and a half hours west to Kanchanaburi, arriving with enough of the afternoon left to sit by the river and do nothing.

Erawan, and the railway the prisoners built

Erawan falls first, at opening, because by eleven the pools have Bangkok families in them. Seven tiers of limestone terraces; most people stop at the second, the fourth is where the water is best, and the climb to the seventh takes about an hour and a half of scrambling that nobody is obliged to do.

The afternoon is the reason for these two nights. The Death Railway ran 415 km from Ban Pong to Thanbyuzayat in Burma and cost the lives of Allied prisoners of war and a far larger number of conscripted Asian labourers. You ride the surviving stretch over the Tham Krasae trestle, walk the cutting at Hellfire Pass with the museum audio guide, and finish at the war cemetery in town, where the rows are legible and the ages on them are not.

To Chiang Mai

A slow morning by the river, then the road back east to the airport, about three hours, and the flight north. We put you on an afternoon departure with a wide margin: Bangkok's two airports had a sustained run of delays in August 2026, more than 2,300 across sixteen Asian hubs in the same episode, and the scheduling strain behind it has not been fixed by a date on a calendar.

Chiang Mai by early evening. The old city is a square kilometre and a half inside a moat, and the hotel is inside it, so the first evening is a walk rather than a taxi.

Chiang Mai: the old city and the mountain

A morning on foot inside the moat with a guide who can read the difference between Lanna and Bangkok temple architecture, which is the difference between this city and the one you have just left. Wat Chedi Luang lost the top of its stupa to an earthquake in 1545 and has never had it back.

Doi Suthep in the late afternoon, 15 km and about 40 minutes up the mountain, with 306 steps at the end of it or a funicular for those who would rather not. Go at four and the city below you comes out of its haze as the light drops.

A day with elephants, on their terms

An hour and a half north-west into the hills to a sanctuary that neither rides, bathes nor performs its elephants. You will spend the day at a distance with a keeper explaining what you are looking at: which animals came from logging camps, which from riding operations, what a foot injury from forty years in chains looks like, and why the place refuses the bathing photograph that its competitors sell.

It is a slower and less photogenic day than the one down the road, and it is the only kind we will book. If what you wanted was the picture on the elephant's back, say so now and we will part on good terms.

Above Chiang Mai, or in it

The default is the hills east of the city: the road up to Mae Kampong, a village at about 1,300 metres that grew tea and coffee before it took in guests, and a walk between the houses and the water wheels with someone who lives there. Lunch is at a farm on the way down.

The alternative, for anyone who would rather stand still, is a day inside the city: the Sunday walking street if the day falls right, a morning cooking class that starts in a market rather than a kitchen, and the silversmiths on Wualai. We book whichever you choose after you land, not before.

Back to Bangkok

A late-morning flight south, roughly an hour and a quarter, and lunch in the city. The afternoon is for whatever the first two days did not reach: the Jim Thompson house, which is six teak buildings brought in from up-country and assembled in 1959; the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, if the exhibition is right; or nothing at all, which after eight days is a defensible choice.

Dinner is booked wherever you tell us at the start of the week, and the hotel is chosen for the airport road rather than the view.

Depart Bangkok

Breakfast and the transfer, timed against your flight rather than a standard check-out. Suvarnabhumi wants three hours for a long-haul departure and the road there wants an hour of margin on top in the afternoon.