Hands up if you know where Sangkhla Buri is located!
Not very many I suspect, and the answer is very close to the Thai Myanmar border about 210 miles or 375km northwest of Bangkok, and far from any of the well known destinations in Thailand that attract the bulk of the 30+ million international tourists who visit Thailand annually.
For many reasons I am not a fan of the USA which I am happy to expand upon at another time, but I do believe it is the finest destination in the World for a Road Trip.
So just what is a road trip?
I arrived in the Swiss mountain village of Mürren on August 11 2024 after spending almost 3 months in the UK which was my longest continual period in the country since 2009!
I had spent the time in the UK with and visiting family, competing in Backgammon tournaments and exploring Wales, the West Country and London with my Filipina friend who was visiting the UK to select a university to continue her postgraduate studies.
………… he is tired of life! The immortal and perennially repeated words of Samuel Johnson.
I have always had a love-hate relationship with London – I studied there as a university student from 1967 to 1971, taking first a Bachelor’s Degree in Geography at University College London, and then a Master’s Degree in Soviet Foreign Policy at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, now also part of University College.
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Hands up all those who know where Wessex is located!
It is a fictional region in the South West of England and the term was popularised, if not created, by the famous English author Thomas Hardy who used it as the setting for all his novels. (‘Far from the Madding Crowd’, ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’, ‘Jude the Obscure’ etc).
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Of the three Celtic Nations that make up the British Isles – Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, it is by far Wales that is the least well known to overseas visitors.
Scotland with its Lochs, Mountains, Whiskey, Golf courses and one of Europe’s most beautiful cities in Edinburgh, is a major international tourist destination whilst Ulster and Ireland attract many visitors seeking to discover their family roots after a significant percentage of the Irish population emigrated to the New World to escape poverty, search for wealth and pursue a new life.
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In January 1973, I arrived in Sydney, NSW, Australia, the culmination of an 11-month journey overland through Asia with my girlfriend Heather and friend Richard. We had crossed Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan by rail and bus, and then travelled through the legendary Khyber Pass into Pakistan, and spent a month exploring Northern India and I made the first of what was to become a total of 14 visits to Nepal.
It is not a coincidence that the first article I wrote for this website 12 years ago (see here) was inspired by my first visit to the Antarctic; and between 2012 and 2017, my wife, Sharron, and myself joined five more expeditions to the polar regions including another visit to Antarctica in 2014. A planned 3-week expedition to the Russian Arctic in 2020 was twice postponed because of Covid and so in late 2021, we instead decided to cancel our Russian plans, claim a refund, and instead planned a third visit to Antarctica, in my opinion the most spectacular destination on the planet.
In December 1973 and February 1974 my then girlfriend Heather and myself spent two month’s hitchhiking around New Zealand when we took an extended break from our jobs in Sydney Australia.
It created many positive memories that remained with me for the next 50 years. It was where I made one of my first mountain hikes near Mt Cook but above all it was the friendliness of the people so proud of ‘God’s own Country’, and the incredible variety of the scenery and landscapes that remained in my mind. Continue reading
Although I am writing these words in Thailand, with an outdoor temperature of 30 degrees centigrade, I am fortunate enough to have spent most of the time from early September 2021 to February 2022 in the mountain village of Mürren in Switzerland, as described here.
Notes from a Nomad 