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From stunning coast line to a generous smattering of tropical islands, Thailand has long been a behemoth contender in the exotic destinations arena. Many a backpacker has plodded their flip flop on a Thai sandy beach, revelling in the best the world can offer in cultural, lively and picturesque travel. It’s brilliant for backpackers from a budgetary angle, allowing you to find cheap holidays around a relatively large country, making the many attractions around Thailand easily accessible. But this presents a problem, with so much on offer you may find yourself a little swamped when it comes to planning your itinerary.

For the party and hedonistic scene, Ko Pha Ngan and its full moon party or Ko Samui will be pushing for your money, with Chiang Mai or Ayuthaya being contenders to satisfy your desire for experiencing a bit of culture. But if you really want to tap into the laid back, beach living lifestyle whilst still being spoilt for choice for beach front restaurants cafes and bars, Ko Tao is a fantastic option. The island manages to strike a happy medium between keeping you entertained at night without preventing you from getting a good night’s sleep, whilst also creating a relaxing and picturesque scene during the day.

A lot of this is due to Ko Tao managing to maintain a low profile in terms of development. You won’t find the travelling grumblers moaning about it being ruined in the same ilk that other locations such as Phuket in Thailand have been. This is partly thanks to its small size, you can pretty much see the entire Island’s profile in the ferry approach, and there aren’t that many roads on the island. The infrastructure is all pretty basic, and the best way to get around is often strolling along the beach front at Sairee or hiring a mountain bike.

Location
Ko Tao is in the Gulf of Thailand and is well connected to the ferry routes servicing Ko Samui and Ko Pha Ngan, two islands that feature in many travellers Thailand holidays. You can get here easily by bus, plane and train from Bangkok, and its proximity to the other two islands makes it incredibly easy to factor it into your trip.

Sitting in the shadows of Ko Pha Ngan and Ko Samui has actually worked wonders for Ko Tao, as these two islands more than satisfy the local need to party loud and late. Ko Tao therefore has resisted the urge to become just another party destination in Thailand, so if you’re looking to avoid this or nurse your resulting hangover, it’s a great place to head over to.

Claim to fame
The small island first became known as a mecca for diving enthusiasts and beginners with its shallow shores and nearby reefs. Learning to scuba dive may be out of many backpackers’ budgets, but it is worthwhile bearing in mind that this is one of the cheapest locations in the world to get your diving certificate. Because it started as a diving location, it isn’t awash with cheap food stalls or provisions for budget backpackers, but as it is now a popular location for this type of traveller you can easily find a cheap drink and place to stay.

Food and Nightlife
The lack of the nearby hustle and bustle on other islands has allowed a laid back beach front scene to develop. You will not be pushed to find a place on a sun warmed bit of decking where you can order typical delicious Thai food whilst gazing out to sea with the odd long boat spluttering about. This means that you never feel rushed in the restaurants by a demand for places, thus creating the perfect opportunity to order a long drink and chat or wile away the day and late afternoon. It’s also a great location for the sea foodie, as obviously being an island this is a particular specialty here.

As the day gives way to the night scene, there’s no apparent change in set up along the beaches apart from the appearance of fire dancers and extra cushions outside the bars on the beaches. This gives a slower more relaxed feel to the night, as it isn’t overrun by crushed buckets and swathes of dancing revellers. This does not make it entirely quiet though, the fire dancers create the excitement and there are still a few larger bars along Sairee and Mai Haad beaches offering the usual dance steps, beach area and late night tunes.

Beaches
Being so small Ko Tao keeps it simple when it comes to beaches. This size makes it perfect for hiring a long boat if you’re looking to pick out the smaller and more isolated bays which are mainly along the East coast. The West Coast is dominated by Sairee beach, which runs the majority of the length of the island. It is a beautiful crescent shape, offering views at both ends of headland jutting out. It’s also where you’ll find the majority of the islands restaurants and nightlife, as well as accommodation and dive schools. You can check out this all out in the view offered by the approaching ferry and jetty you offload onto.

The island of Ko Nang Yuan is very close to the shore and creates an interesting focal point on Ko Tao. It is a snorkelling and diving hotspot, as well as a unique beach location that can only be accessed by boat taxi from Ko Tao. If you’re looking for truly impressive photos, then this is the spot to head to!

Author Bio – Matthew has been travel blogging since the end of a RTW trip in 2011. Thailand was one of his favourites, and he has now booked his Flights to Australia to continue his travelling later this year.

When it’s cold at home, where are the best places to go to find sunny weather and rid yourself of your hat and gloves? If you’re looking for ideas for where to go on your holidays next year to ensure you get some warm weather in January, we take a look at some of the sunniest places to go during the month of January.

From Asia to Africa and all around the globe, while we are in our winter doldrums, others are sunning themselves and drinking mojitos. Here’s a look at five of the best places to go to find fantastic January weather.

When it’s cold at home, there’s somewhere you can guarantee it will be warm and that’s down under. The island continent of Australia enjoys its hot summers during December, January and February. Average high temperatures in Sydney are around 78F in January.

When it’s hot, many Australians head to the beach to cool down. The Bondi Beach area in New South Wales has long been considered one of the world’s best surfing spots. Visitors can enjoy the surf or just watch from the comfort of a sun lounger.

Mexico is a popular place for January holidays. Great places for beach holidays include the Baja California peninsula, home to the famous Cabo San Lucas resort. Average highs in January are around 76 degrees Fahrenheit.

If you want sun with a bit of culture thrown in, then Mexico offers many archaeological treats. The famous Mexican ruins of Teotihuacan, dating from over 2000 years ago, are located close to Mexico City and are considered by some to be the best ruins in Mexcio.

Although it’s their cool season, January is the ideal time to visit Thailand. The weather is warm and they get the most hours of sunshine and least rainfall during January.

If its beach life you’re after, then the party islands of Koh Samui and Koh Phangnan are popular destinations. Koh Phangnan is home to the famous Full Moon party held each month.

For a more laidback Thai holiday, then Chiang Mai on the mainland is a wonderful place to enjoy the wildlife and taste the very best of Thai cuisine. Cookery classes and elephant rides are some of the popular activities at Chiang Mai.

During January, South Africa has average high temperatures of around 79F. It’s hard to decide the best place to go in South Africa, but the Western Cape area, with its Table Mountain and great beaches, has become increasingly popular with holiday makers.

Over the New Year period, Cape Town celebrates New Year like nowhere else on earth, with a huge carnival. Other South African highlights are the many safari experiences, most famously in the Kruger National Park.

For a perfect blend of culture, good weather and great activities, then the ever popular country of Egypt has it all. Attractions such as the Pyramids of Giza, the Temple of Luxor and the Abu-Simbel Temples are all big pulls for history lovers.

Nile cruises are a fantastic way to appreciate the beauties of Egypt. With average temperatures in January around 78 degrees Fahrenheit, where better place to be than on the deck of a boat?

If you’re after cheap holidays, then Egypt is an ideal location. Beach culture in the Red Sea resorts such as Sharm el Sheik is alive and kicking during January. The Red Sea is famous as an excellent deep sea diving destination. By night, the bars and clubs of Sharm El Sheik keep going till the early hours.

When New Year has been celebrated and Christmas is a memory for another 12 months, if you live somewhere chilly, January can be a miserable time. Finding sunshine during January is a guaranteed way to lighten the winter doldrums.

With warm places a plenty in January from Asia to Africa, Australia to South America, you may end up wishing Christmas away so that you can start your holidays in the sun.

SOUTH PACIFIC 11/27/2010- 1/25/2011

This trip is my first foray into the vast South Pacific – including Australia and New Zealand – an area that covers about a third of the earth’s surface, though with populations amongst the world’s sparsest. Paradoxically this is probably the first area to be settled once modern humans finally got the hell out of Africa, as if they were all looking for the coolest beach on which to hang ten. What is now Papua New Guinea become such a choke point that to this day some eight hundred languages are spoken – almost as many as Africa! – and that’s a lot. If the world has some ten distinct races, as is commonly thought, fully half of them are to be found in the South Pacific, curled up like hidden dimensions in some string theory of cultures. Here is to be found a pattern of human development the complete antithesis of what we usually learn, one in which people take to water and set out vast distances with the goal of settling down, sort of… yeah, me too.

When this trip is over I’ll have some 139 countries under my belt, 100 of them within the last two and years. The interesting fact is that the Caribbean region was focus of my last trip, all settled down from its previous cannibalistic tribal ways, now something of a ‘kinder gentler Africa.’ I’ve never heard anyone describe the South Pacific that way, except maybe a few carefully chosen tourists. We’ll soon see now, won’t we?

WHO SAYS YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN?

Not only CAN you go home again, but you MUST. That’s part of the environmental feedback that builds and sustains human consciousness and cultures. The latest of these feedback loops was my journey ‘home’ to Mississippi two weeks ago for a little pre-holiday communion with friends and family. That was easy. Now comes the hard part, communing with the in-laws… in Thailand. Actually the reasons one HAS to go home again probably have more to do with the home than with the returning. Who even has a home to return to? We Americans are a nation the moral equivalent of army brats. Social mobility has a price, and the cult of consumption has a hollow center. If you don’t have a home, then make one. It’ll do you good. Actually it’s nice to be the one that left, while the family center remains intact; that way you get the best of both worlds. But that’s really not fair to the others now, is it? Thus was born the ‘family reunion.’

The idea for this trip started a year ago, when I claimed a frequent-flyer award with China Airlines, rather than watch the miles expire from disuse, ‘use ‘em or lose ‘em’ being the operative concept these days. One-way to Bangkok was all I could afford to claim, which at the time seemed appropriate, since I figured to be returning with my wife by now anyway. When I realized that would not be the case, the challenge was to use the trip to best benefit, since buying another one-way back would hardly be much of a savings. The best I could come up with was to do a massive round-the-region tour, seeing many- if not MOST- of the region’s countries, something that back-tracking would not facilitate, certainly not with Bangkok in the same itinerary. Truth be told the emergence of budget airline Air Asia is indispensable for this trip to work out cost-effectively, notwithstanding my intense dislike for major stockholder and Thai ex-PM Thaksin Shinawatra. I guess I can somehow deal with that philosophically.

So my in-laws pick me up at the airport and take me back to the family compound where I once lived with my wife, their daughter-mother-sister. There’s the family dog that we got as a newborn reject from the temple, along with a long-gone cat that together prompted my theory of pan-mammal cultural harmony. He seems to remember me, saying in dog language something like, “What the f—.” He’s not barking at least, something he’s usually not shy about. My keys still fit, even if my car’s battery seems a bit weak from disuse. Everything is pretty much as we left it some two-and-a half years ago, priestly offerings still in their privileged corner as if the spirits themselves were self-maintaining. It almost looks like we left in rushed anticipation of an oncoming storm. Maybe we did.

But Thailand is pretty much as I remember it, at least at first glance. There are the smiles, the multiplicity of human services, and the ungodly (!) beautiful women, all in random profusion. The best part is the (usually) gentle demeanor of the people, major exceptions being wannabe Mafia-style big-shot a**holes… and a Thai woman scorned, which has pretty much redefined the term ‘fury,’ for me at least. The first thing a Thai girl usually does when her boyfriend dumps her is chop off all her hair. That makes sense; save those pheromones for future reference. Fortunately ‘making sense’ is not one of my prerequisites for pleasure. Thailand is one of those sometimes-illogical countries- like Laos and Cambodia… or Peru and Bolivia… or Ethiopia and Madagascar… that tend to be among my favorites, but hardly the most ‘logical’ of their respective continents.

The small city of Chiang Rai is growing up in fits and starts… which is to say ‘higgledy-piggledy’… which is to say that the infrastructure will come later, if at all. A couple of relatives have passed on to the other side in my absence, with all the usual family in-fighting and back-biting of course. My stepson says they’ve closed off a street downtown for a pedestrian Saturday crafts market, in imitation of big brother Chiang Mai down the road. That’s just like they did with Chiang Mai’s famous ‘night bazaar’, now pretty much a standard feature in all Thai towns. If nothing else, it’s a great way to deal with those late-night munchies. That’s how it all started in the first place. That’s my next stop, also. My history in Thailand started there, almost two decades ago.

Upon arriving in Chiang Mai I immediately remember why I once moved to Chiang Rai way back when. Somehow Chiang Mai’s particular version of ‘Asia Lite- just for you’ doesn’t get me excited any more- if it ever really did- while Chiang Rai retains a refreshingly significant amount of what made Thailand so nice in the first place, before the foreign hordes came in and started staking their claims to a piece of its well-coiffed turf. It would be easy to get judgmental about it all, but really it’s just a numbers game. At some point the tourists and ex-pats and related service industries start taking over whole sections of the city, transforming it into something it never was before and would cease to be without constant new infusions. More startlingly they also start confusing their needs with the country’s needs and before long you’ve got a country and a culture spinning out of control. The government is wisely making efforts to control future influxes, wise even if it affects me adversely, stop the Texans in their tracks so to speak. If the sight of the country’s finest filles draped over flabby philandering foreigners doesn’t affect you, the pride with which they flaunt it will. The epiphany for me is that the things like that that once bothered me… bother me less now.

The big news so far is the politics in Thailand- or lack thereof. The infamous street battles between yellows and reds seem long ago and far away now, even if in fact less than a year. The war now is being fought mostly only in hearts and minds, though false fronts over border lines with Kampuchea probably have the silliest of ulterior motives, as though Thailand and Vietnam between them haven’t stolen enough of Kampuchea for themselves already. If it weren’t for the intervention of France long ago, we’d all be visiting the Thai ruins of Angkor Wat these days. But this is the holiday season, Loy Krathong down and New Year’s yet to come. Even this weekend is a holiday, the King’s birthday, and Christmas gets fair play, too, more than you’d expect in a non-Christian nation. They say Thais will celebrate anything… and everything. The noise from fireworks can be deafening at times.

But my goals are somewhat more sober, like repairing my computers… and myself. One computer’s ready and another is in the works, all for less than the cost of the Geek Squad’s preliminary diagnosis. More importantly I’ve finally done that long-postponed colonoscopy, and in the nick of time it seems. It ain’t pretty in there. This gives new meaning to tourism, especially for us health-care-deprived Americans. It’s worth the cost of an RT to get the medical work-over here. So enjoy the beaches, and enjoy the temples, but don’t forget the tune up the vehicle, too. Root canal anyone? So for me the trip is bittersweet, (or should I say sweet-and-sour?), visiting old friends and getting to know my in-laws… WITHOUT my wife’s presence as interface. Did I mention that my wife stayed home? And it’s all good, as it should be. The homecoming is over. Now the REAL trip begins, next stop Australia…

As of the present there is only one international flight per week (on Wednesdays) between Bangkok and Guwahati in northeast India. The flight can be used by those that book tours in Bhutan that originate from Paro, the capital of Bhutan, traverse the entire country to Eastern Bhutan, to Mongar and Trashigang on its only road, and rather than backtracking to Paro again, the tourists can continue to exit Bhutan via Samdrup Jongkhar in southeastern corner of Bhutan to Guwahati in Assam province of India. Guwahati offers also a convenient flight access to Kolkata and Delhi, as well as serves as a starting point for adding a cruise tour extension on the Brahmaputra River or visiting the Kaziranga National Park and elsewhere in Assam – Meghalaya region. The Indian government now considers introduction of new direct international flights from Guwahati to not only Thailand but also to Myanmar, Bangladesh, China and Malaysia. These connections would further improve the travel logistics in the India subcontinent, to and from China and southeast Asia.

Second significant addition to travel access to India has been recent introduction of new daily flights by Air India from Chicago via Frankfurt to New Delhi and onwards to Hyderbad or elsewhere in South Asia.