Today was one of those days you feel your mind wrapping with a special piece of memory and labeling it, “to be opened when I am old.” I arrived last night in Chiang Rai under the cover of darkness and left early this morning. I headed north across the Mae Kok river and into the [...]

Thailand is the only Southeast Asian country never to have been colonized by a European power. There has also been no period of self-induced national amnesia, no cultural revolution, no sweeping away of yesterday for the sake of tomorrow. Instead, Thai culture, imbued with Buddhist tolerance, has evolved in layers, each one an incremental negotiation [...]