Living in Thailand — the country, not the holiday

The honest answer has three parts, and only one of them is about Thailand being pleasant.

The first is the arbitrage. Earning in a strong currency and spending in a weaker one changes what you can afford to risk. It is not about living cheaply. It is that a longer runway lets you say no to work you should say no to.

The second is that it is easy to function here as a foreigner. That sounds obvious until you go somewhere it is not. My first trip to China taught me the difference in about three days. Thailand is set up to absorb outsiders in a way most places are not.

The third is the community, which is the one I underrated for far too long. There is an existing base of people doing roughly what I am doing. You do not have to build a social world from nothing, which is a much bigger deal than the brochures suggest.

Staying in Thailand long term is an administrative relationship, not a decision you make once. There is paperwork, there are renewals, and there are border runs.

The visa landscape here changes, and anything specific I write will be out of date faster than the rest of this site. The durable point is different. Build your life on the assumption that your right to be here has an expiry date, because it does, and the version of you that ignores that is the version that gets caught out.

In practice that means keeping your documents current, knowing your dates before immigration does, and never letting a visa position depend on one thing going right.

It is manageable. It is also the least romantic part of living abroad and the part most writing skips entirely.

Most writing about Thailand is really about two or three places. The country is much bigger than its reputation and the parts I like best are not the famous ones.

Pai is the clearest example. A few hours north of Chiang Mai on a road that is genuinely unpleasant, and worth it. I have compared other places to Pai and had them lose, including some in China.

The north is a different country to the islands, and the difference matters if you are choosing a base rather than a holiday. Cooler, slower, cheaper, and far less seasonal in who is around you.

Burn season. From roughly February to May, agricultural burning pushes air quality into genuinely hazardous territory, and March and April are the worst of it.

This is the single most important fact about living in northern Thailand and the most under-reported. It is not a nuisance to manage with a good attitude. It is chronic particulate exposure, and it requires infrastructure or absence.

I plan for it now rather than tolerating it. The practical answer is to leave for that window, which conveniently is when several neighbouring countries are at their best.