Bex Callan

The two-week holiday was the plan. I was twenty-four, I had a return flight, and I had never dived in my life. I did an Open Water course on Koh Tao because everyone else in the hostel was doing one, and that was more or less the end of the plan. I stayed to become a divemaster, then stayed some more because there was always another island, another loop of road up north, another trailhead I had not walked yet.

Eight years later I had done most of the wild version of this country, and I had done nearly all of it the hard way, by getting it wrong first. I ran out of fuel on an empty mountain road. I dived a site I was not ready for. I handed over my passport as a bike deposit like an idiot, and I spent one very educational afternoon in a clinic in Krabi. None of that was in the guidebooks, which mostly told me which beach was prettiest.

So Adventure in Thailand is the practical version I could have used at twenty-four. Where to actually go, what each thing genuinely costs you in money, time and nerve, and above all the small unglamorous decisions that keep a good trip from becoming a bad story. I am not a tour operator and I am selling you nothing. Anan Wattana, a licensed Thai guide, fact-checks the on-the-ground detail so the local specifics are right; the mistakes recounted here are all my own.