Expat Travel Mom

Thailand was never actually on our bucket list. We'd figured we'd land in Europe before we'd land here. Honestly, we'd never been that far East, so knew. nothing about it. But an amazing flight deal from Etihad changed our minds, and within a month we were booked for fourteen days, a family of five headed to our kids' sixth country together. We split the trip in two: Bangkok first, then out to Phuket for a stretch of beach time, then back through Bangkok once more before flying home to the UAE.

Arriving in Bangkok

Bangkok has two airports on opposite ends of the city. Don Muang handles the smaller, local and chartered flights; Suvarnabhumi International, where we landed, handles everything else. It's enormous and genuinely nice, high-end shopping, plenty of eateries, a good place to kill time even on a layover. Once you've collected your bags, skip the pricey limousine services and private drivers. A metered taxi from the level 1 stand got us most of the way across the city for 200 THB total, including surcharges, about $6.41 USD. Plenty of taxis around the city will refuse to run the meter, just wave the next one down, or promise a tip, since that's usually all they're after. At the airport itself, taking one from the official stand is always safe.

We stayed in two different Airbnbs across the trip, one on arrival, one for our final two nights, to get a feel for different parts of the city. Our first place was in walking distance to Siam Paragon, Pratunam Market, and Lumphini Park, with a 7-Eleven never more than a block away, as always in this city. Our second stay was near the famous Chatuchak Market, Dusit Park and Zoo, and the MRT, with coffee shops and a Big C grocery store nearby. Both gave us our own kitchen and space, which felt like a genuine relief after a long day of sightseeing.

Getting around, we tried it all: tuk-tuks (fun once, but you'll pay more than you need to), metered taxis (often cheaper than the trains for a family of five, though rush hour could mean 45 minutes to an hour crawling across town), and the BTS and MRT, genuinely clean, modern trains, the Phahon Yathin stop in particular impressed us with its shopping and food court.

The Grand Palace and the Reclining Buddha

For 150 years, the Grand Palace complex was home to the king and the entire government, war ministry, state departments, the mint, all of it. Its most famous resident today is the Emerald Buddha, carved from a single piece of jade and considered the most sacred religious object in Thailand. The grounds alone are worth hours of wandering and photographs. Admission runs 400 THB and includes entry to Vimanmek Mansion; the Palace is open daily 8:30 to 3:30, and you'll need to dress properly, long pants and sleeved shirts for men, no bare shoulders or sheer clothing for women, socks if you're wearing sandals. Sarongs are available to rent if you show up underdressed.

From the Grand Palace, it's an easy walk around the perimeter wall to Wat Pho, home to more than a thousand Buddha images and one of the largest single Buddha statues in the country, the Reclining Buddha. I'd been waiting to see this one, and it did not disappoint. Standing next to it, the sheer scale is breathtaking. The kids loved all the gold.

Chatuchak Weekend Market

One of the craziest, busiest, most genuinely fun shopping experiences I've ever had, fair warning that with little kids, this turns into a very hot, very long day fast. Chatuchak almost entirely outdoors, vendor stacked on vendor, spanning 70 acres, with an estimated 200,000 people passing through on a given weekend day. We split our visit into two half-days, one for window shopping early in the trip, one for actual buying near the end. You'll find literally everything here: furniture, souvenirs, live animals, crafts, ceramics, silk, all at a fraction of what you'd pay elsewhere. We bought a set of eight hand fans for 25 THB each; the same fans were 120 THB apiece at MBK Mall. A vendor even told us you could ship a full one-meter box from Bangkok to Dubai for 2,000 THB flat, regardless of weight, in about a month. Bring small change, almost every restroom in Bangkok charges a small fee. If the heat gets to be too much, JJ Mall at the market's edge has indoor shopping, a few restaurants, and a top-floor local food court where dishes run about $1 to $2 each.

Siam Paragon and MBK

Siam Paragon is less a mall and more a full day out. Ocean World, the largest aquarium in Southeast Asia, takes up the entire basement. The ground floor's Gourmet Paradise covers every cuisine imaginable, I got happily lost in the gourmet market hunting down a few American items we couldn't find back in the UAE. Higher floors split into categories, high-end retail, IT, even a floor dedicated to kids' edutainment. We caught a movie in their theater on the fifth floor.

Next door, MBK Shopping Center is eight floors and 2,000 shops deep, a favorite with locals and tourists alike. Beyond the food courts and play areas, the prices on familiar brands were startling, a Canon lens my husband had been eyeing was $1,000 cheaper here than anywhere else he'd looked, in an actual authorized Canon store. We spent six hours at MBK alone, and somehow the kids found it just as exciting as we did.

On to Phuket: Surin Beach

From Bangkok we flew to Phuket for eight days, starting in Surin Beach. It was everything we'd hoped for: tailored clothes made to order, public buses that worked just fine for getting around, family massages, and genuinely great food everywhere we turned. We even ended up talking with the owners of a small, sustainably run resort nearby, one that employs 100 locals year-round and keeps its own kitchen staffed entirely by locals too, exactly the kind of place we try to seek out when we travel.

The Hilton, Karon

We moved down the coast to the Hilton Phuket Arcadia Resort in Karon for the second half of our island stay. Here, we just relaxed and enjoyed things like the kids club, the amazing pool and slides, the wandering peacocks, and the town within walking distance.

Back to Bangkok, Then Home

Our last full day was spent attacking MBK one more time, testing exactly how long three kids could last in a mall (six hours, as it turns out). We flew home to the UAE the next morning on Etihad, tired, sunburned, and already talking about coming back. Thailand, it turns out, was fantastic with kids, bucket list or not.

A bit more on the Reclining Buddha at Wat Pho: it measures 46 meters (about 151 feet) long and 15 meters tall, built in its current form under King Rama III in the mid-1800s. Wat Pho is also considered the birthplace of traditional Thai massage, and the statue's mother-of-pearl feet are divided into 108 sections, each depicting a symbol tied to the Buddha's auspicious characteristics, the same number represented by the 108 bronze bowls visitors drop coins into along the surrounding corridor for good fortune.