Traveling around Thailand in a car was a spectacular experience that I will never have anywhere else.

Thailand is a very long country, and the symbol of Thailand, the elephant, came from its elephant-looking shape of the country. My parents live in southern Thailand in a city called Hatyai, Songkhla, which is only an hour and a half away from the border of Malaysia. It’s located at the tip of the elephant’s nose if that helps to picture it in mind. Where my sister and I live though, is up in the north in a city called Chiang Mai, about 1600 km away from home, and it’s located on the left side of the elephant’s ear. I have lived in the capital city of Thailand, Bangkok, which is located in the Central part of Thailand, for around two years, lived in Hatyai for a year and a half, and it’s my fifth year living in Chiang Mai. Because of this, I had some good basic knowledge about Thailand’s different culture, weather, and food according to the regions before we went on a car trip.

Down south was very humid and hot. Beautiful beaches that lay along the side of the elephant’s nose attracted hundreds of tourists each year and my family was one of them. We were amazed at the view of glittering clear blue water on our way up to Bangkok. It would rain once in a while but hearing the sound of rain in a car felt relaxing. We had seafood for our meals surrounded by loud Thai people. I don’t know if it was because of the humid and hot weather or not, but people in the south seemed so much louder than the people in the north.

The air looked and felt different as we drove nearer to the central part of Thailand. Bangkok, famous for shopping, nightlife, spas and traffic, looked a lot different from the south. It felt like my second home since Bangkok was where we first settled in Thailand. We started to see more shopping centers and tall buildings blocked the view of the mountains far away. My sister and I got excited for shopping, but we could only go to one shopping mall because we didn’t know the route to other places and we didn’t want to get delayed for being lost.

By the time we were moving onto the northern part of Thailand, we were all exhausted. We had been on a car for about eighteen hours. The trees and mountains though, helped refresh our minds so we opened the windows to let cool fresh air circulate. The air felt very different from the south and the central. The view changed from beaches, buildings to mountains and rice fields. We stopped by this small restaurant and took a break there and everyone just seemed really quiet. Our parents really liked the quietness and the peacefulness that we could never get in the south. We had a good friend of ours living in Chiang Mai so they took us around to some of the tourist attractions. We went to the Night Bazaar, a long, big street market where everything is sold for a cheap price, Sunday Market, also a street market but it’s where most of the Thai people go to, Doi Intanon, the highest mountain in Thailand, and Elephant Camp, where we could ride on the elephants, then bamboo rafting, then ride on an ox cart back to the starting point. Even if I already knew well about Thailand, this was another cool experience that I would do again, maybe for a train trip the next time.