Product Description

Around Lan-Na is a narrative and cultural guide describing an arc around Thailand's north-western and north-eastern borders with Burma and Laos. Ten years in the making, the book masterfully presents the same blend of adventure travel, anecdote, personally researched route detail, and cultural-historical information that the author deployed in his acclaimed Three Pagodas: A Journey down the Thai-Burmese Border. Aimed at travellers graduating from the conventional guidebooks, Around Lan-Na maps out an exciting off-the-beaten-track border journey by public transport, by motorcycle and on foot from Chiang Mai to Nan, taking in the KMT Chinese outposts of Nong Ook and Mae Salong, the recently vacated opium warlord territories of Hin Taek and Doi Larng, Mae Sai and the "Golden Triangle", the ancient Mekong riverfront towns of Chiang Saen and Chiang Khong, the Tai Lue weaving village of Huai Khon, and a swathe of remote mountainous jungle extending down the Lao border as far as Bo Bia.

As the itinerary unfolds, the book also provides information about treks in unfrequented areas that travellers can make themselves: climbing poppy-covered Doi Chiang Dao (Thailand's third-highest mountain), in Nan province's celebrated Doi Pu Kha National Park, and east of Nan town in the jungles of the Lao frontier. It contains practical tips on how to get by in difficult situations in isolated places. The second half of the book represents the first thoroughgoing exploration of the kingdom's least-known province and best-kept secret: Nan.

In this guide, the culturally-minded reader can learn about the exquisite weaving of the Tai Lue people, Nan's rare temple murals, and the historic salt wells of Bo Glua. The armchair traveller can join a trailblazing jungle trek through the "Empty Quarter" guided by ex-communist guerrillas. And the student of northern Thailand can read about the history of Lan-Na, of Chiang Mai, of Chiang Saen, of the KMT and of the communist CPT insurgency. There are separate exemplary accounts of several minority peoples, including the KMT, Wa, Akha, Hmong, Yao, Khmu, Tai Lue, Palaung, the entropic Lua (Htin) and the vanishing "Stone Age" Mrabri ("Spirits of the Yellow Leaves"). Four hundred pages of text are complemented by 36 pages of arresting photographs and 32 maps, all personally researched by the author. Together with Three Pagodas, Around Lan-Na provides the independent traveller with the most comprehensive account available of Thailand's entire northern border region from the Three Pagodas Pass to Nan.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #730839 in Books
• Published on: 1999-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 470 pages

Thailand Handbuch
Highly impressive. Meticulously researched guide interwoven with gripping anecdotes and cultural-historical accounts. Invaluable for independent Thailand travellers

From the Publisher
Around Lan-Na is an important narrative and cultural guide to northern Thailand (also known as Lan-Na), an area visited every year by millions of tourists, travellers and trekkers. On the basis of a tour around the "roof" of the kingdom, the guide provides accounts of key towns and villages, of the history and culture of the region, of the minority hill-tribe peoples living in it, and of do-it-yourself treks that readers can make by motorcycle and on foot in the local mountains and jungles.

Having travelled in and researched the culture of the region every winter for the last 13 years, the author, Dr Goodden, is a leading authority on Lan-Na. This unique guide by him forms a companion volume to his acclaimed adventure travelogue Three Pagodas: A Journey down the Thai-Burmese Border (published by Jungle Books in 1996). Together, Around Lan-Na and Three Pagodas undoubtedly represent the most comprehensive, authoritative account of northern Thailand available.

What attracted us to Around Lan-Na was the author's obvious passion for and engagement with the region, the book's comprehensiveness, its impressive depth of detail, the meticulousness of its research, and its unconventional but imaginative and successful blend of guidebook-type text, anecdotal material, and cultural-historical as well as ethnographic description. The volume, comprising no less than a quarter of a million words, is a complete package and a veritable mine of information, all stylishly written up with verve and wit. No wonder that even educated English-speaking Thais themselves are now starting to use the title to discover their fascinating country "up north"! Along with the author's other three books on northern Thailand, Around Lan-Na has carved out a niche all for itself in the well-served Thailand travel book market. Quite simply, there is no other book or guide like it.

From the Author
As with all four of my Thailand travel books, Around Lan-Na grew out of the notes I had made in my diaries over many years while travelling in the kingdom, especially the northern part of it. Other travellers, who I met while "on the road", said that I should write up all the material and knowledge I had collected to create a book that others could profit from. And here is that book or, rather, one of the resulting books. In writing Lan-Na, I particularly wanted to do two things. I wanted to address more independent, more intrepid, and more discerning visitors to Thailand than those who are perhaps making their first brief visit to the country, or who are as if tied by an umbilical cord to their copy of the well-known guidebooks. And I wanted to create a book which starts where the conventional guides leave off, i.e. make a book which provides far more information about the places and peoples visited, provides data about smaller and less obvious places not covered by the necessarily more superficial, run-of-the-mill guides, and which satisfies the more discriminating traveller's need for in-depth information. In short, I wanted to present the kind of material that I myself would like to read when I fetch up somewhere! Also, it was my aim to make a travel book that was not just a factual guide, and not just a good-read narrative travelogue, but which would combine the virtues of both genres.

I personally researched all the maps in the book, and took almost all the photographs. The photos are divided into a colour section and a black-and-white section. The colour pictures, of which there are 43, illustrate especially geographical, cultural and botanical features as well as hill-tribe costumes and people, while the 37 B + W pictures are mostly shots or portraits of interesting people encountered when travelling. The latter constitute almost a kind of gallery, which I have heard many readers enjoy looking at.

Thailand is multi-facetted and endlessly intriguing, where there is much to experience and an enormous amount of fun to be had. I hope you have as much pleasure using Around Lan-Na as I had putting it together.