Thailand travel guide: choosing a base

The short answer

Plan Thailand by the place you will stay in, not by the province, which is an administrative area. XTOUR's Thai destinations are eight towns and cities, Bangkok, Ayutthaya, Sukhothai, Kanchanaburi, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Phuket Town and Krabi Town, and three islands in the south, Phuket, Ko Samui and Ko Pha-ngan.

Start from what you want to see and work back to the base, then check whether the site is in that town or only reached from it. Several are not where their names suggest. Sukhothai Historical Park is at the old city, not in the modern town of Sukhothai. The Hellfire Pass Interpretive Centre gives its address in Sai Yok District, not in Kanchanaburi town. Maya Bay is not part of any town. XTOUR has no routing provider, so it gives no travel times between any of these places.

Bangkok

In Bangkok, XTOUR's guides start with the Grand Palace. According to the palace's own history page, the new king moved the capital to the left bank of the Chao Phraya River in 1782, and the palace grounds include a temple that serves as the Chapel Royal: Wat Phra Kaew, the Temple of the Emerald Buddha.[1] The palace's ticket page says one foreigners' ticket covers the palace, the temple and the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles.[2] The Grand Palace and Wat Phra Kaew guide explains what the ticket and gate cover and what the official pages disagree on.

Not everything listed on the palace's website is in Bangkok: the Arts of the Kingdom Museum appears among the palace's attractions, but its page places it at Koh Kerd, in Bang Pa-in district of Ayutthaya Province.[3]

The Bangkok National Museum, the National Museum of Royal Barges and the National Gallery are compared in the guide to Bangkok's three Fine Arts Department museums. XTOUR has no visiting guide yet to Bangkok's other temples, such as Wat Pho and Wat Arun.

Ayutthaya and Sukhothai: the old capitals

These are two different towns with two different historical parks, and neither is part of Bangkok. ICOMOS, evaluating Ayutthaya for UNESCO in 1991, calls it the second Siamese capital, from 1350, and says it was destroyed by the Burmese. Sukhothai is the older of the two: ICOMOS calls it the capital of the first Siamese state, and its World Heritage property joins it with two other historic towns, Si Satchanalai and Kamphaeng Phet.[5][4] At both, the Fine Arts Department runs the historical park.[7][6]

At Sukhothai, the town and the park are different places. The Fine Arts Department gives the park's location as Tambon Mueang Kao in Mueang Sukhothai district, and ICOMOS says the historic town lies apart from the modern one.[5][8] XTOUR's Sukhothai destination is the modern town, from which the park is reached. At Ayutthaya, the historical park, the UNESCO property and the modern town share a name but are three different things.

The Ayutthaya Historical Park guide separates them; the guide to Sukhothai or Ayutthaya compares the two parks; and the explainer on what UNESCO inscribed covers the designations.

Historic sites with no XTOUR base

Some sites have an XTOUR guide but no XTOUR destination that serves as their base, so XTOUR suggests none and gives no travel time. The guide to Si Satchanalai and Kamphaeng Phet covers the other two historical parks of the Sukhothai property. The Lopburi guide covers Phra Prang Sam Yot, Wat Phra Si Rattana Mahathat and Somdet Phra Narai National Museum. Phimai or Phanom Rung compares the two Khmer sanctuary parks.

Kanchanaburi

Kanchanaburi is the base for the places that remember the Burma–Thailand Railway. The Hellfire Pass Interpretive Centre's history page calls Kanchanaburi a major town along the railway and says it is now home to several war cemeteries and memorials.[9] The Thailand–Burma Railway Centre, which describes itself as a museum, information and research facility on the railway's history, says on its visitor page that it stands on the western side of Kanchanaburi War Cemetery.[11][10] Hellfire Pass is a different case: its interpretive centre is an Australian Government initiative, and gives its address in Sai Yok District.[12] XTOUR does not place Hellfire Pass in the town. When XTOUR read the centre's news page on 9 October 2026, it said the centre and its walking trail were temporarily closed from 27 September 2026 until further notice, because of heavy rain, flooding and the risk of landslides and rockfalls.[13]

The guide to Kanchanaburi's wartime sites names each site and who runs it, and the Burma–Thailand Railway history covers the railway itself. The guide to Mueang Sing Historical Park covers a site of another age, a Khmer-period walled town that XTOUR also treats as reached from Kanchanaburi rather than inside it.

Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai

Both cities are XTOUR destinations. For Chiang Mai, the guide to the Chiang Mai National Museum and Wiang Kum Kam covers the Fine Arts Department's museum and the excavated older town, which XTOUR treats as reached from Chiang Mai rather than inside it. XTOUR has no guide yet to either city's temples, including Wat Phra That Doi Suthep and Wat Rong Khun (the White Temple), and gives no guidance on them.

National parks are a separate question from any city. XTOUR has read official notices about them only as dated news items. A 2019 TAT Newsroom item reported that Doi Inthanon National Park, which it places across parts of four districts of Chiang Mai province, had temporarily closed its Pha Dok Siew nature trail and waterfalls in an emergency, until the water level returned to normal.[14] In January 2026 TAT wrote that Thailand's national park system closes several attractions every year depending on weather and park conditions, and pointed to a status list kept by the National Park Office.[15] XTOUR treats every such closure as operational: it states no closure dates and sends you to the current notice.

Phuket, Krabi and the islands

XTOUR's southern destinations are two towns and three islands. Phuket Town is a town on Phuket island, and Phuket, the island, is a separate destination: being on Phuket island does not put a place inside Phuket Town. Ko Samui and Ko Pha-ngan are island destinations too, and Krabi Town is the second town. Ao Nang is not an XTOUR destination yet: the name also belongs to a subdistrict, and XTOUR has not settled which place it would mean.

Maya Bay is the clearest case of a site that belongs to no town, and of a site whose opening is decided by a national authority. TAT's 2021 item places it on the uninhabited island of Phi Phi Leh.[17] TAT Newsroom reported in May 2018 that the Department of National Parks would close the bay, in Hat Noppharat Thara-Mu Ko Phi Phi National Park, for a four-month rejuvenation from 1 June 2018.[16] A TAT item in November 2021 said the bay had stayed closed since June 2018 and was expected to reopen on 1 January 2022, with daily visitor numbers controlled.[17] Those are dated notices. XTOUR does not say whether the bay is open on any date; the department's current notice decides that.

Temples, festivals and customs

Some XTOUR guides answer questions that belong to no single base. The guide to official temple rules sets the Grand Palace's regulation, Wat Pho's tips and TAT's advice side by side, and Thai temple words explains wat, chedi, prang, ubosot and wihan. Songkran, Loy Krathong and Yi Peng explained covers how those festivals' dates are set, and Thai Buddhist holidays and the lunar calendar the holy days whose dates move. The Phuket Vegetarian Festival has its own explainer. Thai massage and the Wat Pho school covers Nuad Thai, and Thailand's EU-protected food names the rice, coffee and coconut names registered as geographical indications.

The bases at a glance

What XTOUR does not tell you

XTOUR does not publish travel times, train, bus, boat or flight routes between these bases, because it has no routing provider. It does not publish opening hours, prices, dress rules or closure dates on this page; each site's operator publishes those, and the guides linked above say which operator that is. It does not rank the bases. Which one suits a trip depends on which sites matter to you.