Thailand

Adored around the world, Thai cuisine expresses fundamental aspects of Thai culture: it is generous, warm, refreshing and relaxed. Thai dishes rely on fresh, local ingredients – pungent lemongrass, searing chillies and plump seafood.
Outside the cluttered cities and towns lies Thailand's rural heartland, a mix of rice paddies, tropical forests and villages where life is dominated by the rhythms of the agricultural clock. In the north, the forests and fields bump up against toothy blue mountains decorated with silvery waterfalls and honeycombed by deep caves. Down south, scraggy limestone cliffs poke out of the cultivated landscape like prehistoric skyscrapers, or emerge dramatically out of the turquoise sea. The usually arid northeast turns an emerald hue during the rainy season when tender green rice shoots carpet the landscape.
The celestial world is a close confidant in this Buddhist nation, and religious devotion is colourful and ubiquitous. Gleaming temples and golden Buddhas frame both the rural and the urban landscape. Ancient banyan trees are ceremoniously wrapped in sacred cloth to honour the resident spirits, fortune-bringing shrines decorate humble homes as well as monumental malls, while garland-festooned dashboards ward off traffic accidents. Visitors can join the conversation through meditation retreats in Chiang Mai, religious festivals in northeastern Thailand, underground cave shrines in Kanchanaburi and Phetchaburi, and hilltop temples in northern Thailand.