Thailand

Thailand hit me like a wave of gold and heat. Bangkok on the first morning — the Grand Palace compound glinting in that flat, hard midday light, the white walls almost painfully bright against the blue sky. Everything there is scaled to make you feel small: the tiered roofs stacked on top of each other, the chedis pushing straight up, the mosaic fragments catching the sun from every angle. I had come from Kathmandu where temples are worn and mossy; here they polish everything until it shines.

From Bangkok we went south to Koh Samui, and the island had a completely different register — saltier air, looser days, and the Big Buddha sitting on its hill above Nathon with the sea haze behind it. The staircase up to the temple is lined with naga serpents in green and gold, and at the top the statue sits so tall it reads almost like a silhouette against the sky. Nearby, the giant Guan Yu shrine surprised me — that deep red face, the gold armour, the sheer scale of it felt like something out of a different century entirely.

The food was its own journey inside the trip. One night a table arrived covered in small bowls — a dark tamarind broth, something sour and herby, a coconut-based curry that smelled of lemongrass — and the warmth of the light in that room, candles and timber, matched the warmth of everything in the bowls. That is the thing about Thailand: the colour and the flavour never really let up.