Where exactly is Thailand?

Saturday, 17 Jun 2006 | Miscellaneous

Last week I was talking to Natalie about how some people can’t even point out their own country on a world map. I remember years ago there was a show on Dutch television where they would every week visit a popular holiday destination and ask the people there to point out the Netherlands on a map. Most couldn’t. Or would with full conviction point to places like Africa -which is not correct, but ofcourse you already knew that.

So where is Thailand exactly?

Thailand is in Asia, but I’m sure you all knew that. Asia is a pretty big place though, covering an area from Turkey to Japan. So to narrow it down a bit: it’s in an area commonly referred to as South East Asia (SEA), close to places such as Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia and the Phillipines. It’s pretty close to the equator.

Bangkok is a little over 9000 kilometers (almost 6000 miles) from Amsterdam. By comparison, thats about 26 times as far as London is from Amsterdam. Or for my family, it’s about 85 times as far as Amsterdam is from Eindhoven. The flight from Amsterdam to Bangkok takes 12 hours non-stop and you’ll fly over countries such as Turkey, Iraq and India. Flying from Los Angeles is a 15.5 hour flight, New York a whopping 17 hour non-stop (!) flight. No direct flight from Toronto, Nat. Sucks, eh?

You’ll fly across many timezones, Thailand is 5 hours ahead of Amsterdam time in the summer. In the winter, the time difference is 6 hours because Thailand has no daylight savings time. It’s 11 (or 12) hours ahead of eastern time.

Some Thailand Trivia

The name “Thailand” means ‘land of the free’, the capital Krung Thep (which westerners refer to as Bangkok) means ‘city of angels’.

Thailand is about 12 times the size of the Netherlands, but it has only 4 times the number of people living in it - almost 65 million people. It’s about half the size of Ontario. Bangkok officially has about 8 million inhabitants, roughly the same as places like New York, London and Hong Kong. Countless people live there without being registered though, a more realistic number is perhaps 10 million.

Bangkok has been deemed the ‘hottest city in the world’ by the World Meteorological Organization. Not because it has the highest temperature of any city in the world, but because it has the highest average year-round temperature. It doesn’t really cool down during the night, perhaps only a few degrees. I don’t know why not, perhaps because of the smog? Thailand does sort of have seasons, which I guess could be defined as hot, really hot and really, really hot. The mildest is in December/January with lows of 25 degrees (77F), the hottest in April. Especially in the rainy season, the air is very humid so I guess it feels even hotter than it actually is. I’ve been told that Chiang Mai (in the north) does have real seasons, where you actually have to wear some sort of a coat in the winter.

Thailand by standards of the European Union is still a developing country, but that is not the same as a ‘third world country’. I bet you didn’t know that! Bangkok is a very modern city with everything a spoiled westerner could ever dream of needing, but in rural areas life is a lot different from the big city. A lot of people live in little rice farms (a very common way of making money), without electricity or running water.

The average wage of people in Thailand is about 150 euro per month, people in the big cities perhaps make a little more. Japan is by far Thailands’ biggest trading partner, which explains why there is a fairly large Japanese community in Bangkok.

Food and transportation are relatively cheap. Appliances such as a computer cost about the same as they do in the west. Basically, if something involves manual labor and is not imported from abroad, the price will most likely be lower than they are in the west. An example of ‘how cheap labor is’ can be found by walking into any shopping mall, I’ve more than once seen staff sitting on the floor and chatting for hours. They have nothing else to do, because there are simply too many of them.

Have anything else you would like to know about Bangkok or Thailand? Send me an email, I’ll happily research it and let you know the results!