Khao Yai is about 2 – 3 hours drive from bangkok airport. For the past few years we usually go to places where we don’t have to drive because I tend to find driving stressful. But this limits our travel options since places that have good transport infrastructure are typically heavily populated cities. The last time I drove in a foreign country was in 2019, so I wasn’t sure if I was up to it.
Singapore is a very small country: we could drive across the entire country in less than an hour, so we are not used to driving for more than that. Our roads are also very orderly and planned, so we may lack the survival skills required for more chaotic traffic. Thankfully we could skip most of the bangkok traffic by driving from the airport area.
We had the idea to visit khao yai because we have a friend living there. I was semi-curious of her life. I admit I knew nothing about the place before we met her. It wasn’t a destination that came up before.
Thanks to her I decided to skip driving on the highway and opted for the slower but calmer roads. I also made 3 stops along the way to break up the monotony and fatigue of the driving. We were not in a rush anyway. This is one of the cafes near bangkok we stopped at to have some matcha. It is amazing how we can find such tranquility near bangkok:
We finally reached khao yai many hours later due to the frequent stops along the way. We must be the only people making this many stops for a 3-hour drive. But why not?
It felt really worth all that anxiety and effort upon reaching:
One of the many cafes with an amazing view and environment:
Vineyards are also a thing, though they are probably not in season now:
Some cafes are really stupendous:
I wrote some of the following in my anniversary post: that as I age I tend to find myself more and more drawn to the safe and comfortable zone. Knowing and remembering more of life gave me more accumulated anxiety about everything, so I prefer to be in a stress-free existence by only having safe experiences. But I am aware that this causes a chronic shrinkage of my existence. I have become smaller and smaller, and I have become one of those people who have started to wonder what had happened to my past free (and admittedly ignorant) self?
Maybe to many people a 3-hour drive is nothing, but it felt like a huge accomplishment for me, a barrier I had consciously chose to break for myself. I was chronically trying to avoid it. This opens up other possibilities that I wouldn’t have contemplated before.
I feel like I have to actively rebel against ageing, not because I am afraid to be old, but I don’t want to become static or smaller. The accumulative stress of living makes me want to stay safely in the same place, yet ironically it also makes me less and less resilient to stressful conditions.
I am glad I am still able to experience something different, and I hope to continue to be able to do so.