Tak Life

Tak Town and the Ping: Taksin's Town and the River of Lights Tak town is the Thailand that highways pass through and travellers remember fondly afterwards, often with a little surprise that they stopped at all. It is a quiet provincial capital on the east bank of the Ping River, roughly midway between Bangkok and Chiang Mai and at the junction where the road west breaks off for Mae Sot and the Myanmar border — a position that has made it a crossroads for a very long time. Armies, kings and traders have all passed this way, and one king in particular made the town his own so completely that Thailand still calls him by its name: Taksin. Yet nothing about modern Tak is monumental or hurried. It is a riverside town of markets, temples, government offices and evening walks along the Ping, living at a pace that the bigger northern cities lost a generation ago, and that is precisely its charm. We run a small family condo business in Patong, Phuket, and towns like Tak are our favourite k...

Living in Tak and Getting There: Costs, Roads and Border-Province Life Every Thailand guide eventually has to answer two plain questions: what does it cost to be here, and how do you actually get here? For Tak province the answers come with an honesty clause, because Tak is not one place but three: quiet Tak town on the Ping, a provincial capital of markets and government offices; Mae Sot, the busy, multicultural border town on the Moei, an hour and a half west over the mountains; and, down a legendary road to the south, Umphang, which belongs in a guide to expeditions more than a guide to living. This article covers the first two as places to stay a month or a season, and the roads, buses and flights that connect all of it to Bangkok and Chiang Mai. Costs are given as ranges and framed as estimates throughout — provincial prices move, landlords vary, and anyone who quotes you an exact Tak rent from an office in Phuket is guessing. What we can do, from our own road time in the provinc...