Tak Town and the Ping: Taksin's Town and the River of Lights
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...