Thailand

Destinations
Most people go first to the Royal Palace and the Bangkok sites, then to Chang Mai and/or the Ancient Capital and summer palace. Phuket is the beach and dive resort area. The Bridge over the River Kwai is a one day adventure by train or car from Bangkok.
Hotels
We have always stayed at the Sheraton Royal Orchid which may be a little fancier than the Shangri-La chosen by Viking River Cruises as this meeting point for our Myanmar, Irrawaddy River cruise. The Shangri-La is in a better location and has free water taxi service to the Asiatique which is where you want to go most evenings.

Transportation
This is a modern, well developed country with good airports, roads, cars, taxis, tuk-tuks, interurban rail service, sidewalks, and street lights. Visas
Get your visa through Washington Passport and Visa Services, wpvs.com. They have come through for us many times over the years. Be sure you have your visa in hand a good month before you go.

Passports
Our US passports were required at all hotel checkins. We only usually carry a quality photocopy with us on our persons like we do in most countries. Please note, in many countries now our driver's licenses are checked when we use our credit cards also!

Travel Insurance
What we want most is the actual help given by the Insurance issuer for a medical or emergency evacuation. We don't insure our trips for cancellation any more. I think frequent travelers should be members of Divers Alert Network at a level that covers evacuation, not just the cost but the arrangements.

Travel Agents
Our travel agent Dianne Blackburn at Gateway Travel in Spartanburg, SC is one of the most important people in our lives. She always gets us the best deals and finds us the best trips. She has helped us when stranded outside of the US and has changed arrangements on the fly multiple times. She knows when we check in to our airlines and hotels and often has called ahead and changed arrangements while we are traveling and unable to make connections etc. The cruise lines we travel work with her. She is a widely-travelled person and we have learned much of our travel knowledge from her.

Wildlife
Except for elephants in the northern part of the country or maybe bird watching, this is not particularly a wildlife viewing destination.

Language
Not a problem at all.

People
The are arguably the most pleasant people to deal with in the wold.

Food
It is ok to eat local food in cities. A world class culinary destination.

I like to take a lot of thin white coat hangers as you never get enough in your stateroom. I just leave them on the ship when we leave. I like to take some battery-powered stick on lights for the inside of closets, the inside of your room safe, and the inside of the bathroom (the light switch is on the outside so you awaken your spouse when you turn on the light at night). Take a small flashlight or head light for emergencies and for looking under the bed. I take at least a dozen plastic clothes pins and a good string for a clothes line (you usually have a clothes line in the shower already). The thin white coat hangers are useful for drying clothes also. Take some stickers or pictures and double sided tape to decorate your cabin door. Stateroom cabin walls are metal covered with vinyl. Some really strong magnets are great for hanging papers, clothes to dry, daily activity schedules, and if strong enough for anchoring clothes lines. You always get a terri robe so you don't need to bring one. You will have a combination room safe. The cruise ship lends you a beach towel to take if you go to a beach. Take good sun screen and insect repellant and pack them in plastic boxes or Nalgene bottles. Take extra glasses and sun glasses. A copy of your vision prescription has been a Godsend to travelers on several of our trips and could come in handy in some ports such as Hong Kong where glasses are inexpensive. There is a large lending library of books and DVD's on all cruise ships we use. I like to have my insulated travel mug. I rip a lot of videos to my computer with Handbrake to view on my iPad. You move videos on & off of your iPad through iTunes. In much of the developing world you bring your own toilet paper with you to public toilets so we carry a lot of small packs of tissues. Susan carries her own dual voltage curling iron. You might swap photos with other travelers by using an SD card or usb stick so carry a few cheap ones. One of the most important thing not to forget is to take some photo copies of your passport picture page. Because you use the photocopy of your passport rather than the actual passport (which the ship holds for you) you may still need your driver's license or other government issued ID at some money exchanges etc or if you have marked your credit cards CID.

Bathrooms Only on the train to the River Kwai bridge did we need our toilet paper or see a squat toilet.
Health Concerns
This was flu season. We consider this to be a civilized country with good infrastructure and facilities. We love the local experience and hate that our world is being polluted by empty water bottles but we do get sick in out of the way places that we spent a lot of money to visit so we are very careful. That said, it is often good advice to get medical TESTING an ADVICE locally for infectious diseases as physicians in the US are not familiar with many exotic tropical diseases. WHAT TREATMENT TO TAKE may be a different story. As a retired physician I would rather take an antibiotic that I brought or bought myself from a local pharmacist after double checking the advice on the internet than delaying therapy till I got home. Surgical therapy would be much more scary in underprivileged parts of the world. I no longer keep my medical license so I have my Internist each year refill my cipro, doxycycline, metronidazole, eye drops ear drops, Tamiflu, malaria prophylaxis medication, and one extra 90 supply of my home meds (since I can't refill them when out of the country). We carry lots of pink bismuth (Peptobismal), immodium, Neosporin Ointment, cold meds, motrin, tylenol, nasal spray, and glycerine suppositories. We were on malaria prophylaxis as we would visit rural Bangladesh and Myanmar on this trip.
Hygiene Always carry toilet paper but this is not often needed here as opposed to most neighboring countries. . Always carry and use hand sanitizer. Never drink anything that doesn't come from a sealed bottle. Use insect spray more than once a day and keep feet well sprayed. Don't swim in any water except at the beach. We carry small travel towels from REI and every trip or two these are indispensable.

We took our digital SLR's to the royal palace but used point and shoot cameras elsewhere. We use Nikon cameras and I recently upgraded from a D90 to a D7100 and couldn't be happier as it focuses so much faster, works higher shutter speeds, autofocuses videos, and does High Dynamic Range photos. It is heavier than the D90 and Susan won't upgrade until something as good comes along that is lighter. I use a Sigma 18-250mm lens but if I bought now I would get their 18-300mm version. Susan uses a lighter weight Nikon 18-200mmVRII lens. I carry a Sigma 10-20mm lens for architectural shots and shots I just can't get back far enough. I prepare projects in Apple Aperture for each expected photo shoot before leaving on my trips and I just import my photos from SD cards into the preprepared Aperture project allowing Aperture to back up my Nikon RAW files to a USB drive as they are imported and erasing them from my camera SD card all at one time. I usually copy my Apple Aperture library during the trip to another SD card that I carry in my wallet in case I have computer failure. We each carry a small waterproof point and shoot camera to use for dusty or rainy or other occasions. Before we leave home I sync the time on all of my cameras and lock my iPhone's time to stay at my home time zone. That way, I just tell Aperture that the cameras will all be registering Eastern Time but to adjust it to local time at import. Having my cameras get out of sync with time has caused much trouble picking the best shots when multiple cameras are photographing the same subject at the same time. We carry plastic bags large enough for our SLRs to fit. These are helpful for rain but are most useful for sealing the cameras in the bag inside a cool hotel room and waiting till the cameras heat up outside before opening the bag. This has saved much moisture condensation inside our cameras and delays in the day's photo shoots.

We had good Wi-Fi hotel and the airport. We didn't allow our iPhones to connect to local data plans. If we had stayed longer we would have bought a local sim card with a prepaid plan for one of our iPhones.

220 volts. The European connector as well as British and Australian connectors are used in various places. Take dual voltage appliances and adapters.

You don't need fancy clothes here. We wore our synthetic quick dry travel shirts and zip off pants all the time except one day we put on shorts in Sundarbans. In Islamic countries women need to keep shoulders covered and legs covered. You will get dirty and muddy. We wash out clothes in sinks, wring them in towels and air dry them constantly. This allows us to pack lightly. We take almost nothing cotton if we don't need to dress up. We have continually tuned our travel wardrobes to be FEW, QUICK DRYING, WRINKLE RESISTANT, MIX AND MATCHABLE, and with ZIPPABLE POCKETS. We were surprised that we often wore our silkweight Capilene pants and long sleeve tops, polar fleeces, and even down jackets. These store small and are light and having these along saved the day as it often does on trips. You can't make a 2 hour tuk-tuk ride without thermal protection. The locals wore even warmer clothes. I always carry at least one pair of Magellan quick dry black socks. What I really appreciate are a couple pair of Smart Wool short socks and can get these to dry out quickly if I towel them well. A couple pair of ExOfficio under pants and a short sleeve silkwieght Capilene colored tee shirt or two always are in my travel bags.

We carry less and less the more we travel. We left our one combined suitcase at the hotel in Dhaka. This held our shorts for Thailand, our nice clothes for our Viking River Cruises Myanmar Irrawaddy cruise and our Japan winter clothes for the visits that would follow after we left Bangladesh. We each had a very small roll aboard suitcase and a small backpack. I can't say enough good things about our International Traveller roll-aboards. Clearly a generation better than what we had even a year ago! Things will get dusty if you have to travel a long way in tuk-tuks. Whenever we are staying on a boat or cruise ship we take suitcases that are canvass and fold flat enough to put under a bed. You can fill up all of the space in a small cabin with noncollapsible suitcases.
Weather
It is always colder or hotter in the countries than we expect when we research what to take before we leave the US. Also, most of the world has larger spreads between daily highs and lows than we do in the eastern United States. We anticipated hot weather and awoke to high 40's Fahrenheit ( 8 degrees Celsius) several mornings in a row!! We word long sleeves some nights in Bangkok but last year the same time we found over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

US Dollars are widely used in tourist destinations. Australian dollars, Singapore dollars, and Yen also but not Euros (this surprised me). Do get local currency as you can easily exchange it and the denominations are easy to figure out and read.