For the first time in my life, I was watching, on Koh Samui, a Ladyboy show. I remember I was a bit confused. Bangkok manages to confuse, too, with its talent to satisfy all needs: Thai women love Thai men, Thai women also love foreign men. Foreign men love ladyboys, not knowing they are boys. Thai Drag Queens are boys who play Drag Races and love to confuse, too. For me, it’s simple: I love Thai food. Bangkok and Chiang Mai are therefore my best paradises to feel hungry.  On my five trips to Thailand between 1995 and 2016 my insatiable appetite led me to stir-fried morning glory with garlic-chili, spicy giant river prawn soup with lemongrass, lime juice and

bird’s eye chili, toasted dried shrimp with peanut, lime and ginger, green papaya salad, stuffed crab meat, steamed rice dumplings, marinated fried chicken wrapped in pandanus leaves, grilled prawn with pomelo and shredded coconut, marinated, grilled pork neck with galangal chili paste and crunchy vegetables, northern Thai herbed pork sausages and finally spicy southern style yellow curry garnished by toddy palm and with incomparable sticky rice. Eating in Bangkok for the first time had been an entirely new treat for me: Why would I always “need” to eat in a restaurant when I can just kind of sit on a little plastic chair, watch the hawker prepare and eat great food on the street? And I have not even spoken about Bangkok’s veritable Chinatown and its famous Yaowarat street. More street food, Dim Sum, shrimp dumplings…

There are many different forms of greetings around the world: Kenyans might greet you with “Jambo”, Iranians with “Khasté nabāsheed” – don’t be tired! In Brazil they kiss you twice to just greet you and in Tibet they might even stick out their tongue. No wonder that all around Thailand, you hear people greeting each other with a question about food: “Gin khao reuyang?”

– Have you eaten rice yet?”  
My very first trip to Thailand came en route with my mum to New Zealand in 1995, when our airline had offered us a generous stop in Bangkok. After arrival on an early November morning, the air was already hot, tropically hot. I felt sweaty, queasy and exhausted, utterly exhausted. The streets were crowded by

traffic, nothing moved for hours. Entire Bangkok, the City of Gods and the Residence of the Emerald Buddha, still mostly flat besides its golden temples and without the major skyline of today, seemed like a huge noisy construction site. At that time there were neither Skytrain nor subway, leaving the river taxi as our only rapid means of transport. Withstanding the heat, we took ton the river, visited famous Arun Temple, a floating market outside the city and dived for the first time into Bangkok street food.

My mum and I still remember vividly coming home to our hotel, tired and happy, after each exciting sightseeing day. We entered the lobby which was dramatic with an Asian so far unknown, exotic theme, The air was cool and fragrant with frangipani. Refreshing towels and ice-cold coconuts were immediately served to replenish our energies. Behind the grand lobby shaded wooden colonnades were leading through a tropical garden to two wonderful pools, inviting us for a cooling dip. Just the sound of the many long tail boats racing up and down the adjacent Chao Praya river reminded us that we were still in a big city.

The hotel was aptly named, describing exactly how we felt. We felt that we had reached our Shangri La, a name taken from the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton about a fictional utopian lamasery located in the Himalayas of Tibet. I love this word since then, after I had learned that “Shangri La” is a synonym for an imaginary paradise on earth, a remote and exotic utopia. For us, in those days in Bangkok, it was real and I was lucky that I had finally been introduced to the magic of great hotels in Asia.

Where would be your Shangri La?