BOOK REVIEW: “Getting Offbeat in Thailand” by Chris Backe
Globerovers Magazine asked Chris Backe to tell us more about his book: “Getting Offbeat in Thailand”. Chris is a travel blogger, digital nomad, author of ‘Becoming a Digital Nomad’, game designer, and all-round geek. He’s written dozens of guidebooks and itineraries, and has been seen on Atlas Obscura, io9, Fark, and Mental Floss. Chris is married to an awesome Canadian woman and is currently slow travelling through Eastern Europe.
If your planned excursions in Thailand are to big cities and popular tourist attractions, continue reading the Lonely Planet and your average travel blogs. Going off-the-beaten-path in a country like Thailand means a bit more travelling for a lot more rewarding places, and Offbeat Thailand offers a great guide to do just that.
Offbeat Thailand focuses on over 100 bizarre, exotic, and unique places spread out over the country. The first section serves as a general introduction to the country, a trademark of One Weird Globe guidebooks. The bulk of the book features destinations across Thailand in alphabetical order, a design choice made to make it easier for the casual reader to jump in. The back of the book offers a location index, subject index, and alphabetical index. Whether bought as a PDF or Kindle e-book, there’s always the ability to search the book for your keyword of choice.
Each place offers a photo and a couple of paragraphs about what to expect, along with the sort of information all guidebooks should be including: the address of the place, the website (if one exists), admission cost, and so on. Offbeat Thailand goes one step further by assigning any of 10 colourful icons signifying anything from ‘kid-friendly’ to ‘bring the camera’ to easy (or tough) to find. You can quickly look at the icons and figure out at a glance which places may or may not be for you.
Some highlights include “the most psychedelic temple around” in Wat Baan Rai, the Sanpatong Buffalo Market (“where you too can buy a buffalo!”), and the Chokchai Museum (“Swarovski crystals and scads of skulls”). While some places are well away from big cities and require a special visit to reach, other places are in Thailand’s bigger cities but are still lesser-known. Part of One Weird Globe’s focus has been that the traveller need not travel to the end of the world to find the bizarre, and places like the Museum of Counterfeit Goods (a short walk from a Bangkok bus stop) or the Amulet Market (across the street from Bangkok’s Grand Palace) are proof of that.
Where One Weird Globe’s itineraries offer a step-by-step hand-holding guide from one place to the next, Offbeat Thailand does no such thing. There are no pre-planned routes, no touristy trails to follow. Your own trip will be unique, based on how many days you have, which part(s) of the country you want to see, and whether you feel comfortable driving a motorcycle / scooter.
As a guidebook to the country, it’s far from complete, but that’s by intention. By curating a careful selection of places to appeal to a specific audience, One Weird Globe guidebooks avoid the traditional scattershot approach and narrow the potential pool of places from thousands to about a hundred worthy places actually visited by the writer. By the end of your trip, you’ll have taken a journey of your own making to places few tourists ever reach.
“Getting Offbeat in Thailand” is available at
This interview appears in the July 2018 issue of Globerovers Magazine.
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