The Journey(s) of Ian

The province of Yala is one more of the three ‘deep’ south provinces of Thailand, also suffering from terrorism as is Pattani. I decided to visit the capital city of this province, also named Yala (every Thai province shares its name with its capital city—it is one of the few exceptions to the rule that every rule of Thai administration has an exception), to see what I could see.  On the buses. A mix of culture ? Heading to the city. One of many checkpoints. These are difficult to photograph from the bus. A poor area, many folk live in simple wooden shacks. Rather than move myself and my gear to the landlocked Yala province, I decided to keep my base in Pattani, at the comfortable CS Pattani Hotel, and take a local bus to Yala city for the day. This consumes an hour plus in time, 25 baht in coin, and 40kms of space travelled southwards from Pattani town.  Always soldiers. In my previous blog post about Pattani I made the point that there was little...