love to travel. l like seeing new places, eating new foods and meeting new people. The best way to do this, in my opinion, is to not get on a plane. Flying is great if you love ridiculously expensive airport food, endless immigration queues and the joys of squeezing into a small seat and having an elbow battle with your neighbour for several hours. Of course, flying is necessary if you want to experience distant foreign countries and cultures, but some of my best travel experiences have been much closer to home. For economy travel around the kingdom, Thai buses are great because they go everywhere and they're cheap. Sadly, they are also regularly involved in accidents, but if you're lucky you'll get a driver who hasn't just drunk 15 bottles of Red Bull and doesn't think the Chiang Mai to Lampang highway is a Formula One racetrack But my favourite way to travel is by train, and as I mention in Chatroom this week my favourite ever trip was from Bangkok to Butterworth in Malaysia The Butterworth train leaves Hua Lamphong in the early afternoon and lazily makes its way west then south, through Ratchaburi and Phetchaburi, arriving at Hua Hin just after sunset. During the evening and through the night the train will visit Chumphon, Surat Thani and Phatthalung. Of course, it could well be terribly behind schedule by then, but who cares?