I have been thinking about one evening in northern Thailand for more than a decade now, and it has quietly shaped how I do my job.
The evening we got lost
We had spent the day on a scooter, out near the Myanmar border, and we lost the light on the way back. A few kilometres outside Chiang Rai the dark arrives completely, and every road begins to look like the one before it. Around there, almost nobody speaks English, and many people cannot read Thai either, so producing a map or a guidebook is entirely useless.
In a village somewhere in the hills, my brother asked for help. He has a real gift for communicating in gestures and for getting people on his side.
The two women he asked were having a beauty evening on their veranda above the main street, one setting the other’s hair in curlers, nail varnish out. The one doing the curlers abandoned her friend mid-set and went to fetch a neighbour, who abandoned his dinner and took us to another neighbour, who was feeding his baby daughter. That man picked up the baby, opened his internet point specially so we could look up our resort’s website and find the exact directions, and then, evidently not trusting our sense of direction, picked up the baby again, got into his car, and told us to follow him all the way to Naga Hill.
Five people. None of whom spoke our language. None of whom gained anything at all. One of whom did the last part of it holding an infant.
There is a word for it
I did not know this at the time, and I wish I had.
What happened to us that evening has a name in Thai: นำ้ใจ, nam jai, which translates literally as “water of the heart”. It means generosity given freely, without calculation and without any expectation of return. It is not politeness and it is not service. It is closer to a quality a person either has or does not have, and which, like water, simply flows outward.
It sits alongside other ideas that shape daily life there. Kreng jai, roughly “a cautious heart”, is the instinct not to impose on others, to hold yourself back rather than trouble someone. Jai yen, “a cool heart”, is the composure that Thai culture prizes over hot-headedness.
Put those three together and you have most of the explanation for why the country is called the Land of Smiles, and why that name is not a tourist-board invention. The smile is the visible part. Underneath it is a whole architecture of consideration.
Which is worth knowing before you go, because it also explains things that puzzle visitors. A Thai person may decline your offer of help not because they do not want it, but because accepting would impose. Raising your voice, however justified, loses you the argument rather than winning it. And the smile you receive is not always the smile you think: it is a piece of social language with a great many meanings, only some of which are happiness.
What I did with it
I have had experiences of this kind in a good many places, in South East Asia especially, and in parts of Central and South America. They are precious memories full of laughter, and they taught me something specific about availability and hospitality that I have used ever since.
When I tell this story to people at home, the reaction is almost always the same: yes, but it is different there, here people have problems, here nobody has the time, here everyone is stressed and overcommitted.
I have never quite believed it. Our problems are, for the most part, less vital than we tell ourselves, and so are most of our commitments. I think what has actually happened is that we have let something slip out of our education and our culture, in the middle of decades of a comfort that was not always as real as it looked.
Because the thing I keep coming back to is that none of the five people in that village did anything difficult. Nobody rearranged their life. Somebody put down a hairbrush, somebody left a plate of food, somebody carried a baby to a car. Small gestures. And a smile arrives with another smile, and on those terms you can travel a very long way.
What I wrote in 2014, and what I know now
When I first published this piece, I ended it with a thought that I now find slightly startling to reread.
I wrote that tourism and hospitality have to go together, and that hospitality should be understood as the availability of an entire local community, not merely of the people sitting behind a hotel desk or at a tourist information counter, since availability is the least you should expect of those two. And that making a visitor feel good ought to make us feel good too, and be a source of pride.
I wrote that before I ran anything. I am now the person behind the desk, in a village in the Cinque Terre that a very large number of people want to see, and after years of it I would only add one thing.
Hospitality is a renewable resource, and it can be depleted.
That village near Chiang Rai could afford its generosity because two lost foreigners on a scooter were an event, not a Tuesday. Where I live, the visitors arrive by the million into five villages of a few thousand people, and I watch that same instinct wear thin in my neighbours, not because they have become worse people, but because you cannot give water from a well that is being drawn down faster than it refills.
That is the part I did not understand in 2014 and understand very well now. A community’s warmth is not a fixed feature of its character, to be listed in a brochure alongside the beaches. It is a resource produced by people who have enough space, enough housing, enough ordinary life left over to be curious about a stranger. Manage a place badly and you do not just crowd it. You use up the very thing that made it worth visiting.
I have written about the mechanics of that at length in my piece on tourism sustainability. But it started here, on a dark road outside Chiang Rai, with a man holding a baby and driving very slowly so we could follow.
Our country, our town, our civilisation, is us
That is the line I finished with in 2014, and I would not change a word of it.
If you want to be a good guest somewhere, the arithmetic is not complicated: arrive with some of that same availability, and leave enough of it behind you that the next person gets some too.
With thanks to Nicola, who sent me the film that started all this.
Further reading
- My guide to Chiang Mai, the heart of northern Thailand
- Tourism sustainability: it was never about the crowds
- Responsible travel is not just sustainability, it is respect
FAQ
Why is Thailand called the Land of Smiles? The nickname reflects a genuine feature of Thai social life rather than a marketing slogan. Thai culture places high value on nam jai, literally “water of the heart”, meaning generosity offered without expectation of return, alongside kreng jai, the instinct not to impose on others, and jai yen, a calm and composed temperament. The smile is the visible surface of that architecture of consideration.
What does nam jai mean? Nam jai translates literally as “water of the heart” and describes genuine, uncalculated generosity given without expecting anything back. It is considered central to Thai hospitality, and it is what a visitor experiences when a stranger goes far out of their way to help them with nothing to gain.
What is kreng jai? Kreng jai, sometimes written greng jai, means something like “a cautious heart”. It describes the Thai instinct to avoid imposing on others, and explains why someone may decline an offer they would actually welcome, or hold back from asking for something they need, in order to preserve harmony and avoid causing trouble.
Is Thai hospitality genuine or performed for tourists? Thai hospitality is rooted in long-standing cultural and Buddhist values rather than in tourism, and the concepts behind it, nam jai, kreng jai and jai yen, govern how Thai people treat one another as well as visitors. It is most visible away from the heavily touristed areas, where interactions are not shaped by commercial expectation.
What can travellers learn from Thai hospitality? The most useful lesson is that hospitality belongs to a whole community rather than to hotels and information desks, and that it is sustained by small, unremarkable gestures. It is also finite: in places under heavy visitor pressure, the warmth that made a destination attractive can be worn down, which is why how we travel matters as much as where.
