THE LAND OF SMILES
Essays, Reflections, and Conversations
from across Thailand
During the summer of 2023, in the pages of a black Moleskine, a young writer, fresh out of university, left home and began to record the fragments of a twenty-eight nights solo adventure across Thailand. What started as private notes - observations scribbled in hostels after midnight, reflections written between training sessions, night-walks, and mountain hikes, slowly became something more deliberate: a portrait of a globalised world glimpsed through conversation.
Across humid training camps and transient dormitories, he spoke with coaches and fighters, solo-travellers and spiritual seekers, fellow guests and the outcasts of society, individuals all united in the premise of having a story to share.
Their testimonies - by turns tender, evasive, boastful and bruised - form the backbone of The Land of Smiles. Beneath the easy laughter, other currents emerge: ambition, loneliness, faith, and hunger for reinvention.
Exactly two years later, in the summer of 2025, after spending a year in China, and then again, in the Spring of 2026, after spending half a year in Indonesia, the writer returned to question the experience.
Seeking out former interlocutors and new voices, he revisited the scenes of his own becoming, testing memory against reality.
Both travel narrative and oral history, both confession and inquiry, The Land of Smiles examines, amongst many things, masculinity, performance and what it means to be a global citizen.
It is a book about departure - as much as it is about the optimistic stance of looking ahead.
In a thoughtful foreword, Shadi Ganjavian-Connor, founder of Team GC, TEDx Speaker, philanthropist, ambassador to the ‘Imagine This’ charity, and close friend to the author, situates the work within a lineage of her own triumphs and tribulations and her own journey’s around the world.