A few years ago I sold all my stuff to explore the world, creating 12 startups in 12 months and building $1M+/y companies as an indie maker such as Nomad List and Remote OK. I'm also a big pusher of remote work and async and analyze the effects it has on society. Follow me on Twitter or see my list of posts. My first book MAKE is out now. Contact me
Subscribing you...
Subscribed! Check your inbox to confirm your email.
levels.io

Finding an apartment in Chiang Mai

Asia, Chiang Mai, Cover, Thailand, Travel
Jun 16, 2013

After a week of staying at the great Parami Guesthouse, I started asking around for the best places to stay around here. At PunSpace, the co-working space I work at, I kept hearing about Hillside Plaza, so I decided to have a look for myself. I found this amazing apartment at the Hillside Plaza 4 complex on Huay Kaew road, in the north-west of the city. Their cheapest room was 42m2 studio with a stunning view of Chiang Mai’s mountains in the west. It was only 14,000 baht per month (about 340 euros) and located on the road that connected straight to the Old City. The Old City is the center of the city, where you can find lots of food and bars and where the tourists hang out. The apartment was big, it had a pool and a fitness area. I checked in, paid the amount and moved into the room the next day.

The condo is fully furnished with a bedroom and kitchen while featuring an outdoor swimming pool, sauna, steam bath, spa and washing machines. And it’s only 14,000 THB or 340 euros per month. I thought that was cheap until I spoke with the girl working at the guesthouse when moving. She said she lived with her family in a house of 2,000 THB or 50 euros per month. Wow. Okay, so definitely room for improvement there.

It was good for awhile, I had a great mountain view of the west side of Chiang Mai towards the temple at Doi Suthep. But day by day, I found out everything was a bit torn down. It didn’t really look like the photos on their website at all.


The ground floor was the most striking of the building, it looked something from an indie movie where a huge desolate shopping mall from the 1950s was struck by a nuclear disaster where people immediately fled. There was empty store windows with mannequins staring hopelessly back at me, a communist-China looking restaurant with live music where old people sat, a deserted pool hall without pool tables but with round Las Vegas style couches with the covers torn. I actually liked walking around there, since it looked so absolutely fucking weird.

It wasn’t just the ground floor. When I started paying attention to the building’s details everything really was torn down. Somehow they managed to make it so that a prospective renter wouldn’t notice it at first. On the outside the building’s paint was scratched off and it was covered in smog and dust in many places.

It wasn’t just the building either, the people living here were hella weird. There was a 25-year old American next to me with a Thai wife who didn’t speak English, raising a 3-month old constantly crying baby in an apartment the size of a hotel room. It was ridiculous to see that while the rest of the building was filled with Japanese, Chinese and Australian sexpats. The entire building just breathed like bad shit happened here. You could feel it in the air.

And now I started seeing it in my room. Shit was broken. My shower was either excruciating hot or freezing cold. There was no middle ground. When I asked the front-desk to fix it, they obliged and sent in a Thai repair guy, who worked on it for 4 hours and then concluded by shouting FIXED. When in fact, he hadn’t actually changed a thing.

One thing was good though: the pool. I took a dive every day after waking up and it was great for my fitness and I quickly started building muscles after a month of swimming lanes.

I was planning on working home half the time and at PunSpace the other half. But that plan quickly crashed. After paying for a WiFi card at the Hillside Condo 4 for 700 THB (about 20 EUR), I found out the WiFi was completely unstable. Using my MacBook’s signal strength detector, I found it was only somewhat usable in the apartment building’s hallway or in the kitchen — if I had my door open. With no other option, I spent a month with my entire desk cramped into my kitchen and the apartment’s door open. Just to get a connection with the speed of a 28k8 modem. A bare situation.


I learned somethings from this experience:
(1) Always book an apartment for a day first to see how it actually is;
(2) Don’t ever trust the photos on the apartment building’s website in Thailand, they are probably heavily photoshopped;
(3) You’re not supposed to pay a rent of 14,000 THB in Chiang Mai, the locals pay 2,000 THB (50 EUR) per month for a whole house, pay accordingly. The maximum you pay should be around 7,000 THB (160 EUR).
(4) Apartments, hostels and hotels are interchangeable on this side of the world. With respect to the last point, it doesn’t differ so much in price or services if you stay in an apartment, hostel or hotel, since it’s all pretty much serviced and furnished renting. And if you ask the manager, you can actually book hotels/hostels for a month or more, while getting huge discounts (50% on the day rate is standard).
(5) Apartments are only rentable by at least a month or few months minimum, it decreases your flexibility and being flexible is probably one of the reasons you left the West to live here. In that respect a guesthouse/hostel/hotel is a better choice. That’s why I decided to live in a hotel after.

After 30 days, I couldn’t wait to get the hell out. They charged me 3,000 THB (75 EUR) extra for electricity usage, making the final tally 17,000 THB (400 EUR) for the most shitty apartment I have ever lived in.

I was glad to pack up and go for my visa run to Tachileik in Myanmar/Burma »

P.S. I'm on Twitter too if you'd like to follow more of my stories. And I wrote a book called MAKE about building startups without funding. See a list of my stories or contact me. To get an alert when I write a new blog post, you can subscribe below:

Subscribing you...
Subscribed! Check your inbox to confirm your email.

2022
18 Sep
This House Does Not Exist
2022
14 Jul
Sam Parr + Shaan Puri asked me about bootstrapping, open startups and lifestyle inflation (My First Million Podcast)
2022
16 May
Thinking and doing for yourself (Life Done Differently Podcast)
2022
10 May
Relocation of remote workers (Building Remotely Podcast)
2022
26 Jan
Money, happiness and productivity as a solo founder (Indiehackers Podcast)
2022
20 Jan
Bootstrapping, moving to Portugal and setting up Rebase (Wannabe Entrepreneur Podcast)
2021
25 Mar
Why I'm unreachable and maybe you should be too
2021
25 Mar
The next frontier after remote work is async
2021
19 Mar
List of all my projects ever
2021
08 Mar
Why coliving economics still don't make sense
2021
14 Feb
Inflation Chart: the stock market adjusted for the US-dollar money supply
2021
10 Jan
I did a live 4+ hour AMA on Twitch w/ @roxkstar74
2020
20 Dec
No one should ever work
2020
10 Dec
Normalization of non-deviance
2020
05 Dec
Copywriting for entrepreneurs: explain your product how you'd explain it to a friend
2020
30 Nov
Entrepreneurs are the heroes, not the villains
2020
12 Nov
The future of remote work: how the greatest human migration in history will happen in the next ten years
2020
05 Nov
Will millions of remote workers become location independent in 2021?
2020
11 Apr
5 years in startups with Abadesi
2020
11 Jan
Twitter giveaways can be hacked to win every time
2019
16 Oct
Lorn - The Slow Blade ✕ Hong Kong
2019
28 Sep
Most decaf coffee is made from paint stripper
2019
12 Sep
The odds of getting a remote job are less than 1% (because everyone wants one)
2019
08 Sep
In the future writing actual code will be like using a pro DSLR camera, and no code will be like using a smartphone camera
2019
29 Aug
Instead of hiring people, do things yourself to stay relevant
2019
28 Aug
Nobody cares about you after you're dead and the universe destroys itself
2019
28 Aug
The only real validation is people paying for your product
2019
05 Aug
Monitoring Bali's undersea internet cable
2019
29 Jul
Nomad List turns 5
2018
29 Jan
I'm Product Hunt's Maker of the Year again!
2018
28 Jan
Why Korean Jimjilbangs and Japanese Onsens are great
2018
24 Jan
Turning side projects into profitable startups
2018
03 Jan
What I learnt from 100 days of shipping
2017
28 Dec
As decentralized as cryptocurrency is: so will be the people working on it
2017
22 Oct
How to 3d scan any object with just your phone's camera
2017
09 Aug
In a world of outrage, mute words
2017
03 Aug
How to pack for world travel with just a carry-on bag
2017
26 Jul
Building a startup in public: from first line of code to frontpage of Reddit
2017
24 Jul
Facebook and Google are building their own cities: the inevitable future of private tech worker towns
2017
21 Jul
The TL;DR MBA
2017
12 Jul
We did it! Namecheap has introduced 2FA
2017
08 Jun
It's about time for a digital work permit for remote workers
2017
23 May
Using Uptime Robot to build unit tests for the web
2017
08 May
Namecheap still doesn't support 2FA in 2017 (update: they do now!)
2017
03 May
Taipei is boring, and maybe that's not such a bad thing
2017
16 Apr
What we can learn from Stormzy about transparency
2017
17 Feb
The ICANN mafia has taken my site hostage for 2 days now
2017
10 Feb
Most coworking spaces don't make money; here's how they can adapt to survive the future
2017
11 Jan
A society of total automation in which the need to work is replaced with a nomadic life of creative play
2017
07 Jan
Nomad List Founder
2016
12 Dec
Make your own Olark feedback form without Olark
2016
29 Oct
How to fix flying
2016
19 Oct
Robots make mistakes too: How to log your server with push notifications straight to your phone
2016
17 Oct
Hong Kong Express - 上海 (Shanghai)
2016
17 Oct
Choosing entrepreneurship over a corporate career
2016
13 Oct
"I can't buy happiness anymore. I've bought everything that I ever wanted. There's not really anything I want anymore."
2016
11 Oct
From web dev to VR: How to get started with VR development
2016
05 Oct
What I would do if I was 18 now
2016
22 Sep
Bootstrapping Side Projects into Profitable Startups
2016
27 Aug
Kids
2016
13 Aug
How I cured my anxiety (mostly)
2016
26 Jul
We have an epidemic of bad posture
2016
17 Jul
Fixing "Inf and NaN cannot be JSON encoded" in PHP the easy way
2016
26 Jun
My third time in a float tank and practicing visualizing the future
2016
15 Jun
How to add shareable pictures to your website with some PhantomJS magic
2016
29 May
My chatbot gets catcalled
2016
19 May
From web dev to 3d: Learning 3d modeling in a month
2016
09 Mar
My second time in a sensory deprivation chamber
2016
04 Mar
Day 30 of Learning 3d 🎮 Cloning objects 👾👾👾
2016
02 Mar
Day 29 of Learning 3d 🎮 Glass, reflectives, HD, coloring and more details
2016
29 Feb
Day 27 of Learning 3d 🎮 Details, details, DETAILS!
2016
25 Feb
Day 23 of Learning 3d 🎮 Filling up the street and adding shadows
2016
24 Feb
Day 22 of Learning 3d 🎮 Added rain, blinking lights, sound, textured menu sign and a VR web app
2016
23 Feb
Day 21 of Learning 3d 🎮 High res textures, physical rendering and ambient occlusion
2016
22 Feb
Day 20 of Learning 3d 🎮 Objects and camera perspectives 🙆
2016
19 Feb
My first time floating in a sensory deprivation tank ☺️
2016
12 Feb
Day 10 of Learning 3d 🎮 Making complex objects by combining shapes 🙆
2016
06 Feb
Day 4 of Learning 3d: @shoinwolfe visits the actual street I'm modeling 🏮😎🏮
2016
03 Feb
Day 1 of Learning 3d 🎮 I learnt how to make shapes, move, rotate and scale them + how to texturize, and add colored lights 💆
2016
02 Feb
I'm Learning 3d 🎮
2016
27 Jan
The things I have to do to read an email sent to me by my government
2016
12 Jan
How to use your iPhone as a better Apple TV alternative (with VPN)
2015
23 Dec
Here's a crazy idea: automatically pause recurring subscription of users when you detect they aren't actually using your app
2015
17 Dec
Stop calling night owls lazy, we're not
2015
16 Dec
We are the heroes of our own stories
2015
25 Oct
There will be 1 billion digital nomads by 2035
2015
21 Oct
Tobias van Schneider interviewed me about everything
2015
18 Oct
Why doesn't Twitter just asks its users to pay?
2015
17 Oct
Punk died the moment we learnt that the world WAS in fact getting better, not worse
2015
15 Oct
Stop being everyone's friend
2015
14 Oct
Vaporwave is the only music that fits the feeling futuristic Asian mega cities give me
2015
09 Sep
We live in a world built by dead people
2015
01 Sep
Why global roaming data solutions don't make any sense
2015
26 Aug
How to export your Slack's entire archive as HTML message logs
2015
24 Aug
How to play GTA V on your MacBook (and any other PC game)
2015
14 May
I uploaded 4 terabyte over Korea's 4G, and paid $48
2015
08 May
How I sped up Nomad List by 31% with SPDY, CloudFront and PageSpeed
2015
04 May
My weird code commenting style based on HTML tags
2015
01 May
Now is probably the time to make HTTPS the default on all your sites and apps
2015
17 Apr
Do the economics of remote work retreats make any sense?