About Roadside Thailand
Roadside Thailand is an open atlas of the strange, the seasonal, and the overlooked — the Thailand most tourists never see. Think Roadside America meets Atlas Obscura, pointed squarely at Thailand.
Your hosts: Mon-chan & Cinnamon 🐕🐿️
Every atlas needs guides, and ours are Mon-chan, a tan Shiba Inu in an olive paisley bandana, and his best friend Cinnamon, a squirrel who never lets go of his acorn. They travel Thailand together, photographing every odd corner they can sniff out.
Mon-chan is the leader — and a little obsessed with it. He's the biggest and fuzziest, so anything bigger or fuzzier (teddy bears, snow monsters, a giant Buddha) makes him insecure: "I don't like him." He was built by a machine and occasionally misses his "big cold metal mother," and when something thrills him he throws his head back and barks "YEAH!" Cinnamon is the sub-leader: he loves nuts, chatters ("chk-chk!"), and bounces up and down when he's excited. Both of them can transform into things, which they do at the worst moments. The camera roll and captions you see across the site? All theirs. ✌️
Why it exists
Most guides send you to the same temples, castles, and skylines. This is for everything else: the giant roadside Buddha, the museum of parasites, the village of scarecrows, the hillside that turns blue for two weeks a year, the festival nobody wrote about. The goal is a single feeling, over and over:
"I had no idea this existed."
How it works
- Browse & filter. Combine filters by season, theme, cost, effort, accessibility and more on the Explore page, or roam the map.
- Seasonal first. Many discoveries only exist for a short window. Filter by the current month, a specific season, or what's in season now.
- Anyone can contribute. Submit a place — no account needed — and it enters a review queue.
- AI helps curate. A research assistant can find candidates, draft entries with sources and a confidence score, and propose them for human approval.
The repository is the database
There's no server and no hidden database. Every place is a small Markdown file in a public Git repository, validated against a strict schema. That makes the whole atlas transparent, version-controlled, forkable, and easy for both humans and AI agents to edit. The website is generated from those files and served as static pages — fast, cheap, and resilient.
Built to last
Roadside Thailand is designed to be developed primarily by AI agents over a long time. Architecture, data model, and contribution workflows are documented in the repository so any capable agent can pick up where the last left off. It's a passion project, not a tour company.
Credits & license
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Content CC BY-SA 4.0 · Code MIT. Found an error? Open an issue or comment on any page — corrections are welcome and easy to make.