In late 2010 my partner and I had just moved to Hua Hin, and we did what people did back then: we started a Blogspot. The header said it plainly — this is about our day to day living... for personal reference and also to help new people find great cheap, reliable and useful places in Hua Hin.
Personal reference. That was the honest part. We weren't building a travel guide. We were writing down what things cost so we'd remember, and so the next person off the train wouldn't get quoted double.
Pepperoni Pizza 170B, Basil & Pine Nut Pesto Linguine 170B, small Chang 60B, can of Lipton Ice Tea 30B, VAT 30B — Total 460B.
Sixteen years later that turns out to be the only kind of travel writing that ages well. Nobody needs my 2010 opinion of a pizza. But that receipt is a document. It's a snapshot of a country that no longer exists in quite that form.
What we wrote down
Over about five weeks in September and October 2010, we posted roughly twenty times. Reading the list back, the shape of it is unmistakable — it's the shape of two people solving the problem of arriving.
- Somewhere to sleep. Cha Am VIP Condo Chain, 10,000 baht a month, living room and bedroom, ocean view and a breeze.
- Somewhere to wash clothes. A nameless hole in the wall in the back streets — 3 baht a piece wash and dry, 5 baht if you wanted it ironed too. We called the post 3 Baht Laundry because we didn't know what else to call it.
- Something to ride. An automatic scooter, 200 baht a day, quoted at 3,500 a month, settled at 3,000. Pink, with a Hello Kitty badge, chosen for me by the woman who owned the shop. I did not get a vote.
- Somewhere to eat, over and over. Chicken rice at GO JONG — small shop but BIG taste — 30 baht normal, 40 special. A roadside place in Cha Am where two of us ate for 72 baht including drinks. Night vendors on Soi 55/2 that got busy around six. Sakura in Soi 94 for when we wanted Japanese. The Baguette on Phet Kasem for when, as I wrote at the time, “Thailand might have great food, but sometimes you just want something that tastes like home.”
And scattered through it, the Thai word of the day. Mai ao nung — no skin, for the chicken rice. Mai tong reed — no ironing. Ped / mai ped. We were teaching ourselves in public, badly, one transaction at a time.
The numbers, then and now
| 2010 (from the blog) | 2026 (indicative) | |
|---|---|---|
| Chicken rice, street plate | 30 B | 40–80 B is the normal street-food band in Hua Hin |
| Two-person roadside Thai meal, with drinks | 72 B | You will not do it for under about 150 B |
| Laundry, wash & dry | 3 B per piece | Per-piece pricing is essentially gone; it's per-kilo now |
| Scooter, monthly hire | 3,000 B negotiated | Shops still advertise 3,000 B/month for a base 110cc |
| One-bedroom, Cha-Am, sea view | 10,000 B/month | Portal listings put the local median well north of 15,000 B |
| Thai daily minimum wage | Under 200 B in this province | 337–400 B depending on province |
| Bangkok → Hua Hin by train | About four hours on a good day | Around three hours on the double track |
The scooter is the joke of the table. Sixteen years, a coup, a pandemic and a currency cycle later, and a basic automatic still rents for three thousand baht a month in Hua Hin. Everything else in that column roughly doubled. Two-wheeled transport just refused to participate.
The laundry is the real casualty. Three baht a shirt was not sustainable in 2010 either — it was a business run on volume and on rent that hadn't been repriced yet. The per-piece back-street laundry has mostly given way to per-kilo shops and coin machines, and the arithmetic that made 3 Baht Laundry worth a blog post doesn't exist anymore.
The nostalgia museum that became nostalgia
The very first thing we ever posted about was PlearnWan.
PlearnWan opened in 2009 on Phet Kasem Road — a whole wooden village built to look like Thailand in the late 1950s. Rusty mailboxes, an outdoor cinema, pinball machines, shophouse cafés. Bangkok families drove down at weekends to photograph themselves inside a decade they were mostly too young to remember. I described it, with the confidence of a man who had been in the country five minutes, as somewhere that would be “good for old people who born in that time.”
PlearnWan closed for good on 31 January 2020. The company told its tenants it was the economy. It had lasted a bit over a decade.
There's a neat, slightly cruel irony there. A place manufactured entirely out of longing for the past, itself now only accessible as a memory — and the people who are sentimental about it aren't the ones it was built for. They're Thais in their thirties who went there on a school trip. The 1950s theme park has become a 2010s theme park in absentia.
We got there in 2010 and thought it was a bit naff. It's the post from that month I'd most like to have taken more photographs of.
The station in the photo
The picture at the top of this piece is the Hua Hin station sign — in black on white, in that unmistakable red frame.
In 2010 I wrote a post recommending the train. Take it for a change of pace: cool breeze, fresh air, carts coming through selling food and drink. Downsides duly noted — the seats and the toilets on a long run. Tip: take the express, the ordinary train will eat your day.
That station stopped being a station on 11 December 2023. Operations moved next door to a new elevated terminal, part of the southern double-tracking project, and the 112-year-old building — with its four-gabled royal waiting pavilion — was handed over to the Fine Arts Department as a heritage site. It's a museum now. People still walk through it, because the way out to the taxis takes you past it, and it remains the most photographed object in the town.
So the sign in that photograph is still exactly where it was. It just doesn't mean the same thing. In 2010 it meant get off here. Now it means this is where people used to get off.
The trade was a good one, mostly. Three hours to Bangkok instead of four-plus, lifts, escalators, and seven kilometres of track lifted off the streets where it used to cut the town in half. Nobody who actually uses the train wants the old one back. But you can hold both thoughts.
Still standing
Some of it survived, and the pattern of what survived is not what I'd have predicted.
The Baguette is still there on Phet Kasem, and it's now several shops rather than one. The thing we wrote up as a small mercy for homesick farang — 25 baht for a croissant, air conditioning, actual bread — turned out to have a much bigger Thai customer base than we understood at the time. Two thousand reviews later, it is one of the more permanent institutions in town.
Khao Takiab hasn't gone anywhere, obviously. What's striking is what my 2010 post left out. I wrote about the steps, the view over Hua Hin and Pran Buri, the lack of shade in the afternoon, the beach to the south being good for sunrise. Not one word about monkeys. It is now, to most visitors, Monkey Mountain — that's what the restaurant at the bottom is called. Either the troop was smaller then or I simply wasn't looking, and I know which of those I'd bet on.
Pizza Corner on Soi 61, where Craig Mills first took us in 2007, doesn't turn up anywhere now. Chuan Chom, the very clean place off the freeway where a steak and chips was 190 baht and I gave it 75 out of 100, is still going. Hua Hin has more and better Italian food than it did — that end of Soi 94 is thick with it — but the specific room we sat in at Pizza Corner is gone, and there's no marker.
That's the ordinary attrition rate for small restaurants over sixteen years. It only feels remarkable because someone happened to write the prices down.
What the blog was actually for
We stopped posting after a few months, the way everyone did. The blog sat there.
What I notice re-reading it is that it isn't nostalgic at all. There's no reflection in it. It's twenty posts of a bloke working out how to live somewhere — where the cheap food is, how much you should pay for a bike, which train not to catch, how to say “no skin” so you get what you actually ordered. It's completely present-tense.
That's exactly why it works now. Nostalgia writing tells you how someone felt. A price list tells you what the world was. Three baht a shirt, thirty baht for chicken rice, ten thousand a month for a view of the sea, and a pink scooter I didn't choose.
I'm still here. Nineteen years in the country, a bit up the road in Cha-am. The trains are faster, the laundry is dearer, the nostalgia museum has closed and the station has become one. And the scooter, somehow, is still three thousand baht.
Original posts: livinghuahin.blogspot.com, September–October 2010. 2026 figures checked against: Hua Hin Today and the State Railway of Thailand on the new elevated station (opened 11 December 2023); Khaosod English and The Thaiger on the PlearnWan closure (31 January 2020); Thai Ministry of Labour minimum wage notifications; current Hua Hin rental shop and property portal listings. Present-day prices are indicative bands, not quotes.