Serving Visitors to Northern Thailand
since 1986

Greetings from the Editors

Once upon a time, well, at least 17 years ago, two lifetime partners fell in love with their adopted hometown, being Chiangmai, of course. The friends who came to visit the couple were delighted to be led to the favorite sight-seeing spots, markets and shopping that Goson and Margaret Bhadungzong shared with them. At that time Chiangmai also though over 650 years old was still in the early stages of tourism. What the province needed was an easy to use publication with lots of tips on local culture events, sights and all that make up a fun-filled holiday. Creating a magazine with maps and recommendations of reliable businesses seemed to be the natural thing to do to present our hometown in its best light.

At this time "Welcome to Chiangmai and Chiangrai" magazine enters its 18th year of serving the public. How to bring the glories of Lanna to those less lucky than us has always been a difficult task, for the circulation of hard copies of a magazine such as ours can only reach a limited readership, and the advent of information technology has been a godsend.

This allowed us to create our own informative website at www.chiangmai-chiangrai.com, which is now in its seventh year. The Internet lets us easily and quickly inform the world about Thailand's magical north. In October 2003, our website received a record number of 104,000 hits per week.

Our publication is, of course, driven by our many advertisers, and we give you heartfelt thanks for your invaluable support. This support demonstrates your faith in us and this to continue gives us the confidence to continue to expand and improve our magazine. It gives us faith in the value of our magazine and shows it is reaching a wide spectrum of readers. Our readers too, and particularly our subscribers, are always in our thoughts. You do so much to help us improve our magazine through your many useful comments. We thank you for all that you do.

Every year has its challenges which we cannot foresee. We look forward to it and hope you will join us somewhere along the way. All we can say for sure is that we will do our best to keep you informed and entertained and to "Welcome" you to Chiangmai and Chiangrai.

With warm regards,
Goson & Margaret Bhadungzong