Travel Happy

TravelHappy is a personal guide to travelling in Thailand and South East Asia written by me, Chris Mitchell. You can connect with me through TravelHappy’s Facebook page and on Twitter (I’m @travelhappy). Twitter in particular is one of my favourite ways of meeting new people.

I’m an experienced British freelance writer (15+ years) and I’ve been living in Bangkok, Thailand since 2004. Currently I write mainly for scuba diving magazines. (I also publish TravelHappy’s sister site DiveHappy.com, my personal guide to the best scuba diving in South East Asia). A book I’ve co-authored with my friend Jez Tryner, Thailand’s Underwater World, will be published in late 2011 by Marshall Cavendish. (He did the eyepopping photos – I did the text and came up with the general concept of the book, which is designed to appeal to divers and non-divers alike).

TravelHappy originally began as a way for me to pass on useful information about travelling in Thailand and Asia generally, so the site is a somewhat undisciplined mix of the practical and the personal. It’s definitely not a comprehensive guide – a guidebook is still your best bet for that. The focus is very much on Bangkok, where I live, and Thailand, but I try to find something worthwhile to highlight when I go elsewhere too. I still travel frequently within Asia, usually on short trips every couple of months.

Besides scuba diving, my other main motivations for travel are history – I love exploring ancient ruins and monuments (like Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Sukhothai in Thailand and Petra in Jordan) – taking photos, and meeting new people. Getting to write a story like Angkor, Bagan, Sukhothai: The Legacy for Asian Geographic magazine was my idea of travel-geek-research bliss.

As well as running my websites, I’m a Field Editor for Scuba Diver AustralAsia magazine and a regular contributor to Asian Diver magazine. I’ve also written for Sport Diver (USA), Scuba Diving, EZ Dive and Underwater Photography magazines, as well as CNNGo.com and Fah Thai and Tiger Tales in-flight magazines. I’m available for commissions and assignments.

Before leaving the UK in 2002 I previously worked for Vodafone, Future Publishing and Epic Multimedia. I wrote for a wide variety of national newspapers and magazines about Internet issues, including the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mirror and Evening Standard.

I’m also a PADI Speciality Scuba Diving Instructor (No. 629614), although I haven’t done any instructing for a long time. If you need recommendations for learning to scuba dive in Thailand, I unreservedly recommend my good friends Rob on Koh Lanta and Ayesha and Wilco on Koh Tao. They did their instructor course at the same time as me, but have remained instructors ever since. This means they are extremely experienced, having now certified thousands of divers between them, and they are also great people to hang out with.

Besides TravelHappy and DiveHappy, I publish SpikeMagazine.com, a long running website about books, culture and ideas. Spike is now edited by my good friend Jason Weaver.

You can email me at chris [at] travelhappy.info or leave a message in the comment box below. Your message will remain private as all comments are moderated before they are published.