Other Regions

There are a number of other regions where expats sometimes reside, which are briefly covered below.

Riverside

Many expats request a romantic river view. This is generally included as part of our Zone E.

However, you should know that the Bangkok riverside does not have any significant parks, nor bicycle/jogging trails along the river, nor much shopping along the river, nor anything like rivers in other parts of the world. The river is mostly lined with old established Thai homes and buildings with walls ...

... though there are also many luxury tourist hotels, highrise condominiums and apartments with scenic views of the river traffic, and piers to take the boat to the skytrain station (and other locations along the river).

We know the choice places along the river, with the nicest views, transport, and other conveniences. There are some charming locations.

You can commute by boat, but do be aware that the boats are slow, so that if you get far from the Taksin Bridge skytrain station, then you will probably prefer taxis or driving.

If you choose to live on the river, we can help you analyze the relative benefits of different areas and buildings, as well as the tradeoffs, for longterm living.

Aree and Phahonyothin

This area is down the skytrain line towards the northern end, on the same rail as Sukhumvit but going the opposite way.

Victory Monument is the bus transportation hub of Bangkok public transport. You can go just about anywhere in the greater Bangkok metro region from Victory Monument. However, it's an old and crowded area, and few expats live here. If they need to bus somewhere, they take the skytrain to the Victory Monument station.

North of Victory Monument, the skytrain goes atop Phahonyothin Road. It is an old area. However, around the Aree station is an area with some expats and ecclectic shops, a combination of new highrise buildings and quite a number of old houses in the back roads. It appeals to ecclectic expats, as well as those who need to drive north down the Vipawadi-Rangsit expressway but who want to be next to the skytrain.

Many United Nations people lived there due to the reasonable taxi commute to the U.N. main building and surrounding branches, before the skytrain opened around New Year 2000. Now, many U.N. people live on Sukhumvit and take the skytrain and then a taxi to/from work.

Further north, the skytrain ends at the Mochit station, not far from a highrise area which has many oil and gas companies (near the Thai PTT oil and gas company building) and which has a few highrise condominium buildings.

Vipawadi-Rangsit Expressway, and Pathum Thani

There are a few neighborhoods and condos along the Vipawadi-Rangsit Expressway, though this is not a popular area until we get up to Pathum Thani, where you can find lots of housing neighborhoods at most economical prices. The down side is that it's quite a commute to the city center, so people who live out there tend to work in industrial estates to the north.

Ekamai - Ramindra

Jumping back towards the city center and a little bit east, if you go up Sukhumvit 63 aka Ekamai, several kilometers north, the expat area stops shortly before Petchburi Road, but Ekamai road keeps going north, and eventually an elevated expressway bends and rides above this road.

It is a fairly new road by Bangkok standards, and its name was difficult to remember when first created, so I gave it my own name so that expats would know what and where I was talking about. Since expats knew Ekamai, and the new (at the time) expressway ended at Ramindra Road (aka Ram Indra, the root), when the expressway first opened back around the year 2000, I just called it "the Ekamai - Ramindra expressway", wrote that on my websites, and spoke it everywhere in my professional circles. Funny, this name I created caught on, and now a lot of Thais as well as foreigners also call it the Ekamai-Ramindra Expressway -- a zillion websites now, just look in Google!

Around 2008, an extension of that expressway opened which linked it all the way to the East Ring Road, so that it no longer ends at Ramindra Road, but I'm not going to start calling it the Ekamai - *** Expressway.

The formal name is the Chalong Rat Expressway. Sometimes I refer to it by this formal name, and people often say "Which expressway is that?", so I reply "The Ekamai-Ramindra Expressway" and immediately they know it. Take your pick, but know both names if you plan to go to that area. (Maybe think of a long rat dancing the cha-cha-cha on the expressway, Tha Long Rat Expressway, Cha Long Rat ...) To further challenge expats, the ground level road underneath is called the Praditmanutham Road. I've lost that one after the 4th letter, and just called it Prad Road, similar to my surname.

There are a lot of new neighborhoods up there, but not so many expats yet. The new neighborhoods are populated mostly with very wealthy, high class Thai families. We have covered that area in detail since around 2002 when some of these new luxury neighborhoods were completed, and followed its growth, but it's simply not so popular among expats. It has a lot of unique charms, but not a lot of expats yet.

There are paved bicycle paths on both sides among greenery, and that's a nice way to tour many parts of it. I can tell you about the region in fairly fine detail, as I love it, especially a lot of the shops and restaurants, both on the main road as well as off side roads, many run by high society Thais who have lived and worked overseas. The neighborhoods themselves are towards the high end on prices and very strict on security, but the shopping and restaurants along there are fairly ecclectic in a fine way, with modern Thai-foreign fusion style.

Elsewhere

Actually, there are a lot of unique places in Bangkok. Being an explorer and travel enthusiast, and living here continuously as my base since 1994, I've been all over the greater Bangkok metropolitan region. Though I working as a consultant to property development companies since 1995 who planned and created a lot of these neighborhoods and shopping areas, that's a very small part of what I knew, though it did help me understand the technical and organizational issues with properties.

Thais have an artistic nature as well as an ability to adopt foreign design concepts and merge them together. The diversity is wonderful.

The main problem is that the vast majority of expats have commutes to work and/or school, or want to live in areas where there are other expats, and my solutions must accommodate the customers needs and preferences, not my own.

This is why the website zones reflect the main expat areas, and the database reflects mainly the properties are in the main expat areas.

There are a lot of other areas which I love and can show, but I do not promote them on the website simply because they're not in enough demand to be economical to promote, so hobby must be separated from business. Also, all my staff are very much focused on the most popular areas, and they do the vast majority of the surveying.

Nonetheless, if you have particular needs, you can go ahead and run them past me.

SiteMap > Our Zones, Regions > Other Regions