Luxury Travel to Chiang Rai

The Thai end of the infamous Golden Triangle lost its edge with the cessation of the drug trade and a booming tourist industry. With the advent of the luxury chain Four Seasons Golden Triangle, it just about enables you to say that you'd gone 'camping in the Golden Triangle'. Although no one has to know of course, that it was The Four Seasons.

Come March every year, there's an elephant polo tournament at the Anantara Chiang Rai, one of the two properties Urbane Nomads facilitates in this area. The tournament is a social event and non-players (guests of Anantara) are welcomed to watch the tournament at the pitch where a picnic lunch will be served daily for the entire period of the tournament.

For the year 2009, Urbane Nomads is organizing an extension from Chiang Rai, coinciding with the Elephant Polo tournament. Complete your journey of the Golden Triangle by crossing over to the Burmese end, and then hop on a private jet to Putao, quite the version of paradise on earth, it being an area where the lush jungles of Myanmar coincide with the cool climes and mountainscapes of the Himalayas. Enquiries for private departures by private jet are also welcome.

Luxury travel in Chiang Rai is certainly spearheaded by the Four Seasons (whose tented camp in the Golden Triangle is surely one of its signature outposts) and the Anantara and a luxury tour of Thailand would best include the northern areas of Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai.