So, my sorting of digital photographs continues, and working backwards in time I’ve reached early 2014. One of my objectives is to make sure directories are properly named, so I can find images of specific places more easily. Naming the directory based on when I visited a place – as I have done in the past – doesn’t really help me to know where I was. And if I visited several places in one day, having all the images lumped in together is not helpful at all.

Anyhoo, I found photos of a place I visited last January, and I couldn’t remember the full name. “I’ll check my blog” I thought. But to my surprise, there’s no article. And I think there should be, so here it is…

Tootling around the area of Nakhon Si Thammarat, I found a place about thirty kilometers west of the city called the Mueang Nakhon Reception House. It was built to receive members of the royal family any time they were visiting the city. And the rest of the time it’s open to the public.

Like most interesting places I find, it was devoid of visitors. Entry is free of charge, but it’s necessary to register at the security gate, and from the book, I could see I was only the third visitor in a month.

That’s a shame. It’s nice peaceful place, with pleasant gardens. The buildings are nothing too exciting, but even so, it was worth an hour of my time to wander around enjoying the ambiance.

Knowing how revered the royal family is in Thailand, I’m surprised not more Thais make a trip out from the city. Perhaps that’s because there’s no promotion. I did mention it to a few people, and they’d either never heard of the place, or they vaguely knew of it but had no idea where it was.

Now I need to check more carefully to see if I’ve accidentally skipped more places. I think I know how this happened though. Last January I was busy preparing for the move from Malaysia to Thailand. My trips here were more like business trips to arrange accommodation and the like, so any touring I did was brief, and quickly forgotten. I can see that the images below were taken with my iPhone camera, so it would seem I didn’t have my trusty Canon DSLR with me.

I think sometime soon I’ll visit again, with Canon, and hopefully on a sunny day. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with these, while I look for more…