🤪 Weird

📍 Aichi, Nagoya 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Sauna Fuji — Sakae's Retro Capsule-and-Cold-Pool Sauna

A men-only capsule hotel and sauna deep in downtown Nagoya's Sakae district, built around a startling 20-meter, 110cm-deep cold plunge pool and 368 stacked capsule rooms, all wrapped in a lovingly kept Showa-era retro atmosphere.

📍 Baden-Württemberg, Abstatt 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

The Rällinge of Abstatt

Thirty-nine oversized painted tomcat sculptures scattered across a small Swabian wine town, each hand-decorated by a different local club or business, born from a folk legend about lovesick young men who used to meow under women's windows.

🌲 Nature

Bua Tong Sticky Waterfalls

A waterfall you climb UP, barefoot, with no ropes: the mineral limestone is so grippy your feet stick to it even under flowing water — one of the strangest physical sensations in Thailand, and completely free.

📍 Chiang Mai, Mae Taeng 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

📍 Bangkok, Bangkok 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Khlong Toei Market

Bangkok's largest and rawest fresh market — a sprawling, chaotic maze where the city's restaurants buy their produce, seafood still flips on the ice, and the sights and smells are as intense as Thai market life gets.

⛩️ Shrine & Temple

Wat Bang Kung (The Temple in the Tree)

A small Ayutthaya-era ordination hall completely swallowed by the roots of four enormous banyan and bodhi trees — the living wood now forms the temple's outer walls, with a Buddha image glowing in the green gloom inside.

📍 Samut Songkhram, Bang Khonthi 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

🏚️ Abandoned

Sathorn Unique Tower (The Ghost Tower)

A 49-storey luxury skyscraper abandoned half-built during the 1997 financial crash — now a hauntingly empty concrete shell looming over central Bangkok, one of the world's most famous unfinished buildings.

📍 Bangkok, Bangkok 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

📍 Nakhon Pathom, Sam Phran 🎫 Donation ⏱ Half day

Wat Samphran (The Dragon Temple)

A 17-story bubblegum-pink cylindrical tower with an enormous green dragon coiled around its full height — and the dragon is hollow: its body is the staircase to the roof.

🦊 Animals

Bangkok Snake Farm (Queen Saovabha Institute)

The world's second-oldest antivenom facility — a working Red Cross research centre where you can watch live venom-extraction shows and meet cobras, vipers, and king cobras in the heart of the city.

📍 Bangkok, Bangkok 🎫 Varies ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Cabbages & Condoms

A genuinely good Thai restaurant with a cheeky mission — decorated entirely in condoms (mannequins, lampshades, a 'Captain Condom' figure), with all profits funding a long-running rural family-planning and development charity.

📍 Bangkok, Bangkok 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Chang Chui (The Plane Night Market)

A creative-junkyard market built around a full-size decommissioned airliner, with sculpture made from scrap, a skull-themed bar, indie food stalls, and an art-school sense of glorious mischief.

📍 Samut Prakan, Samut Prakan 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Erawan Museum

A three-headed bronze elephant fourteen stories tall standing on a pink museum building — you climb a spiral staircase inside a hind leg into the elephant's belly, which holds a stained-glass cosmos.

Jay Fai

A 70-something street cook in ski goggles, working two flaming charcoal woks on a Bangkok sidewalk — and holder of a Michelin star. Her crab omelette and drunken noodles draw queues for hours.

📍 Bangkok, Bangkok 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Jek Pui Curry Rice (The Tableless Curry)

A 70-year-old Chinatown curry stall with no tables at all — you grab a red plastic stool on the pavement, balance your plate on your lap, and eat elbow-to-elbow with strangers. Locals call it 'musical chairs curry.'

📍 Samut Songkhram, Samut Songkhram 🆓 Free ⏱ Half day

Maeklong Railway Market

A produce market built directly on active train tracks: eight times a day a train rolls through at walking pace, vendors snap their awnings back in seconds, and the stalls re-open before the last carriage has passed.

🏛️ Museum

Museum of Counterfeit Goods

A law firm's private museum displaying thousands of seized fakes — counterfeit watches, medicines, car parts, liquor and electronics — side by side with the genuine articles, in a fascinating gallery of forgery.

📍 Bangkok, Bangkok 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Na Oh (Dining Inside a Grounded Airplane)

A high-concept restaurant built inside a decommissioned airliner at the Chang Chui creative park — a moody, post-apocalyptic 'survival' dining room where a set menu is served amid the salvaged fuselage.

📍 Krabi, Ao Nang 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Phra Nang Princess Cave

A seaside grotto on a stunning Krabi beach crammed with hundreds of carved and painted wooden phalluses — offerings to a sea princess spirit from fishermen seeking safe passage and a good catch.

📍 Nong Khai, Nong Khai 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Sala Kaew Ku Sculpture Park

A riverside field of towering, surreal concrete deities — a seven-headed naga, a wheel of life, and a 25-metre Buddha — built by a self-taught mystic who blended Hindu and Buddhist visions into one of Asia's strangest sculpture gardens.

📍 Chonburi, Pattaya 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

The Sanctuary of Truth

A 100-meter-plus monument on the Pattaya shoreline built entirely of carved wood — no nails, every surface a sculpture — under construction since 1981 and deliberately never finished, with carvers working live as you walk through.

🏛️ Museum

Siriraj Medical Museum (The Death Museum)

A cluster of medical museums inside Bangkok's oldest hospital — pathology, forensics, anatomy and parasitology galleries lined with preserved specimens, including the infamous mummified remains of a 1950s murderer.

📍 Trat, Ko Kut 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

Treepod Dining at Soneva Kiri

On a remote island, you climb into a woven bamboo pod shaped like a weaver bird's nest and are hoisted metres up into the rainforest canopy — while a waiter delivers each course by zip-lining through the trees.

📍 Bangkok, Bangkok 🎫 Varies ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Unicorn Café

A gloriously over-the-top pastel fever dream off Silom — rainbow everything, a wall of plush unicorns, sparkly unicorn onesies to borrow, and rainbow spaghetti and candyfloss drinks served under a haze of glitter.

⛩️ Shrine & Temple

Wat Pariwat (The David Beckham Temple)

A working Bangkok temple whose ornate decoration hides pop-culture cameos — most famously a small gilded figure of footballer David Beckham among the traditional guardians at the base of the main altar.

📍 Bangkok, Bangkok 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

📍 Chiang Rai, Chiang Rai 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Wat Rong Khun (The White Temple)

A blinding all-white temple encrusted in mirror fragments, built by one artist as a lifetime project — you enter over a bridge crossing a pit of grasping sculpted hands, and the murals inside hide superheroes among the demons.

📍 Oita, Beppu 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

The Hells of Beppu (Jigoku Meguri)

A tour of seven boiling, steaming, technicolor hot springs you absolutely cannot bathe in — cobalt-blue, blood-red, and one with crocodiles — where the only thing you soak is an egg.

🏛️ Museum

Meguro Parasitological Museum

A tiny, free, two-floor museum dedicated entirely to parasites — home to a preserved 8.8-metre tapeworm and a gift shop selling parasite keychains. Tokyo's most gleefully strange date spot.

📍 Tokyo, Meguro 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

📍 Tokyo, Kuramae 🎫 Varies ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Kakimori

A Kuramae stationery shop where you hand-pick the cover, paper, binding, and closure to build a one-of-a-kind notebook — plus a spin-off next door where you mix your own custom fountain-pen ink.