Just for the sake of fun and comparison I have in the past done a "contest" of sorts between Thailand and Vietnam. I have called these two countries my home for the past 2 decades and Vietnam is the more recent one.
I didn't mean to live in Vietnam, I was initially only meant to be here long enough for Thailand to allow me visas again but then Covid happened and now my dog is too old to relocate again. I have become used to living here in Vietnam, you could say, and the times that I do go back to visit Thailand I am always trying to see if it appeals to me enough for me to want to return there, which is always an option but will become a lot more easy once I turn old enough to qualify for the retirement visa.
This last trip to Phuket, and area that I have always told people is just outstanding. The reason for this is that the entire island's coast is basically a postcard of natural beauty. No matter which beach you go to it is going to be outstanding. Who doesn't like that? As someone who has spent a lot of time living at and being near the shore, I appreciate good beaches and would like to be near them.
I feel this way despite the fact that I rarely ever get into the water . A good view is just a nice thing to have access to, wouldn't you agree?
I don't feel the same way about the beaches that I have been to in Vietnam, although I will admit I haven't been to a great many of them.
So Thailand definitely wins on the natural beauty of the beaches, especially in Phuket. But unfortunately, there is a very horrible side of Phuket as well as other areas with great beaches in that country and that is the fact that Thailand is BY FAR the most popular SE Asian country for tourists to travel to. Their numbers are astronomically higher than Vietnam or anyone else in the region, to the point where it isn't really a competition at all. Thailand has something insane like 10x the amount of annual visitor than any other countries and this leads to one of the things that I dislike the most in the world: Places being crowded.
it is just a fact of life that if there is something that is beautiful the people are going to flock to it until it is no longer enjoyable because of the masses of people that are there. This is unfortunate, but particularly in a place that is as affordable as SE Asia, people are going to flock there in droves and this results in crowds that are maddeningly huge. For me, I honestly don't care what the attraction is, if a place is this crowded, I don't want to be there.
This is something that I just kind of took in stride when I was living in Thailand because I never knew any differently. That's just the way that it always was and I suppose you could say I got used to it.
It took me several years of living in Vietnam to realize that there are lovely places that are cheap as well, that aren't just overrun with tourists all the time. Da Nang, despite having over a million people in it, is just a very nicely designed city. They got ahead of the curve, so to speak, and have roads that are actually much larger than they currently need to be. There is a neighborhood project about 10km down the road from me that has absolutely massive roads going through it even though almost nothing has been built there yet. Someone, somewhere, had the foresight to realize that while it isn't that way yet, it will be one day, and eventually those roads are going to need to be the size that they are.
In Phuket, I think they didn't really consider the logistics of millions of people when the island started growing at a very rapid rate and now there is no more land for them to build any way of getting people around. There just isn't a solution anymore other than to accept that you are going to be in traffic everywhere that you go.
I moved to this part of the world from a major metropolitan part of the United States with one of my primary objectives being to NEVER be involved in some sort of traffic grind as a part of my daily life. In Phuket, and most of the rest of Thailand, traffic is just unbelievably bad. It was so annoying that no matter what me and my friend were trying to do that it was going to involve and hour of time in the car, mostly sitting still waiting for lights to turn green. My friend regularly exhibited road rage, which is something that I had hoped would never be a part of my life again. That stress is just something that is horrible and I will never subject myself to living in that sort of environment again if I can help it. here's the thing though. I CAN help it. I don't have to live like that.
One thing that is very pleasing to me when I visit Thailand is that I can speak the Thai language better than perhaps 95% of all non-Thais on the earth. I can get anything done that I need to get done without ever finding that one staff member that can speak English. I have gotten into an argument with a police officer and won... twice. I think that is the true test of whether or not you can really speak a language.
Then there is the question of visas. I don't know what it is about Thailand's Immigration department, but they seem to loathe long-term foreign residents and are constantly changing the rules to make things more difficult or impossible to live there on a long-term basis. This has never made sense to me because they are simultaneously basically begging people to come there and spend money to boost their economy.
So which is it? Do you want us there or not? My initial reason for leaving the country in the first place was because I had grown tired of constantly searching for a new avenue of how I was going to be allowed to live there. After exhausting my visa options I just decided to bail on it all and go and live in another country for a couple of years.
For whatever reasons, this normally will get Thai immigration off your back for a few years.
In that time though, I have come to be quite comfortable here in Da Nang, and it took this last trip to make me realize that.
All this time I have just been sitting here waiting to be able to qualify for a visa in Thailand and as I get closer and closer to that date I am honestly starting to feel as though I don't really want to go back there anymore.
The next few years are going to be very telling because in the meantime despite not speaking any of the Vietnamese language, I am able to have a pretty easy life here. Smartphones and translator apps have made it so you don't really NEED to speak the language of the country that you are in. I have never found myself in a situation that I was totally screwed because I don't speak Vietnamese but when I first moved to Thailand smartphones didn't even exist. You either learned the local language or you were just lost all the time.
So, while I do have a fondness for Thailand and absolutely zero regrets about living there when I did, I am starting to lean towards perhaps not moving back there even though until recently I actually considered that my real home and Vietnam was just a temporary thing.
Now, I feel as though Vietnam is actually more conducive to long-term expat residents.