Set amidst emerald-green rice fields and lush orchards, Khum Lanna gives you a luxurious home-stay experience combined with a cooking school specialising in traditional Northern Thai cuisine. A celebration of heritage, food and lifestyle, the Culinary & Wellness programme combines cultural exchanges with local communities with Thai cooking classes, herbal steam baths and massages.

Northern Laos especially presents many great trekking opportunities. Not only is the terrain very mountainous and largely swathed in forest, it is also home to a dazzling array of highly colourful minority tribal people who still pursue the traditional slash and burn (swidden) farming methods, unchanged for a thousand years.

Thailand's cultural and social roots are firmly set in the countryside, in fact, when Mahatma Gandhi said of his home country "... the real India is in the villages". He could just as easily have been referring to Thailand, a country whose political and cultural birth was in the "million rice fields" of the ancient Lanna Thai Kingdom.

A deluxe, live on board cruise across South East Asia's largest freshwater lake, the Tonle Sap, is an ideal way to explore hidden parts of Cambodia at a deliciously relaxed pace while travelling between the must-see destinations of Angkor Wat and Phnom Penh.