Hey, I'm Andy.
Welcome to the blog the algorithm didn't ask for.
I was born and raised in Bangkok — which means I grew up fluent in two things: traffic, and the art of finding a good meal at 11pm. But it also means I grew up travelling. Every year, without fail, my family packed up and went somewhere. Nothing extravagant. Just enough to make me realise, somewhere around age nine, that the world outside Bangkok was unreasonably large and interesting.
That feeling never quite went away.
After university, I left Bangkok to study English, then kept going — all the way to a master's degree in Boston. Seven years in the US. Long winters, great libraries, and an embarrassing amount of time spent figuring out how the T works. Eventually I moved back to Thailand, spent years in an office (with the occasional work trip to Hong Kong, Singapore, China, and Japan to keep things interesting), then packed up again — this time to Canada.
So what is this blog, exactly?
Here's the honest version: it's a travel blog. But one with a slightly specific obsession.
Most travel content gravitates toward the same handful of cities. And look — I get it. Paris is Paris. Tokyo is Tokyo. But the places that have stuck with me longest aren't always the famous ones. They're the smaller cities, the secondary stops, the destinations that don't have their own hashtag yet — where you can actually wander without a queue, eat without a reservation, and feel like you stumbled onto something rather than booked it three months in advance.
That's what Off the Algorithm is about. It's about the alternatives. The places one step removed from the obvious. Towns that reward the traveller who digs a little deeper — not because they're secret, but because most people just don't think to look.
Why should you trust anything I write?
Fair question. I pay for all my own travel. No sponsored stays, no tourism board invites, no free tours in exchange for coverage. That means my opinions are mine — including the ones that aren't entirely glowing. If the accommodation was overpriced, I'll say so. If the crowd situation is genuinely bad, I won't bury that in paragraph seven.
I also don't write about places I haven't been. Every destination on this site is somewhere I've actually stood, eaten, gotten mildly lost in, and eventually figured out.
What you'll actually find here
Destination guides that don't pad the word count. Practical information — where to stay, how to get around, what to eat, when to go — written the way I'd explain it to a friend who asked. A bit of honesty about what's worth it and what isn't. And occasionally, a personal story from the road that I couldn't quite leave out.
If you're the kind of traveller who opens the map and looks slightly to the left of the obvious pin — you're in the right place.