The last visa approval came through yesterday. Five Destination Thailand Visas: mine, Lindsay's, and one each for Lily, Cora, and Harper. After four years of tourist stamps and onward flights booked to keep immigration officers happy, a country has handed us permission to stay. We are spending that permission on a house in Chiang Mai, for at least a year.

There is some irony here. We once published a post arguing that Vietnam had overtaken Thailand as Southeast Asia's top digital nomad destination. Thailand appears to have taken offense and issued us five visas.

What Is the Thailand DTV?

The DTV, or Destination Thailand Visa, is a five year, multiple entry visa that Thailand launched in July 2024. Each entry gives you 180 days, and you can extend a stay once at a local immigration office for another 180, which puts close to a full year in the country within reach before you need to cross a border. The fee is 10,000 baht per person.

We applied under the Workcation category, which covers remote workers and freelancers earning their income outside Thailand. A family travel blog run from a laptop qualifies. You cannot work for Thai companies or take on Thai clients, and the financial bar is bank statements showing at least 500,000 baht that has been sitting in the account for three months or more. Applications go through the official e-visa portal, and you have to be outside Thailand when you file, which we handled from here in Da Nang.

How Do DTV Applications Work for a Spouse and Kids?

I applied first. Dependent applications ask for the primary holder's approved visa, so Lindsay and the girls could not file until mine came back. Once it did, we submitted four more applications through the same portal, each one as the spouse or child of a DTV holder, and each with its own 10,000 baht fee. Thailand does not do family discounts.

Then came the stretch of days where you refresh an inbox and pretend you are not refreshing an inbox. Yesterday the last approval landed, and the whole family was accounted for.

Why Chiang Mai for a Year?

We love Chiang Mai. We spent three months of last summer there and walked the old city until we knew the moat by its corners, and the girls still bring up the night markets. It sits high on the digital nomad lists for reasons that hold up, and the cost of living helps. The draw this time is duller than temples and night markets, though. We want an address.

Three girls sit inside a tuk tuk at night in Chiang Mai, lit by blue LED strips, with one girl lying down across the seat and two others sitting across from her looking tired.
Three girls, one tuk tuk, no energy left. A standard Chiang Mai exit.

And there is the khao soi. Egg noodles in a coconut curry broth with a tangle of crispy fried noodles on top, pickled mustard greens and lime on the side. It is the family's favorite meal, and the girls treat a bowl of it as a personal event: headphones on, forks up. A year of eating it a short walk from our own front door factored into this decision more than a visa post should admit.

Cora sits at a restaurant table in Chiang Mai, wearing red headphones and grinning with her mouth open as she lifts a forkful of khao soi noodles from a bowl, with a small side dish of condiments next to it and a globe lamp visible in the background.
Cora and her khao soi. She did not wait for the photo.

Since May 2022 we have lived out of rentals measured in weeks. We learned to slow down a while ago, but slow is still moving. A house means a kitchen we stock for more than the current week, and a doorway where the girls' heights get penciled in. It means unpacking all ten checked bags at once and finding out what has been living at the bottom of bag seven since Osaka.

Can You Do Orthodontics While Traveling Full Time?

Cora needs a palate expander, and a palate expander needs a family that stays put. An orthodontist fits the appliance, then adjusts it over months of short appointments, widening the upper jaw a fraction at a time. The treatment assumes the patient will keep showing up at the same office, which is a promise our lifestyle could not make until now. It went on the list of things a year in one house would solve, and it sat near the top of that list.

Chiang Mai has a strong reputation for dental care at prices that do not require a payment plan and a stiff drink. Cora can start with one dentist and finish with the same one, and we can stop treating her teeth as a scheduling problem.

The Bikes

The girls have been asking for bikes for a couple of years. The answer has been some version of "where would we put them." Our family of five moves across borders with ten checked bags, and a bike does not fold into any of them, so the request followed us from city to city and we gave the same apologetic no in each one.

A house changes the answer. Somewhere to park a bike is most of what you need to own one. Once we have the keys, we are buying three, and I suspect we will spend our first week in Chiang Mai on a quiet soi, walking behind three new cyclists.

The visas run five years, and the plan for the house is at least one, though the first month in Chiang Mai goes to apartment hunting rather than moving in. We leave again after that for Europe and a transatlantic cruise out of Barcelona at the end of October, with a week at Disney with Lindsay's family waiting on the other side of the Atlantic. We fly back into Chiang Mai once that is done.

We have since made the move. The application timeline, what the five visas actually cost us, and what Bangkok immigration did with them are all in our write-up of the flight from Da Nang to Chiang Mai. The bikes and the first orthodontist appointment still have to wait on keys.

Flying Into Thailand on a DTV: Da Nang to Chiang Mai With Eight Bags Chiang Mai Walking Tour: Family Itinerary and Budget Guide Da Nang: An Honest Update Slow Travel: How We Learned to Stop Moving and Love Staying Put

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