e spend the first night of our five-day road trip through northern Thailand in a clear plastic bubble. You know, when kids blow bubbles with plastic wands, and sometimes they stick together as they float away? Our suite looks something like that, set on a wooden deck. We enter through an opaque “airlock” of thick pistachio-green polyester, where our butler advises, “Make sure one door always stays closed, otherwise the whole thing will collapse.” Swallowing my fear of suffocation, I follow my wife, Yupin, into the bedroom, a transparent dome that arcs to its apex above a curtained four-poster bed. Attached to this is a smaller bubble, also opaque, also pistachio, that contains the bathroom and all the amenities of our “day” room back in the main building of the Anantara Golden Triangle Elephant Camp & Resort. The point of these so-called Jungle Bubbles (of which there are three, set in their own forest clearing) is to remove visual barriers between
