Travel08 / 12
ExploreLanta
A bilingual discovery platform for Koh Lanta, Thailand
- Status
- In development
- Period
- 2026 →
- Role
- Design and development, end to end
- For
- Travellers planning or living a stay on Koh Lanta.
Problem
Travel information about a small island goes stale quickly and is scattered across social posts and old pages. Visitors need facts they can rely on, in their own language.
ExploreLanta is a planned guide to Koh Lanta. The discovery phase is done and a first end-to-end skeleton is being built on Astro and Cloudflare Workers.
Case study
The project is in active development. The discovery phase and the first walking skeleton (E1) are done, and the decisions are written down as seven ADRs.
The approach keeps facts in git and operational state in Cloudflare D1. Pages are served in two languages at request time, and data is extracted by a deterministic-first cascade that only calls Claude Haiku when the simple rules are not enough.
Architecture
Astro on Cloudflare Workers with D1, KV and R2, developed Docker-first on a local machine. Facts live in git, operational state in D1, and extraction runs as a deterministic-first cascade with Claude Haiku as the fallback.
Engineering decisions
- Facts in git and operational state in D1, so content is reviewable and history is kept.
- Bilingual pages generated at request time.
- Deterministic extraction first; the model is the fallback, not the default.
- Docker-first local development to match the deployment target.
Challenges & trade-offs
Keeping the guide trustworthy: every fact needs a source, and automatic extraction must never invent content.
Verified results
- Discovery phase and first walking skeleton (E1) complete
- 7 architecture decision records (ADRs 0001 to 0007)
Status labels are factual: nothing here is presented as more finished than it is.