Thai travels

Southern Thailand is everything that it says in the travel guides - long white sand beaches, stunning limestone karts, cheap beer, good food (think fresh crab & papaya salad, roast duck noodle soup, pad thai) and teeming with tourists. Teeming. If you are looking for a quiet idyllic retreat you need to be prepared to shell out the big bucks for a fancy resort or head down the road less travelled to some off-beat nook in Indonesia. Southern Thailand has been so thoroughly 'discovered' that even the backpackers have mostly moved on.

There is very little that is uniquely, culturally 'Thai' about Southern Thailand, unless you consider Thailand's exemplary ability relatively efficiently cater to first-world tourists in a third-world infrastructure. The South is not the more genteel cultural (but still touristy) destination of the North, it is unabashedly 100% for tourists, period.

There are probably more white people on any given beach in Thailand than on just about any given city street in London. It was utterly bizarre to so suddenly rejoin the ethnic majority.

The majority of tourists are German, French and British and as an American it's always refreshing to be reminded that not all Europeans are as refined and sophisticated as they would have you believe.  I saw more tramp-stamped, obese bikini-clad women, and coconut-oiled, flabby speedo-strutting men since my summers manning the snack bar at the local public pool.  This is the Ibiza of Asia - where Euro-trash comes to roost in the Mediterranean off-season.

Okay, this has gotten more negative than I intended. Like I said, it's stunningly beautiful (really) and a with a bit of know-how you can put some decent distance between yourself and the hordes.  The beaches are crowded - there is no getting around that - but rent a kayak, go for a hike or hire a private boat (which doesn't cost much more than going on one of the jam-packed, all-day snorkeling tours anyway) and before long you've left the circus behind.

Krabi is a mere 1 hour and 15 minute flight from KL, so as an escape from the big city, endless oil palm plantations and Malaysia's grimy West Coast beaches (Langkawi excepted) on the oil-slick shipping lanes of the Straits of Malacca - it's a pretty excellent retreat. If it was my one shot at a big trip to Asia though, I'd probably be a bit disappointed. 

Would I go back? You bet.