31st January - Railay (Thailand)

Friday 31^st January

Railay, on the Thai mainland is simply glorious.  It all looks very familiar – I am sure I have seen this fabulous landscape/seascape many times in movies, and holiday destination programs. 

There is a price to pay for this beauty/viewty…popularity… The area is simply heaving with tourists, most of the Russian.   The beach is lined with longtail boats, ready to zoom people noisily hither and yon.  There are canoes being paddled (sometimes alarmingly by people who don’t seem to be able to co-ordinate the paddles and who possibly can’t swim…) People are climbing the vertiginous cliffs, others are shrieking, bat-like, in the once silent and majestic caves.  There are resorts, shops, cafés, bars, peoplepeoplePEOPLE everywhere.

It is all very fascinating, to sit at a beachfront table and watch.  So many different sizes and shapes, mostly wearing…bikinis.  (Some inadvisedly.)  Russian couples seem to go in for matching outfits – fluorescent green or orange, speedos for him, tiny bikini for her.  And LOTS of bright pink sunburn…

The Chow Lair* (Sea Gypsies) have been gently but definitely removed from their own islands.  Entrepreneurs (local) have bought up the land on the most beautiful beaches, leaving them with nowhere much to go.  Their culture is slowly disappearing.  Such is modern life, modern tourism…the price to pay.

* I read in Lonely Planet that during the 2004 tsunami virtually no Chow Lair were killed, as folk tales handed down from generation to generation alerted them to the dangers of the quickly receding tide, and they were able to escape to higher ground.