It was just great to have a holiday, time with family, no emails and phones, sleep. Thailand is interesting in a range of ways, principally for the falseness of its representation. If you buy a postcard or look at pics on the web, it looks like this, which is fair, the colours and cliffs are unreal...
But what is left out is the stuff that gets cropped, because the place is insanely busy, like being in central, but on the azure sea, so more accurately looks like this...
With boatloads of people having a swim, or mass pee, one is never sure, in their life jackets. Its the equivalent of the airport with the tour-guide with a flag - just the aquatic version. I must add that none of this is offensive to me, its just that I don't want to participate in the falseness - and what is probably most interesting is the change of people since I was here last; then the majority was Russian. Since then the oil price and the Ruble have collapsed, now the majority of tourists are Chinese. It's an interesting little cameo of geo-economics. There are also some South Africans.
At Phi Phi the scene looks like this, though of course the height and direction of light make the water look very different (the pictures above comes from the the place in the left of the photo, below).
And then to give you an idea of the volume of water traffic, I've cropped out that piece, which close-up looks like this; its just an absolute zoo of boats.
Phi Phi harbour itself looks like this: still spectacular - the jungle and cliffs, but man is it under the cosh of people pressure. If one is looking for a getaway, this is not it.
Finding a restaurant amidst the zillions of people to have lunch was a job in itself. But it did give Evan a chance to find and pat every cat on the island - which had a profound effect on us, collectively, because we decided OK, we have to get this child a cat - and that is the thing that led to Holly.
But what is left out is the stuff that gets cropped, because the place is insanely busy, like being in central, but on the azure sea, so more accurately looks like this...
With boatloads of people having a swim, or mass pee, one is never sure, in their life jackets. Its the equivalent of the airport with the tour-guide with a flag - just the aquatic version. I must add that none of this is offensive to me, its just that I don't want to participate in the falseness - and what is probably most interesting is the change of people since I was here last; then the majority was Russian. Since then the oil price and the Ruble have collapsed, now the majority of tourists are Chinese. It's an interesting little cameo of geo-economics. There are also some South Africans.
At Phi Phi the scene looks like this, though of course the height and direction of light make the water look very different (the pictures above comes from the the place in the left of the photo, below).
And then to give you an idea of the volume of water traffic, I've cropped out that piece, which close-up looks like this; its just an absolute zoo of boats.
Phi Phi harbour itself looks like this: still spectacular - the jungle and cliffs, but man is it under the cosh of people pressure. If one is looking for a getaway, this is not it.
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