South Thailand - where have all the backpackers gone?

One of the things that travelling teaches you is that your expectations mean nothing, and so it was with the south of Thailand, where my notions of what it would be like turned out to be 10 years out of date. My mental image of beaches full of hale and hearty travellers all sharing tales of travels around the globe proved to be well misfounded. Thailand, even the supposedly 'backpacker' areas, is packed full of people from northern Europe on 2 week holidays. Not that there's anything wrong with that of course, except that they all seem a bit zombified (yes, I do remember what effect cold and work has on you) and not particularly interested in meeting and talking about adventures with other travellers. In other words, it was all a bit undynamic and, dare I say it, boring. I was going for 4 or 5 days at a time without having a conversation with anyone, which, after falling into so many easy conversations with other travellers over the past 18 months, came as a bit of a shock. Having headed to Bangkok after the beaches and met up with some other people who were travelling on their own, it seems that they also had the same general experience. Shame that I didn't meet up with them on the beaches and we could have had the general experience together. Due to a lot of luxury resorts now as well, the budget travellers can only afford to stay on the beaches that no one else wants, so lots of rocks in the water or strange squishy seaweed stuff underfoot. Strangely, given that everything in Thailand is so convenient (apart from getting from A to B, which is always more complicated than it needs to be), it was the most difficult 3 weeks of travelling I've had. But anyway, here are some photos to show that it wasn't all bad, and beach wise, I managed to get by! As I had to head back to Bangkok a week before I left Thailand to get my Indian visa, I went to Khao Yai National Park a couple of hours from Bangkok.

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