Fat Westerner

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The Thai alphabet has 48 consonants, 24 vowels and 6 'tones'. They really should do a version of Countdown.

Love it or loathe it, Khao San Road in Bangkok is and always will be the backpacker capital of East Asia and you will often run into people you met in other parts of Asia. This time for me, Bangkok was a waiting stop before a dive trip in the south. I whiled away the time spending a ton of cash buying crap I am sure I will not use and then popped 10kg of the stuff in the mail.

I have wanted to go diving on the Similan Islands in the Andaman Sea for absolutely yonks and had planned to go as the only thing to do in Thailand. Then the tsunami happened. I had misgivings about going to the west coast of Thailand after that: Is it appropriate? What is left?/Can I dive there?/Is there disease? The British Foreign Office mentions Khao Lak (where the dive shops are) in its travel warning. But after a bit of Googling, I decided the Foreign Office was talking shite as usual and so opted to go.

I arrived in Khao Lak on the main road which passes through the town. I was reminded of the opening scene of Vanilla Sky, where Tom Cruise wanders around a completely empty Times Square wondering what the hell is going on. Everything looked intact, there just was hardly anyone around and nearly everything was shut. The dive shop that I had made my booking with was open so after dropping my stuff with them, I decided to head to the beach, 200 metres down a slope behind the main road. Then I saw: the place is fucked. It is as if someone dropped the bomb on it. Whole hotel complexes are gone. Having said that, there were places to stay on the main road and the dive shops were starting up again.

When I was in Auschwitz in November, I was left with a feeling of horror at what people were capable of doing. In Khao Lak, there was horror alright, but I was moved by the way people there were capable of picking up the pieces of their lives and their businesses and rebuilding the town with real spirit and even a wide smile.

There are loads of beaches on the west coast of Thailand that were hardly touched, so I would suggest that anyone with a few weeks to spare should take advantage of the fact that there are less tourists around and help the local economy recover at the same time. They call the abscence of tourists here the 'third wave'.

Did 12 dives on a live-aboard boat over 4 days, including two night dives. I am not sure how much I like night dives. Five people nosing around the deep waving torches about. It feels a bit like I have broken into someone's house while they are asleep. Night dives aside, it was a great trip, and there were far less dive boats in the Similan region (it was not affected very much by the tsunami), so if you have never seen a leopard shark before, get your arses over sharpish to take advantage of this fact.

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