Koh Whai

Koh Whai Sunset
Originally uploaded by Bill Bevan

We eventually landed on Koh Whai on the 9th December and have just spend a little over a week there. We’re now having a few days on Koh Change before returning to Koh Whai for Christmas.

Whai is a perfect place to stay if you fancy a remote getaway and don’t want a young crowd up for a party. The average age is probably 45, mostly well-travelled backpackers who tend to return to Whai every year. It is very popular with Germans and Austrians. Everyone we have met has been very friendly and good for a stimulating conversation.

The island is a very small jungle-covered hill with some north-facing narrow beaches. The beaches are not anything to get excited about. The attraction of Koh Whai is its sheer tranquillity. The electricity is only on from 5.30 – 10.30pm. After that the brightest light is the moon, and we were there during full moon so it was splendid, and the loudest noise is that of waves lapping against the sand, though during our stay in the regular northerly wind forced the waves and tore through the palms. The wind is supposedly a daily or nightly occurrence every November and December. It really cools the island down creating a very fresh temperature.

There are a few walks along the bays of the north coast, to the rubber tappers’ houses on the south and to a rocky sunset point on the south-west. The rocks here are some form of metamorphic or lava, dark red-orange bands forming pockets of grey rock with heat bubbles. I think the bands are formed as fissures formed in the rock, rapidly cooling thin plates of the rock while deeper inside the rock cooled more slowly.



Hot Rocks Cool


The attraction of Whai to us was the tranquillity, a great bungalow terrace for yoga, good company and some good snorkelling straight off the beach. The corals have died in many places but there is plenty of variety with many corals also coming back on the dead mounds.

We'll get some more photos of the island online when we get back to the mainland just before NYE

Bridge Over the River Kwai

Bridge Over the River Kwai
Originally uploaded by Bill Bevan

We're currently staying in Karanchaburi, spending a few days at the Sugar Cane 2 Guest House right on the banks of the River Kwai. Yes that river, that bridge, that defiantly whisteld World War 2, that classic British film of British stiff-upper-lipness starring Alec Guinness.

The area is very beautiful which belies the terrible past it bore witness too as the Japanese forced thousands of POWs and tens of thousands of South Asian labourers to hand-build a railway line from Thailand to Burma - the infamous Death Railway. Visiting the huge POW cemeteries, of those died building the line through malaria-infested mountain jungle using picks, shovels, dynamite and wheelbarrows is very moving. Even more so, if knowing that many thousands more forced labourers from South East Asia were buried in unmarked graves, any fixed place for the memories of them being lost forever.