Globalisation is bad, m'kay?

So I used to think of the essence of globalisation as the sharing of technology and brands; often hand-in-hand. The process is unstoppable because more efficient ways of doing things and making things are going to be attractive to anyone, and so why should we care if the stupid Americans invented everything first.

But in the South of Thailand there are almost no Thai people. They have modern technology, internet cafes everywhere, beautiful resorts and amazing beaches, but no Thai people seem to enjoy them.

Some of Thailand's most beautiful resources have been sold off to the international world, but that means the average Thai person has lost out. I wonder if they care. Or perhaps there are even better secret beaches that no one knows about. But even in the movie The Beach which is all about that secret beach, there were no Thai people on it.

What's with that?

Phi-Phi is nice, but I feel like I'm in a Thai Amusement Park rather then in Thailand, where they've hired some Thai people to run some of the shops for extra authenticity. You almost feel like an idiot trying out the small bits of Thai that you've picked up along the way, because most of the Thai staff just give you a slightly disgruntled look.

Before this I was on Railey Beach, well the beach next to Railey Beach, which is the more rural one. But even on this beach there are almost no Thai. Admitedlly all the staff everywhere are Thai and the Beach Bar Guys clearly run the beach and they're living there because they think it's awesome and don't really give two shits about the tourist. Order a drink; maybe it'll take 2 minutes maybe an hour, whatever don't rush them, they're chilling out. I liked them.

Before that I was at a place called Pine Bungalows which we stumbled across by accident after arriving in Krabi and realising that it was a town and not a beach at all. We were jostled into a pick up truck by a friendly Thai guy who was offering a relatively good deal on a bungalow and we had a night or two to kill before Gabi and Kirsten caught up with us. We assumed that everywhere was sort of close so if it sucked, we could just give them the finger and bugger off. But there was nothing else anywhere. A small village about 15 minutes of walking away, which consisted of two streets, one pharmacy and an internet cafe. There was a big picture of the king strung up along the road.

There were maybe only 40 bungalows, if that, and hardly any people there. It was like being nowhere on a beach.

I woke up that night to find my face and hair covered in ants and used Shannon's doom to kill those little bastards. Despite the sentence structure of the previous sentence, I don't actually mean I sprayed myself in the face with doom. First I brushed them off then looked at my ant infested bed, and said to myself: "Man is King." Then I doomed them.

Stepped outside for some fresh air and came back in and looked at all the tiny, twisted little ant corpses lying over my fresh-ish linen. I felt a bit sad for them, but they crossed the line. They messed with my hair. I tried to go back to sleep and lay there for a bit feeling very sick because all I was doing was breathing in poison so I went for a walk to the beach and sat and looked at the sea by night and it was pretty.

There are a lot of South Africans in Phi-Phi. It's weird. Part of the reason I went away was to get away from South African things, but "if you hide in mouse holes, the cat-claws will find you. There are bears in every cave." That's a misquote from Rumi.

Especially weird was to run into Darryl Bernstein who was my best friend in school and I haven't seen him in years. That was nice, if surreal.

Phi-Phi's okay, but so far not really the highlight. I'm looking forward to getting off this rock tomorrow.