Email or ask me and I'll recommend the hell out of it, but I will not post this place on the Internet. Unless I was getting paid, in which case I would write, “sleepy backwater staging area without much to offer, especially in light of the opportunities for which it is a launch point.” Not a lie, but not the entire truth by even a partial stretch.
It hit me this morning while I took my morning float in the ocean: this is where I'd send my grandparents, were they still of the traveling vintage. Oma would've loved the beach, the mountains, the markets, the everything, and Opa would've been happy with the golfing, caves, and waterfalls. All within a few minutes' drive. More on those later, after I do some exploring.
With a full weekend and light pack, it would be possible to walk most of the beach, staying either in a hammock or stopping at one of the populated areas for a $20ish bungalow. While miles and miles of open beach might present trespassing or food-packing thoughts in the States, this is Thailand. Just start walking. True, there might be a stretch of a few miles without readily-accessible stirfry, but if you're nervous, take lunch to go wherever you get breakfast. Or second lunch wherever you stop for the first edition. And the entire walk will be only as interesting as you can make a Thai version of whitesand, speckled with myriad seashells and sundry washed-ashore critters, punctuated by archetypal beachside bar and grils, bungallows, and luxury resorts. If you're the sort who can very legitimately say : whitesand? Seen better, done that, give me ______” this is not the place. If you can be excited by a seashell, the impression of a starfish, a swarm of crabs devouring a jellyfish, a jellyfish, or simply spending a day determining whether it's more fun to walk where the sand bleaches as your feet compress out the moisture or where the wave action tickles your toes, or if the novelty of such stretching out a hammock or sleeping bag just somewhere along a stretch of such beach is enough to justify a sidetrip, this is paradise.
My grandparents would be hung up on the lack of a supermarket in town: elsewhere, they would make daily trips for fruit or yogurt or laundry detergent or toenail clippers or whatever else—consider it a geriatric form of barhopping. In many places, they would be absolutely crippled by a Thai-style market. Here, though, there is enough tourist infrastructure that the vendors are accustomed to farangs, if not always English, and arecompletely prepared to make gestural transactions without a common language.
And the fruit is fresh and the seafood is still flopping and there are pigs heads being chopped up right next to fermenting mounds of fish and it's all very grand and exciting to farang eyes, but it takes up half a block, not half a section, and, as I said, they speak English. And if they don't, it's for good reason: you don't want it (say, the partially dried fish you pound and mash into fish paste: you can't eat it plain, and if you've been around long enough to know how it's made, you know it's worth it to buy pre-made by someone's grandmother who's been doing it since the last Rama's reign, or if not her, someone who grew up listening to and smelling her process and product). On their own, Oma and Opa would've found the food carts on the sidewalk (sidewalks are for drawing revenue and parking, streets are for overflow parking and walking) and within a day or two would've ventured into the dark depths. Carts are easy because what they have is what you see: if someone were pushing a cart large enough for an actual refrigeration unit, the only reason they would want to hide a product would be to protect its unsalable state. And here in Thailand, if you find, say, a packet of hotdogs “on special” you check for mold first, the date second, give a detailed and scrupulous sniff-check third, and if you still can't figure out why the company wouldn't want to make a profit on them, you take them home and plan on cooking the possibility of life out of them in the most literal sense; if there meat cooler has a “clearance sale” area, it's fascinating to poke at in the same way it's fascinating to poke at a decomposing something that washed in on the tide, except you probably would never intentionally eat a mound of jellyfish plasma or beached whale.
Not to say my grandparents would gravitate to the cart selling whatnot cuts, although Oma grew up in Germany and loves blood sausage, headcheese, and lung soup, or that they wouldn't balk at the lack of American levels of sanitation.
What I do believe is that if my geriatric little grandparents made the effort to shuffle into the market, the proprietors would more than reply in kind.
And for the hard days, the raining days, travel-weary days, they would be in a place they consider comfortable at a price even they consider reasonable; they could stay in and not regret it for want of comfort. What's remarkable is that this one, main stretch of beach, the developed 6 or 8 K, has everything from a beach bar where you show up with your hammock or sleeping bag and leave after your noontime breakfast beer to a resort where James Bond would stay while tracking a supervillain in one of the nearby islands; wait, that was Goldfinger, wasn't it?
A neighboring town, close enough to confuse or render geographically identical, the town I would write about in my guidebook article because it's a port that has long since sold itself to making the easiest nickel, so it has the handbag and movie sellers, the Guci and Pradda and CK jeans that have one leg three inches short, the shops selling half-emptied bottles of designer fragrances, all that stuff usually associated with Thailand street markets, but it's still small enough to be safe for people like my grandparents. Maybe they get taken, but that means spending $5 on something that should've cost $3.
And the wats and temples are all over, the caves and waterfalls and islands, and the museums and cultural centers are within a short distance and, more importantly, easy drive. Not a cross-Bangkok commute, just hopping on the highway and getting off when the signs say so.
So if you're in southern Thailand and looking for places, I have a recommendation for you. But if you're one of the faceless millions looking for insider info on “The Real” Thailand, go have some fun with yourself and read a map. Maybe you'll luck out and get lost in a horribly uncomfortable backwater slum; there's the real Thailand. Or maybe you'll end up in a hyperdeveloped prostitute paradise; there's the real Thailand. Or maybe you'll luck out and strike the perfect balance. That's also Thailand.
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