I was having a beer with my new "best friends" on a dinner beach table watching that Corona commercial cliche beautiful sunset over the white sand beach, when a small family came out of their bungalow onto the sand. One of our group who had been "traveling" in the same bungalow for 3 months said "Families are going to ruin this island."

I was pissed off at first, thinking he had no right to claim this island in the name of young single travelers looking for sex and sun. But on the ride back, we got to stop by the construction site of a group of villa bungalows, the future time-shares that will, at the expense of obstructing and stealing the prescious scenery, will most likely be occupied at most one month per year. I've come to agree with my friend at least that families will transform the island in the end to become that serene, expensive, winter getaway that we all see in the brochures. I gritted my teeth in frustration, knowing full well that the next time I visit this island it will probably be with a family of my own.

But tourists will always want to avoid tourists, and finding paradise out here is a cat-and-mouse game of colonizing a new island before the fat vacationing sandles-and-socks fanny pack Europeans move in. Ko Samui is beautiful but overrun, go to Ko Pangan. Ko Pangan's too touristy, go to Ko Lanta. Too many people in Ko Lanta, head to Ko Lippe. As it stands now, everybody's going to Ko Lippe to run away from tourists. It's an island at the southern end of the archapelago, takes two days to get there, is full of unpopulated alcoves and beaches, and is cheap as all fuck. Basically, it's got two years before it's overrun itself, and it gives me the impression that we'd be more successful trying to run from our own shadows.

A few days ago I landed (and am leaving in one hour) on Ko Phi Phi, also transliterated as Ko Pee Pee, which is more phonetically accurate. I came here to meet Ludo, the French guy I'd been travelig with in Laos and Cambodia, before I head off to India and dissappear forever. It's the site of the movie The Beach (coincidentally about trying to find that hidden paradise before anybody else gets there), and, unfortunately happens to have been one of the Tsunami's biggest casualties. The island i'm on consists of a north and south mountain, and when you have two large rocks like that in the ocean, sand collects in between. So basically there's a 150m strip of sand and soil connecting the two mountains, on which the whole tourist city is built, and is where I'm sitting right now. The wave swept over the whole thing and sent the city into the water. I went on a night scuba dive to the site of a bungalow that had been transplanted 2km from shore last year. It was surprisngly intact, but between the weightlessness, the torch-lit darkness of it and the fresh trajedy, it was turned out to be far creepier and Indiana Jonesy than my sunrise exploration of Ankor Wat. On the other hand, the city has been completely rebuilt in the past year to the point that, if it wasn't for the pictures and frequent shrines, I'd have had no idea about the devastation.

By some strange twist of fate, since the tsunami this island has been almost exclusively recolonized by the Swedish. Even the Swedes don't quite understand it, but everybody's tall, blond, beautiful, and prissy. And at the beach it seems like they don't even sell women's tops around here. I really can't complain, but I keep getting this wierd Deja Vu about Santa Monica beaches. Even the French guy I'm with tells me the girls here are stuckup. That says alot.