The hotel was great, although there's not much point talking about it since it's been through quite a lot since we stayed there. It was bought by the Dusit chain, which supposedly didn't do a very good job with it, then it became an independent hotel again, then the tsunami came and hit Krabi very hard. The hotel was rebuilt and is open, but with all the changes and destruction, it may be quite different than our visit. The location is beautiful, on a narrow strip of land between two beaches, and huge rock formations hemming it in on the sides. There's really no way to leave the area except by boat. All the guests stay in these little hobbit houses, which most people find really charming but I think look pretty funny. There's probably about 60 of them dotted all over the place, and it looks like a mushroom field. Insides are typical Thai design, on a two floor layout with the bedrooms on the second floor. Staff was very friendly, and I remember the breakfast being really good, but you had to compete with pretty aggressive monkeys who were always invading the place and carting off the best food.

4. Chiang Rai, Thailand, Nov '97

After our mercifully short flight to Chiang Rai, we stopped in the city for a couple of days, staying at the Dusit hotel. The Dusit is Thailand's main homegrown upscale chain, and is sort of like a Sheraton in the US, reliable but never interesting. At the time of our visit, it was (and I think still is) the only upscale hotel. It's on an island in the middle of a lake, which adds a tiny bit of exoticism to it, but it's basically a generic business hotel. Chiang Rai was something of a rival center to Chiang Mai in the northern Thai kingdom of Lanna, and the kings often moved between the two when one of the cities was burned down by the Burmese or Cambodians. (Capital burning happened with great regularity in those days). Chiang Mai is indisputably the capital of the region nowadays, and Chiang Rai remains a pleasant, small city with unfortunately nothing to see in terms of tourist sights. Backpackers tend to congregate here as a launching pad for trekking the mountains and visiting hill tribes. Until recently, Chiang Rai was too dangerous for trekking since it was the center of the Golden Triangle, an area spread around remote parts of Laos, Burma and Thailand that was once the world's largest opium producer. Opium production in Thailand has more or less stopped, so Chiang Rai is being repositioned as a trekking capital.