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Chumphon is a jump-off point for people going to the Islands of Koh Tao, Phangan, and Samui.

If you’ve come down from Bangkok, this is the jumpoff point if you are aiming for the Islands of Koh Tao, Koh Phangan, and Koh Samui. If you haven’t already organised your onward bus and ferry connection, you shouldn’t worry. Bringing people like you to the islands is an industry in and of itself.

Getting to the ferry terminal is about a half-hour drive, but could take you a lot longer by a shared van service because of dodgey practices by the local van cartels and rackets. If you want the cheapest option, expect dishonesty and delays, but hope for the best. I admit to having lost my cool personally. If pay more for a private taxi if you can. Its too far to walk – about 10km as the crow flies or 17km by road.

If you’re getting off but not going to the islands, Chumphon has plenty to offer. Its long white beaches are often overlooked in favour of the islands, which make them less populated. There are also great coastal mangrove forests, which don’t offer easy tourism, but are important ecosystems often with great wildlife.

Otherwise the town itself hasn’t got a lot on. Its worth noting that shortly after invading in 1943, Imperial Japan built a 90km railway from here to the Indian ocean port of Kra Buri so that they could advance their troops into Myanmar, which lay just across the river from there. But the line was short-lived because of heavy Alied bombings of these efforts. They instead moved all the equipment, slave labourers and steel up 450 kilometres to the North, and added a whole lot more slave laborers and Prisoners of War to build the famed Death Railway, which was a lot more successful (despite what you might have seen in the Alec Guinness movie).

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Travelling through the countryside, you’ll see a lot of variants of buddha statues. They all have meaning.

To the east, you may be able to see a golden standing buddha with one hand raised as if pushing at a door. The abhāya mudrā symbolises protection, peace, and the dispelling of fear. Sometimes it is shown in frescoes depicting a story where the buddha was approached by an aggressive elephant and the posture was used to quel the beast.

If both the buddha’s arms are raised, it refers to a time either when he repelled a flood, or when he stopped his relatives from fighting.

If his hand in this raised position with the thumb and forefinger making an “okay” sign, the buddha is appealing to your reason, and asking you to listen to what he has to say.

If both his hands are making the “okay” sign in front of his chest, it means its a statue of his first sermon, and when he put his life in motion.

If the standing buddha has his arms pointed to the ground with the palms faced up, it means he is either granting a blessing, or accepting your charity… or both.

You will commonly see Buddha in a seated position with his hands on his lap with the palms facing up, sometimes holding an alms bowl. Rather than addressing you or in motion as he often is in the standing poses, his focus here is internal, in a state of meditation, and the statue makes a triangular shape symbolising stability.

In such a seated position, if one hand is on his leg, with his fingers touching, or close to touching, the earth, it is refering to the moment he achieved enlightenment. The story goes that after six years of meditating, the Buddha was finally was at the verge of enlightenment when Mara, the Demon of Illusion, tried to dissuade The Buddha from the final last steps. The Buddha then touched the ground to summon the Earth Goddess to witness what was going on. The Earth Goddess wrung her hair, releasing flood waters that swept away Mara, freeing the Buddha to attain enlightement.

You might also see the buddha laying down, always on his right side, with his hand propping up his head. This represents the final moments before the Buddha’s death, when he escaped the cycle of death and rebirth and reached his final nirvana.

If you’re from the rest and are new to buddhism, you might be wondering where the pot-bellied, smiling fellow sits in all this. That guy is actually Pu-Tai: a jovial Chinese monk famous in Chinese folklore for carrying a bag of gifts for children who come to learn about the Dharma. Although he is an important Buddhist figure, he is not considered a buddha.

Having said that, there is actually a fat fellow sometimes seen in Thai temples, but that is Phra Sangkajai – a man famous for explaining sophisticated dharma in easily understandable ways, but he was also so darn handsome that he was attracting unwanted attention. So he made himself obese so people would concentrate on his words.

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We need to talk about the African Oil Palm – you will see a lot of it from towards the Southern side of the Thai Southern Line, and all the way down to Singapore.

Compared with your coconut palm, it has a thicker and rougher trunk, and bigger, spikey frons. Depending on the time of year, it may have thick bushels of red nuts.

These reddish nuts are harveted, ground down, the solids separated from the liquids, then the liquids are boiled and distilled to get a basic oil that is then filtered and bleached to get palm oil – the most widely consumed vegetable oil on the planet.

It contains 50% saturate fat, 40% monounsaturated fat, and 10% polyunsaturted fat. If you’re a nutrition fanatic, you may notice that this is not significantly different to butter. Except it has less saturated fat and no trans fats.

Its also a lot cheaper than butter, and in these days when people are reading food labels more and more, the palm oil industry has been booming as a replacement for butter in industrial food production. You’ve most likely consumed palm oil the last time you ate margarine, ice cream, cookies, crackers, cake mix, instant noodles, pizza dough or non-dairy creamer. You definitely eat palm oil if you like Nutella, KitKats, or Oreos. You might even be consuming palm oil in your lipstick, toothpaste, soap, shampoos, and detergents. In fact, about half of all packaged products sold in supermarket contain it. The meat you eat might also be raised on it.

Packaging will tell you if there’s palm oil, but there are around 25 different names it commonly goes by – everything from the innocuous words like “vegetable oil” or “Palmate”, to obscure words like “sodium kernlate”, “Glyceryl”, or “Elaeis Guineensis” (the latin name for the tree).

Why would food producers try to obscure palm oil content? There’s nothing especially unhealthy about it – no more than other oils at least. But this is how the World Wildlife Fund puts it:

“The uncontrolled clearing of [tropical rainforests] for conventional palm oil plantations has led to widespread loss of these irreplaceable and biodiverse forests. Plantations have also been connected to the destruction of habitat of endangered species, including orangutans, tigers, elephants and rhinos.”

We are currently travelling through one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots. And palm oil has, or is in the process of, wrecking it, unfortunately. It is growing at around 10% per year, and would completely cover Thialand in 40 years if it kept up that rate. We’ve pretty much already lost Peninsular Malaysia, and are in the process of losing Borneo. Thats terrible.

Now there is an argument that having a cash crop like oil palm is great in an otherwise poor rural areas, and I agree. But these plantations aren’t as hippy communes. Around half of Indonesia and Malaysia’s billionaires made their richest with this disaster.

What you can do about it: you could avoid consuming packaged foods, and look for the RSPO Label or the “Green Palm” label on the foods (which indicate the use of oil from more sustainable practices). An even better idea is to just eat less processed foods with saturated fat. Another great idea: partake in some rainforest eco-tourism.

In fact, I have a challenge for you: Get a torch and walk, as quiet as you can, around in a rainforest at night. Any decent eco-lodge or local guide should be able to arrange it. I did this in Borneo. I wasn’t eaten by a tiger. But that walk turned this economist into an environmentalist.

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There are so many nice beaches alongside the Thai Southern Line. So what makes for a nice, sandy, crescent-shaped beach in Thailand? The answer: a “discordant” + few million years.

When waves and wind attack a coastline such as the one we’re travelling down, the softer rock will erode first, and the harder rock later. When the layers of soft and hard rock run perpendicular to the coast like here, the hard rocks turn into headlands or promontories, which you may see popping out of the eastern horizon every 10 kilometres or so.

These rocky bluffs serve as anchors for littoral systems in between them. The soft rock is ground down into fine sand by the waves and wind, and pushed into the crescent shape by the rip currents and tides.

Over time, these beaches take more and more of a crescent, concave shape as the erosion process continues. The headland, which separate one beach from another, can eventually find itself at the end of a narrow strip or spit of land, which erodes down to a sandbar, and ‘plop’ the headland becomes and island. Then the beach continues eroding behind it until it finds the next hard rock to serve the role as headland.

So if you’re out searching for the perfect beach, look out for some nice big coastal karst mountains, and also keep an eye out for this process and the stage of erosion your crescent beach is at.

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The dramatic little mountains you see more an more of as you head South on the Thai Southern Line are called ‘karst’, and they’re pretty weird.

These Karst mountains are made of limestone – a sedimentary rock composed mainly of shells or skeletons of marine organisms such as corals and moluscs and microscopic marine creatures. They leave their shells behind when they die, which build and build over generations to create mounds and reefs in shallow waters (like that of the Gulf of Thailand). Then sometimes, techtonic plates – large surface chunks of the Earth’s crust – push against each other which can force these reefs and limestone seabeds up out of the water over millions of years to become mountains and hills, like the Tennaserim range we see inland.

But when up pushed up into the dry air, limestone is dissolved by the weak acids in rainfall or rivers and lakes. Over millions years more, these acids find weaknesses in the limestone and filter through to form subterranean sinkholes, caverns and drainage systems underneath the surface rock. This then weakens and cracks the surface rock, which widens by further rainfall, vegetation, and wind.

Eventually, all of the limestone rock erodes down into a coastal plain such as that which we’re travelling through. The peaks we see here are the few holdouts in this area – yet to complete the process of breaking down.

When we think about Thailand and Southeast Asia in general, these limestone karst mountains are frequenly what comes to mind. But they are found throughout Asia: They are the quintessential image of Guilin in China, and Ha Long Bay in Vietnam, for example.

The more spectacular formations in Thailand are found further south in the Krabi region. But you will invariably find spectacular little worlds within almost every limestone karst mountain, even up here. When the acids break down the primary skeletons and shells stacked in the mountains, it forms solutions that trickle through into subterranean caves and drainage systems, where they often deposit as stallactites and stallacmites, and a menagerie of other structures based purely on the positions, angles, and distances of regular dripping and trickling. These caves are often inhabited by strange creatures that are oddly adapted to living in them – particularly by losing their sight and acquiring incredible organs that are sensitive to vibrations and smell. Their little ecosystems can create further layers of weirdness in this surreal world. Often these little ecosystems are so contained and isolated from each other, that they could contain their own endemic species. This is also true for the ecosystems covering the outside of karst mountains.

A final layer of weirdness can come from the way humans interract with these places – such as bird nest harvesting, and erecting artefacts for religious worship.

So even if nature, and particularly caves aren’t your thing, I really think you have to visit one of these surreal landscapes at least once in a good Thai holiday. Amidst the karst mountains of Southern Thailand, good options are plentiful.

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The hills inland along a large stretch of the Thai Southern Line are the land of the Karen – an ancient, stateless nation.

As we squeeze between Thailand and Myanmar, its worth noting that on the other side of the mountains is Karen State in Myanmar – an ethnic group that has been waging war against the Burmese government since 1949, which has meant that the coastal plain we’re travelling through is the home of a huge Karen community. There are around 6 million Karen in Myanmar, and 1 million in Thailand.

Although what makes a Karen is actually a bit fuzzy – there are differnet languages (3 main dialects which are mutually unintelligible), different religions (there are Buddhists, Christians and Muslims), even different ethnicity and politics within the group, and nobody can claim to speak on behalf of them. You don’t know one when you see one, but they tend to know it if they are one.

The Karen supported British Forces in WWII when the Japanese were invading Burma, and when the British left Burma in 1948, the Karen felt abandoned and formed the Karen National Union against the Burmese government, with an armed wing – the Karen National Liberation Army. They were known as fierce fighters that don’t surrender, yet they were soundly defeated by the Burmese. They brutalised the Karen people, and Karen refugee camps were built along the whole Western border of Thailand.

So Karen people claim to be a stateless nation. This means that they: have no sovereign territory, do not form a majority in any sovereign territory, are not recognised as a sovereign state by any other states, an autonomist or successionist movement is afoot, and aren’t a sub-group of a nation. But in that respect they’re in good company (with Bavarians, Catalans, and Scots, for example).

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Hatwanakorn is the newest National Park in Thailand. If you’re looking for a pristine Thai beach, this is it.

The long, flat, coastal national park is kinda special in Thailand. Most national parks cling to rocky, jungly outcrops – land which nobody knows what else to do with.

Hatwanakorn is an 8 km long oblong of land that sits on the coast and goes almost 4km inland. The 8km long beach is apparently fabulously pristene, and from the inland edge of the park is only 4 more kilometres of Thailand before a rapid ascent into hills, the top of which is Myanmar.

Apart from our train, which chugs right through the middle of the park, there is nothing there but natural forests, nature walks, and camping. Remarkable. If you’re feeling extra adventurous, there’s also a seemingly deserted island about 7km off the beach.

So if you feel like getting away from it all in a country where its not always easy, jump off at the next station. You’re also just a short car ride to the Mawdaung pass which goes into Myanmar. Its not a very popular border, but you can try your luck (last time I checked, you needed a pre-arranged visa, but I don’t want to dissuade you in case that information is out of date).

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Did Thailand partner with or capitulate to Japan in WWII? The Prachuap Khiri Khan airfield was definitely invaded.

Imperial Japan’s big idea at the time was to bring the whole of Asia – including China, Manchuria, and Southeast Asia – into a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” which was free from colonial tyranny under a benevolent leadership of Japan. So fighting back the colonial masters of Southeast Asia was paramount to its strategy.

But in Thailand, there wasn’t any colonial power. Their fight was not with Thailand, but securing Thai ports, railways, and airfields, such as this airfield just to the east of the track, was an important precondition to invading Malaya to the South and Burma to the West. Right here is where it all came together.

The Japanese Prime Minister Tojo had been negotiating with Thailand’s Prime Minister Phibun about a liase passe arrangement through Thai territory. Although Thailand had signed a non-aggression pact the year before with Britain, there was no point anyone pretending that Thailand’s forces could hold Imperial Japan. The Thai had a professional army of around 25,000 men, and an equal number of reservists. Japan had millions, bobbing towards them on state of the art naval fleets and airforce squadrons.

Thailand was instead negotiating for the territory it lost in the Anglo-Siamese treaty of 1909 and Burma’s Shan State – to be given to Thailand when all the dust settled. But Prime Minister Tojo declared on 1 December 1941 that he was still unsure where Thailand stood on the matter. His intentions were clear, and a buildup of Japanese troops in Java and Indochina was obvious enough.

Britain was not technically at war with Japan at that point. So on 6 December 1941 when a British reconnaissance aircraft spotted a Japanese fleet steaming towards Thailand, Winston Churchill wrote Prime Minister Phibun urging him to defend Thailand against Japan, but the British took no pre-emptive action. On 7 December, the Japanese presented the Thai government with an ultimatem, and were given 2 hours to respond. Unfortunately, Prime Minister Phibun was missing, and presumably unaware.

In the early morning of 8 December, Japan invaded Thailand in 8 places. The Thai government had finally found the Prime Minister, and had surrendered by noon. In only 2 places was there significant Thai resistance: The first was in Chumphon, where a unit of High School cadets held the Japanese off with youthful gusto until the late afternoon when they were ordered to surrender. Only their captain was killed, and posthumously promoted to LT.COL.

The only place that held out longer was just alongside the Thai Southern Line. The Battle of Prachuap Khiri Khan centred on the airport – we travel past the western tip of the still-functioning airstrip – where the local Wing Commander Mom Luang gave orders to resist a Japanese infratry battalion. They had 6 heavy machine guns and two light ones. They held out overnight, and when the telegram to surrender eventually got through to them the next morning, they thought it was a Japanese ploy and continued to fire. At 10am With ammunition running out, the Wing Commander ordered the burning of the control tower and command buildings and then for all hands to flee for lives, but to save one bullet for themselves in case of capture. But at noon, a civilian car with a small white flag arrived containing Thai government officials to hand an order to the Wing Commander from the Prime Minister to surrender immediately.

Altogether, the Thais suffered 27 wounded and 42 dead, including the Wing Commander’s pregnant wife. Japanese officially recorded a loss of 115, but Thai estimates were 417.

Each 8th of December a memorial is held in Prachuap Khiri Khan in honour of the fallen.

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The Gulf of Thailand was once the edge of Europe’s known world.

The Magnus Sinus – or Great Gulf – was a feature on maps before the Age of Discovery. Initially, the great Ptolemy misinterpreted earlier accounts from seafarers and had the Great Gulf enclosed on the East by the “Dragon’s Tail Peninsular” – what was assumed to be a continent-sized body that filled in all the space between the Islands of Indonesia and Indochina as though the South China Sea was all land. Thats where Christopher Columbus thought he was going when he set off to the Americas. The Isthmus of Kra – the neck of land we’re going down, somehow was thought to not exist at all, yet they knew about the Gulf of Thailand – odd!

The Gulf is an interesting body of water: Its relatively shallow – only 85 metres at its deepest – and with so many large rivers depositing into it, there is a lot of sediment and its waters are not particularly salty. The salt waters of the South China Sea flow in only at around 50 metres and below.

The occasional limestone karst bluffs continue into the sea, creating islands and seamonts against which corals cling, or at least used to. Only 5% of the 120 square kilometres of coral reefs are now considered ‘fertile’. This is declining, particularly after a massive coral bleaching event in 2010. So if you want to go diving in Thailand, do it soon, and consider diving on the other side of the Ithsmus – I’ve personally dived the Similan Islands and it was amazing (but that was before 2010).

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The hills in the distance to the East of the Thai Southern Line you can see the karst hills of Thailand’s first marine national park.

Khao Sam Roi Yot means “mountain with 300 peaks”. Its about 100 square kilometres of protected area with Thailand’s largest freshwater marsh nestled between limestone peaks up to 605 metres. Aside from being an important stop for migratory birds, it has inaccessible mountain forests that are home to rare mammals: the fishing cat, the Malayan porcupine and its critically endgangered cousin the Malayan pangolin, the barking deer and mainland serow (which looks like a cross between a goat and an antelope), the dusky leaf monkey and the slow loris (which is a rather forelorn looking primate). The endangered Irrawaddy Dolphin is also reportedly seen in the coastal areas.

In 1868, King Mongkut hosted a European guests here to observe a total solar eclipse. By combining the Thai system of measuring time with western methods of calculating longtitude and latitude, he predicted when the eclipse was going to be most visible, and exactly when it would occur down to the second. His guesses differed by those of the French by about 2 seconds. When his calculations proved correct, I imagine the entire Kingdom high-fived each other, and the standing of the Thai people lifted in the minds of the typically racist colonial powers. 151834 Mongkut is a star named in honour of Mongkut’s contributions to astronomy.

Unfortunately, during that trip both King Mongkut and his son – Chulalongkorn – contracted malaria. Mongkut died of the disease shortly after, and King Chulalongkorn survived not only follow his father’s footsteps, but to be Thailand’s great moderniser.

The most astonishing feature of the national park is the Phraya Nakhon Cave. It features a huge cavern with a hole in the ceiling allowing sunshine to peirce through, and – at certain times of the year – illuminate a pavilion that was built for King Chulalongkorn during a pilgrimage he made back here in 1890.

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