Krabi

It's not named after “crabs,” as Ner Porciuncula, our colleague from the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), would like to insist. It's simply Krabi, a place in the western coast of southern Thailand, although it can refer to three geopolitical areas - Krabi town, Krabi Province, or Krabi district, the same was as we do have difficulties placing what or where Cebu is (island, province, or city). But more often than not, Krabi refers to the town itself, where our delegation stayed, together with the rest of the other member-states of ASEAN.

We're here for the 27th Air Transport Working Group meetings, and the discussions are rather fiercely official, both on the economic and technical aspects, but the intense aura of Krabi itself is difficult to shrug off. It's poignantly familiar for me, having grown up in the province and not in the city, but its exotic uniqueness is also striking, both in its cultural and historical sense, and in the manner that the town, and Thailand itself, treats tourism as a main GDP contributor. Maybe, many of their strategies are worth looking into as we strive to intensify our tourism initiatives ourselves. A total of 22 million tourist arrivals in 2012 is simply astonishing.

Maybe, Ner's observation was fueled by the fact that there are, really, plenty of crabs here, at the very least, as part of the welcome dinner menu our Thai counterparts hosted. Then there's the crab sculptures lining up on the main boulevard along the shoreline of Krabi River. There is one huge mean and ferocious crab and 3 or 4 smaller ones placed on raised dais, and they do look as if they represented the town. But most people believe that “Krabi” came from the word that means “sword” and has nothing to do with the delectable crustaceans of the place.

For a place that hosts a lot of international flights and foreign tourists, the town is surprisingly small - less than 30 thousand population. And it's small indeed, even in terms of facilities and service levels. Ah yes, they do have grand hotels like the Sheraton Krabi Beach Resort, which caters to high-end tourists, meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions. But for the most part, it's a laid-back rural farming and fishing community, which suddenly became an international tourist destination, drawing a chunk away from the traditianl ones - Pattaya, Phuket and Koh Samui. It may be this rural gleam which lures visitors here.

We stayed in a guesthouse, one of many which are scattered across Krabi town, a walking distance from the main street which lines up outdoor open-air restos, cafes, and drinking pubs, interspersed by parlors offering foot spas and traditional massage. The room, comfy, clean and air-conditioned costs 3,600 Baht (or P5,200). No, that's not the daily rate, that's good for 6 nights! It's not that we don't like staying in Sheraton, but the travel allowances that government allows us made that almost impossible. Besides, even with that ridiculously cheap accommodation, we barely have enough for incidental expenses, although you can grab a good breakfast at the guesthouse for less than a hundred baht.

Other than the government-provided service vehicles to and from the ASEAN conference site, we are on our own, and have to experience the local transportation. It's not new to me, I lived in this country for two years, almost 30 years ago, and I can get around fairly easily. But the seeming lack of more comfortable transportation seem not to deter the huge number of European tourists in town. In fact, there are more Caucasians than Asians in our guesthouse - we were the only ones beside a Korean couple while we ate breakfast with the Swedes and the French, and Mick, my new journalist-friend, who was from Hong Kong, but drifted south and made Krabi his new home. Temporarily, he says, but that I doubt. Today, he's getting his tooth extracted, so he'll be leaving a part of himself here, ... if ever he leaves.

Words may not be enough to describe the exquisite uniqueness of Krabi, so I'll probably start up a picture blog about our stay here. What can I say? - Europeans come in droves here, and the small Krabi Airport of less than a million passengers a year, caters to flights from Helsinki, Stockholm, Moscow, Gothenburg, and Irkutsk, mostly seasonal and by charter. The regular flights come mostly from Bangkok, and from Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. Krabi is quaint. But it's a place to come back to, at a later time, ... to relax and enjoy, and not talk about air transport sectoral negotiations and a unified ASEAN airspace.