Thailand Coast Photography, 2023
Two and a half weeks in January 2023, starting inland and working out towards the Andaman coast. The first days were spent in rainforest: a thatched jungle walkway, a limestone karst peak breaking through the canopy, a river run by raft, and, the highlight of the whole stretch, a troop of wild macaques feeding and climbing at close range, along with a banded snake coiled in the undergrowth.
From the jungle it was on to Phuket's Old Town, a complete change of scene: pastel Sino-Portuguese shophouses in turquoise and pink, a café with a slow ceiling fan, a lantern-lit corridor leading to a small shrine, and a storefront smothered in flowers.
The coast proper opened with a still lake at sunrise and closed its first evening with a dog on the sand, but the real subject was the limestone coastline.
What followed was a run of sunset boat trips along that coastline: longtail boats moored beneath jungled headlands, a local fisherman wading ashore beside a garlanded bow, a sea-arch rock formation catching a full sunburst, and karst islands and pinnacles silhouetted against skies that went from pink to violet to deep red as the light dropped, evening after evening.
Some of those evenings ran long past sunset into full blue hour: a figure wading out in the last colour in the sky, a lone mangrove tree on the tidal flats, a wooden pier with a single moored boat, and a closing pair of palm-and-moon and hazy-sun frames once the light had all but gone.
The final days brought a climber on a sheer limestone cliff face, a sea stack at sunset, an orange mineral-streaked cliff above a beach, before a hike up to an elevated viewpoint gave the best single view of the trip: a whole bay ringed by karst cliffs and palm forest, lit gold in the last of the afternoon light.
Nothing here was planned much beyond "follow the coast and see what the light does", and that worked.
