Adventures By Design

In which the travelers watch the planet changing.

This morning we got up early so we could attend a Thai cooking class. A couple days ago we took the afternoon class from this school, and we liked it so much we decided to take the morning class as well (see our other post). This time Andrea and Phil joined us, so we had lots of fun joking around and generally acting silly. Actually there was quite a cosmopolitan student body: we had a Swedish mom and daughter, who came to Koh Lanta to join the hundreds of other Swedes vacationing there. There was also the British husband and Columbian wife who lived in Luxembourg. So with Canadian-but Irish-sounding Andrea and British Phil who live in Australia, we felt like we’d joined a United Nations kitchen.

After we learned how to make several more Thai dishes, we returned to our beach for a swim. Something strange has happened to our beach: it’s changing shape. Previously the waves climbed a relatively gentle slope before crashing on shore. As the sandy floor gradually descended you could feel small hills of loose coral and shells that the waves piled up parallel to the shore. Today when we went for a swim, the waves were much stronger, and the coral and shell mountains were gone. Instead all that material was deposited on the beach, completely covering the sand. We didn’t know that beaches change. Is that common knowledge for coastal dwellers? Anybody know?