Ao Nang

The bay was a minor part of Krabi province for most of its history: a coast of fishing villages, rubber smallholdings and oil palm behind, with the limestone country inland yielding shells, bird nests and caves that have yielded traces of human occupation tens of thousands of years old. Krabi Town, on the river to the east, was the administrative and trading centre, and the beaches had no road worth the name.

Travellers began arriving in the late 1970s and early 1980s, following the backpacker route south from Phuket and Ko Samui. The first bungalows went up at Railay and along the sand at Ao Nang, reached by longtail boat or a rough track, and the cliffs drew climbers from the mid-1980s onwards, which made Railay a name in the climbing world long before the resort was known to package travellers. Krabi airport opened to commercial traffic in the following decades, and Ao Nang shifted from bungalows to hotels, with a paved beach road, dive schools and tour offices.

The Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 December 2004 reached this coast, damaging boats, beachfront buildings and the islands offshore, though Krabi province was less badly hit than Phang Nga to the north. Rebuilding was quick, and warning towers and evacuation signs date from that period. Growth since has been steady and largely unplanned: the strip has crept inland and along the coast towards Klong Muang, and questions about water supply, waste and reef damage have grown with it.

Krabi is a mixed province. Buddhist and Muslim communities live side by side, with mosques in the villages behind the beaches and temples in the towns, and around Ao Nang the call to prayer and the temple loudspeaker are both part of the morning. That mix shapes the manners of the place: dress away from the sand is modest, alcohol is absent from many local kitchens, and Fridays are quieter in the Muslim villages.

Climbing has given the area a second identity. Since the 1980s Railay and Ton Sai have drawn climbers from around the world, and a semi-permanent community of guides, instructors and returning regulars lives around the peninsula in the dry season, with a calendar of competitions and fire shows. Diving and snorkelling employ a similar international crowd, and English is the working language of much of the beachfront.

Southern Thai culture runs underneath all of this. The dialect is fast and clipped and often unintelligible to visitors from Bangkok; shadow puppetry and the nora dance-drama survive at temple fairs inland; and the sea peoples of the Andaman coast have long-standing communities on the islands nearby. Chinese-Thai families in Krabi Town keep shrine festivals, including the meat-free ninth lunar month, and the province's Buddhist year turns on Songkran in April and Loi Krathong in November.

Ao Nang is a village rather than a town — a few thousand permanent residents in its own sub-district of Mueang Krabi district, which also administers the Phi Phi islands — and its population swells with seasonal workers from the Isan provinces and from Myanmar when the hotels fill. Krabi Town, about twenty kilometres east and home to some tens of thousands of people, holds the hospital, the schools, the government offices and the markets that the resort depends on.

Almost everyone here works in tourism directly or supplies it: hotels, restaurants, dive shops, boat crews, drivers, massage shops and the market stalls that feed the workers. Outside the strip, rubber and oil palm plantations and fishing still support the villages, and prawn farms line parts of the coast. The rhythm is strongly seasonal — long hours from November to April, and a much emptier wet season when some businesses close, staff go home to their provinces and the beach belongs to local families again.

Days begin early, with boats leaving from the sand soon after dawn and markets trading before the heat. Afternoons are slow, and the evening belongs to the beach road. The issues that concern residents are familiar ones on this coast: water shortages at the end of the dry season, waste and sewage, the price of land, and how much the reefs and the Railay cliffs can take.

Southern Thai cooking is the foundation, and it is hotter and more turmeric-heavy than food further north. Kaeng som, a sour orange curry of fish with tamarind and turmeric, is the regional standard; kua kling is minced meat dry-fried with a fierce curry paste; and kaeng tai pla, built on fermented fish innards, is the dish that marks out a truly local kitchen. Plain rice and a plate of raw vegetables and herbs come alongside to cool them.

Seafood is the reason many people eat out here: rock lobster, blue crab, squid, prawns and whole fish, usually sold by weight and grilled over charcoal or steamed with lime, garlic and chilli. The restaurants on the rocks at the west end of the bay do this in plain sight, and the simplest preparations are generally the best.

Krabi's Muslim kitchens give the area its other strand: khao mok gai, chicken and rice cooked with turmeric and spices in the biryani manner; roti, griddled and served either with curry or folded around banana and condensed milk; and sweet, strong tea. Breakfast for Thai residents is often khanom jeen, fermented rice noodles under curry with a tray of vegetables, or rice soup. Fresh fruit — mangosteen, rambutan, durian and pineapple in season — is sold from carts along the beach road, and coffee is drunk thick and sweet.