Chapter 2

Chapter 2 deals with a subject we can all immediately relate to: tourism. Compared to other industries such as logging and petrochemicals, tourism would seem to be relatively benign, or even beneficial for the environment. But for all the talk about the potential of eco-tourism, there are remarkably few working examples of it in Southeast Asia. As we shall in the case of a sea kayaking venture that has gone wrong, managing nature tourism sustainably ultimately requires setting limits on the number of tourists, and developing countries find that difficult to do. In Asia, even something as banal as a golf course can turn into a deadly struggle. So I will take readers on a unique alternative tour of Thailand’s fabled Andaman coast to show a darker side of the tourism trade: how it has damaged one of the most beautiful and fragile landscapes on the planet, and how the filming of the movie The Beach on a remote tropical island became an international cause celebre.