KRABI, Thailand -- The idea of an unspoiled, untroubled, untouched land has become necessary in our polluted times -- a space where nature as it was is still to be discovered and where we may once more become natural as well. It is a pleasing prospect, this visitable paradise.
And it is an increasingly necessary one, since it was we ourselves who, in our search, touched, troubled and spoiled earlier paradises. Our very numbers endanger what we seek. Paradises are polluted when we tourists swarm.
Take Thailand. A country never colonized and thus spared the worst of colonial blight, it still contains pockets of unspoiled shore and sea, places where man and his surroundings seem to exist in that happy symbiosis which is one of the qualifications for a bone fide paradise.