Phuket, Thailand - 2 of 3

After an hour or so, on a long motorboat (looked like an oversized canoe) and beautiful ride in the Phang Nga Bay, we then visited Koh Panyee, which is a city of 2000 (350 families) built on pilings in the water where Muslim fishermen live 200 years cut off from the mainland and modernism. All of them are the descendants, directly or indirectly, of Toh Baboo and his family and friends, who were the first people to settle on Koh Panyee.

The hundreds of huts, shacks, restaurants and houses where the villagers live are built on stilts over the surrounding shallow sea. No one knows how many wooden and concrete piles hold up this extraordinary community, but it's certainly a fascinating and unique feat of informal engineering. The village has a school (see the photos as to how the children on this island have a normal K-12 experience), a mosque, a health center, lots of small souvenir shops, and a handful of large restaurants facing the Andaman Sea. We ate lunch at Panyee Village at the New Fern Restaurant. What a fabulous Thai lunch … pad thai, papaya salad, fried chicken, curry chicken & potatoes never tasted so good. And it was a large, beautiful, expensively decorated in and out, restaurant (even with incredible bathrooms).Read more