Don't drown during your Thai holiday!

Required reading for holiday makers during the rainy season on Samui.

Before I start off with restaurant reviews or other posts, here's some well meant warning for all your beach lovers during the rainy season, roughly from November through to February, if it boils down to this topic. This was posted before at my dive blog.

Having just joined the Thorn Tree forum, the official Lonely Planet travel forum, where lots of good travel advise and information can be found, I stumbled over a prolific poster there, Tezza, who runs a couple of blogs, one about beaches and islands in Thailand and on this specific blog, he has a great post about not drowning during your Thai holiday.

You may think, what is all this about and it won't concern me, but have a look and read up on it, he talks about rip tides and undertows and this should be required reading for everybody visiting Thailand, especially during the rainy season, when the likelihood of these rip tides is greatest!

It's a subject I was about to write about somewhere in the near future, since the rainy season is about to start, or should I rather say, started already with a vengeance, and a few weeks ago I already took this picture in front of Centara Samui hotel in Chaweng, a big warning sign on the beach, warning you about potential rip currents. There are various similar signs and explanations along the beach, on big sign posts.

Each year, more people than you can imagine drown on Samui beaches, mainly Chaweng and Lamai beach, due to these rip currents and they don't make the international headlines!

Main victims are elderly people who get caught up in rip currents and who either don't have the strength or knowledge or both to get out of them rips.

So, Tezza, thanks for the informative post and I hope that plenty of people will read it.

Camille