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"Tourism prospects remain fragile Published: 8 Mar 2014 at 16.30Online news: Local News BERLIN - UK visitor numbers to Thailand rose at the start of the year despite plunging numbers from some other markets in the face of anti-government protests in Bangkok. However, "at some point there will be a cost" if protests continue, according to Martin Craigs, chief executive of the Bangkok-based Pacific-Asia Travel Association (Pata). The "Teflon Thailand" image the country has earned for its "amazing" ability to bounce back from crises can't last forever, he added. "Of course, traffic [to Thailand] has dropped off," he told the UK-based Travel Weekly in an interview at ITB Berlin, the world's biggest travel trade fair. "What is instructive is how huge the drop is according to [government] travel advisories. Visitors walk past a cardboard cutout featuring a traditional Thai dancer at the Thailand stand of the ITB International Travel Trade Fair in Berlin. (AFP Photo) "Hong Kong dropped 60% from January 2013 to January 2014. But traffic from the UK was almost 10% up [in the same period]." Mr Craigs said the reason was simple: "Hong Kong's travel advisory put Bangkok in the same category as Syria." The UK Foreign Office has not advised against travel to Thailand, acknowledging the fact that the protests have been confined to limited areas of Bangkok. However, Mr Craigs reported hotel occupancy in downtown Bangkok at just 20-30%. He told Travel Weekly: "Of course, people book further in advance from Britain. The UK market is used to a little turmoil and the majority are not coming to spend two weeks in Bangkok. "The UK and Hong Kong are the most extreme examples of what has happened." Pata estimates total visitor numbers to Thailand were down 16% year-on-year in January. "It's not a Ukrainian-style situation [in Bangkok]," said Mr Craigs. "Twenty-two people have been killed in three months in sporadic attacks by extremists. "Nothing has been closed: 98% of Bang

"THEY live in stilted shacks built on a mud flat above piles of oyster shells, broken glass and rubbish, their nomadic days on the seas of South-east Asia gone forever. Liya Pramongkit, an elder and midwife of Thailand's largest group of Moken-speaking sea gypsies, saw her people on the small island of Koh Lao dying at the rate of one a week, many of them starving mothers and babies. "We have lost our traditional way of life as our children no longer hear the stories that have been handed down by our ancestors," Liya says, her deeply lined face showing the hardship the Moken have suffered since they were forced to leave their seafaring lives, where the only things that mattered were the tides, the fish, the storms, the moon and the sea spirits. "Before, when we lived and died on the sea, life was much better," she says. Advertisement More than three decades working in Bangkok's slums did not prepare Catholic priest Joe Maier for what he saw on Koh Lao when he made his first 30-minute boat ride here from the Thai fishing port of Ranong, in south-west Thailand, four years ago. "The people were literally starving to death, trapped between the modern world and the Moken world," Father Maier says. "I have never seen people as poor. "The women did not have milk in their breasts to feed their babies and everyone had [intestinal] worms ... there were no traditional values ... it was a matter of basic survival." For centuries, home for the Moken were hand-built boats called kabang which they plied through the Mergui Archipelago, where 800 islands are scattered along 400 kilometres of the coasts of Burma and Thailand, in the Andaman Sea. They lived on fish, molluscs, sandworms and oysters, accumulating little and living on land only during the monsoons. But massively depleted fishing stocks, the declaration of marine reserves and crackdowns on itinerant fishers in Burma forced them off their boats into an uncertain future where they are struggling to survive in a Th