The day before we turned up in Pattaya we were on the opposite side of the country, on a boat in Ao Phang Nga National Park. This is the bay on the Andaman coast where the limestone comes straight up out of the water in slabs, dark green on top and undercut at the waterline, and where one particular rock has been trading on an old film credit ever since a camera crew found it.
The rock itself
Ko Tapu stands a little way off the beach in shallow water, and it's the shape that makes it famous: narrower at the base than it is at the top, so it looks like it's balancing rather than standing. The water around it that day was flat, warm and the colour of jade, and shallow enough to walk out a long way before it got serious.
It's a long way from the rest of this trip, roughly the whole width of Thailand: the next evening we were on the Gulf coast in Pattaya, and the country in between holds Bangkok, the hill road out to Kanchanaburi and, much further north, Chiang Mai.