Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Old district office of Ko Lanta

Photo courtesy Camille
Camille from Ko Samui has been traveling to Ko Lanta in the Andaman Sea, which administratively forms a district of Krabi province. By coincidence he found the old district office, a beautiful old wooden building in the historic town center on the southern island. While the building is supposed to be a local museum now, it looked like it was closed down and not kept well recently - which is quite a shame. Though Ko Lanta is still a lesser known tourist attraction, there are lots of resorts on the island already which could bring enough visitors interested in a well-kept local museum.

According to one website I found, this Koh Lanta Community Museum (พิพิธภัณฑ์ชุมชนชาวเกาะลันตา) was opened in December 2007 and is open daily, yet for Camille it looked like it has been quietly closed down in the meantime. Hope it is only a temporary closure, or a misunderstanding by Camille - I'll keep a look on his blog if he can find out any more details.

The building looks rather similar with the historic province hall of Nonthaburi, which is located right at the Chao Phraya river next to the Nonthaburi pier. Though the building there also has parts where it isn't restored that well yet, it has the local museum for Nonthaburi inside which is very much worth a visit, even though it is still only covering few rooms and is planned to have many more rooms and exhibits.

The modern district office of Ko Lanta is in the middle of nowhere still on the mainland, from the satellite image in Google Earth it looks just like most of the district offices today.

2 comments:

Ian said...

I just hope that the Nonthaburi museum has not been damaged in the recent floods. I did read that there was flood damage in the province, and the museum, as you say, is right on the water.

Camille said...

Hi Andy,

There's a comment on my blog about the museum stating that it is open, unfortunately I didn't have time to follow up on this;

Open from 9am-5pm
Tel/fax: 075 697 069
lantaproject@gmail.com

It was indeed opened on 9 December 2007 by Krabi Governor Siva Sirisaovalak