Dave in Thailand
Dave in Thailand
So who is Dave Patterson? I am a Canadian who has been snorkeling around Thailand and northeast Malaysia for over 20 years - Dave in Thailand is a few web pages and things showing some of my trips in Thailand and nearby places

pic of Dave in the water with mask
Dave's recent book Snorkeling the Beautiful Southern Thailand Andaman Islands' Coral Reefs and Gardens - a short but content-rich guide to the best snorkeling spots around the southern Thailand Andaman Islands from Lipe in the south to Ngai in the north, with ID pages for the most common fish and corals and other stuff you'll see.

picture of book cover
Some of Dave's Other Writings
tres importante too
bird silhouette
Dave's Songs
- I've been writing songs and singing those and others since the 60s and the Beatles and the other great music of that time got me going - click on the (lovely) book cover below to visit the page -
Dave's Songs 1966-2025 cover
Democracy Study Guide
Democracy Study Guide image
Dave's most recent attempt to deconstruct the pretend democracy in Canada and suggest ways to make it more real - with links to some of Dave's other social and political writings
Greenways cover

Green Island, Dave's magnum opus, a story of a modern social democracy where We the People have finally displaced the bankers from our government, and established the first real Democracy on our planet. The old rulers are not about to sit idly by and allow the work of centuries to be undone by a band of hippies, of course, and attempt a regime change with their military arm, the US hegemon. This regime change attempt gets a bit of a shock, however. Green Island too has something a little harder under the green glove.
Serpent's Tale cover
A Serpent's Tale - Dave's parable about what we are doing to our planet - when you look into the abyss, even if you have no idea what you are doing - be careful - the abyss is looking back ...
Dave has done a lot of other writing over the years, from books analyzing the problems we face and how to start getting solutions to several books for young readers, more about which can be found at
Dave's Author Info Page
Ernie Mows the Lawn cover
These and Dave's other books can be found at
 Dave's Smashwords EPUBS page
montage of pics of dave in Thailand

Ok, the first rendition of this page - I've been here 27 (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) years now (small fixup to include the Corals book Sept 2025 - 31 years), and had a lot of experiences - the first few years of course very few pics, had a nice Minolta camera, but the heat and mold and humidity eventually got to it, and of course even with a good SLR getting pics developed etc is expensive, so there's not a lot from the first few years - lots happened in my first few years as a CUSO volunteer, we did a lot of traveling around Thailand, but sadly few pics. But somewhere after 2000, I was getting more settled in at my new job (had to leave CUSO after 5 years, their limit - I came on a 2-year contract, but wasn't too anxious to go back to cold Canada after 5 years of no snow etc), and the digital cameras started to appear, and I started taking digital pics, and making web pages with them, a few of which are below:

Wien Tien
PSU AG Fair 2004
Loy Gratong at PSU 2004
Kuching 2004
Luang Prabang page 1, page 2, page 3, page 4
Phnom Penh, Day 1 Arrival, Day 2, the CamTESOL conference,
Day 3, the Killing Fields and S-21, and Days 4-6, touring around a bit
Koh Lipe (day 1), Day 2, around Koh Lipe, and Day 3, the main thing - snorkelling
The Perhentian Islands Day 1; Day 2, Abdul's; Day 3 - snorkelling and exploring a bit, and
Day 4 - around the small island

- there's a bit of a few years without much stuff - this would not be because of lack of travelling to very interesting places, mainly islands around the Andaman, quite the reverse really - I think what happened is that around this time I got the newer versions of digital cameras, which could (a) take a LOT of pictures, and (b) they could take good quality underwater pics too!!!!!! - it was a beautiful time for snorkelling, we made a lot of trips, and I think the web pages kind of petered out because there were just too damn many pics to sort through and prepare for the web pages. I was also working on a book (The Democratic Revolution Handbook, available to the left somewhere there), and still had the trusty old day job to look after, and the travel web pages just got left out of the picture (as the pictures kept accumulating!). but then a few years back I figured out a new approach, after writing some books and getting a relatively quick and easy way of making graphics - it would be easier to make a trip booklet using my publishing program (FAR easier than coding a web page!!!), and then make a PDF out of it for any friends and family I wanted to share the pics etc with. So - here are some of the PDF trip booklets from the last few years, with my own underwater pics -

Koh Sukorn and Lao Liang
Phuket and Koh Racha
Chumpon Marine Park
Koh Lanta, Koh Haa, Koh Rok
Why Koh Kradan is my Favorite of the Andaman Islands