For the Chao Lay people, also known as ‘sea gypsies’, the coronavirus has brought a welcome respite from mass tourism to their ancestral home, near Phuket. Thailand has been closed to foreign visitors for the past eight months. With no tourists, it’s now easier for the Chao Lay to fish; and the real estate projects which posed a threat to the Chao Lay’s ancestral land have also come to a standstill.