KO SAMUI, THAILAND

The train ride was fairly comfortable, but very often the carriages seemed to drift apart a bit and then slam back together so that kept it from being as serene a ride as it could have been. They served dinner on a tray in the compartments and I read my book and then eventually got some sleep. The train was due to get in at about 6:30 the next morning, and I woke up for good about 5 a.m. I think I got about 4 hours sleep altogether, but it wasn’t quality sleep. We pulled into the station finally and saw a group of buses in the station parking lot. I found the one I had pre-paid for the ride to the ferry on and climbed in.

I thought that ride to the port would take twenty or thirty minutes, but it took an hour and a half. It’s just much further than I realized. The bus was air-conditioned and I’m sure it was non-smoking, but the driver kept smoking himself and hanging his head halfway out of the window. Just before we got to the port the driver pulled over across the road to a small market and he got out. He came trotting back a few seconds later with a new pack of cigarettes. I thought this was really weird, but I suppose he knew that we had 30 minutes before the ferry was to leave and only 10 minutes left to drive anyway so we were really in no rush.

We pulled into the port parking lot and the boat was just pulling in. The passengers who just sailed from the island got off and passed us and we all got aboard. I would say there were about 100 passengers total for this 90-minute ride. The boat was very utilitarian and basic. If we had been crossing an international border I am sure it would have been a luxurious Duty Free cruise liner, but this was just like a floating bus with cars in the hull for the ride as well. I sat outside on a bench on one side of the boat and read my book in the rising heat.

The boat arrived on the island and docked. I was one of the last off the ship and I quickly found the man who sold me a pre-paid van ride across the island that would save me a few dollars instead of a more expensive taxi. The van held 11 people and it was completely full with much of our luggage loose in the luggage rack on top. It was very hot outside at this point and not much better inside. The A/C was barely helping so I was hoping for a swift journey. There are towns and resorts all over Ko Samui, but Chaweng Beach is the most famous and densely packed and unfortunately it’s on the exact opposite side of the island.

The island isn’t terribly big so we were over the hill in the center in about 15 minutes, but then suddenly the driver pulled over at a rural 7-Eleven and got out. He went in the store and a few minutes later reappeared with a bottle of water for himself and what looked like a cup of fruit punch. He got back in the van and started driving. Everyone in the van had been on the all night train and the long bus and ferry ride so I was definitely not the only one completely stunned that the driver would just abandon us for even a few minutes to make sure he had plenty to drink.

The driver started dropping people off as we went up the opposite coast and finally he dropped everyone off except me and he got out of the van at the last hotel. Eventually he wandered back to the van and saw me there and only then did he tell me my hotel could be reached by walking down to the beach and then walking two minutes up the coast. Thanks! I grabbed my backpack off the roof and followed his instructions to find Al’s Hut. I thought it was strange that the place was called Al’s Hut since it was, in fact, about 30 individual bungalows lined up perpendicular to the beach in two rows. It was even stranger that the van driver called it Al Hut, but nevertheless the place looked very nice. The travel agency that booked me there said it was a new place so it wouldn’t be in any guidebooks and that was enough to make me suspicious. It turned out to exceed my expectations by quite a bit in almost every way.

I checked in and got my room key. The bungalow cost about $28 per night and it’s just steps from the beach so I didn’t expect too much, but the room was very nice. It was a proper bungalow that had four walls of its own and about 15 feet of grass on each side to the next unit. The bed was the best thing though as it was about 7’ by 7’ and quite comfortable. I had a TV, a very quiet air conditioner and a refrigerator. I was hot, sweaty and uncomfortable from the long trek from Bangkok so I took a shower and then napped for a few hours.

Later I got a good look at the beach and decided it was very pleasant. It’s a wide, sandy beach and is supposedly the biggest beach on the island. It was completely covered with beachfront hotels, restaurants, and bars, but they all had a fairly classy and cohesive feel to them. The small problem with this beach is there is a sandbar or jetty of some kind about 50 meters out, so that cuts down on proper water movement. As a result the water was no deeper than about 3 feet deep all the way out to the sandbar and the water that was sort of trapped in the middle zone was very warm and had some plant growth on the ocean floor. If you walked 3 or 4 minutes down the beach the sandbar ends and the water is cooler and there are fewer plants, but I wasn’t really planning on doing much body surfing anyway.

Walking the other direction from my room you hit the main street in town that runs parallel to the beach. Unfortunately the street was also completely filled in with businesses and was not at all attractive. The other lousy thing about it is the sidewalk is uneven to the point that it sometimes disappears altogether leaving you to walk out into the traffic just to get back to the next thin section of sidewalk.

I had four nights prepaid at the hotel so I was a little worried that I would get bored, but it turned out to be an extremely pleasant place to hang out. There were some tours offered of various local Buddhas and whatnot, but it was still incredibly hot and humid so sitting in a bus and going inland was never too appealing. I had also seen quite a few very similar Buddhas in Bangkok and after all the rest of my sightseeing on this trip I just wasn’t motivated to board a steamy bus to see more things that I wasn’t even aware of before I arrived at the island.

Basically I just hung out on the beach most of the day every day. I had started the 700-page book The Fountainhead just prior to arriving and I found it to be a real page-turner. I finished the book the day before I left the island. One thing that drew people to the beach during this sea was that the heat and humidity were virtually unbearable anywhere else. The light sea breeze made sitting on a padded lounge chair on the beach quite nice, but once you go where the breeze is cut off it was stifling.

My hotel had a restaurant, a bar, and a massage area right on the beach, but the atmosphere was never very hip, at least compared to all the other places nearby. The music they blasted at Al’s Hut was usually light Thai pop that sounded like it was recorded in the 1970s or 1980s, but could easily be brand new and just incredibly bland. I like hearing pop music from different countries, but after 30 minutes of this stuff I had heard enough. Fortunately just about every other place played really good music all the time. One place played really tasty deep house music and two places past that was a small bar that played trance at a good volume all evening and night. I had a few happy hour beers each evening and a delicious dinner at a different place each night, but overall I kept a low profile and never stayed out late at all. I spent more time reading The Fountainhead than anything else.

On my last day on the island I had to check out at noon, but I had a flight to Kuala Lumpur at 6 p.m. from the airport that is very close to my hotel. I stayed in the room until the last minute to avoid the heat as long as I could. I checked out and stowed my bags and then used the Internet at a nearby place that had a really good air conditioner, but eventually I ran out of sites to surf so I went out and had a cheap lunch at a shack close to my hotel. I then came up with the brilliant idea of going to the airport early and hanging out in their air-conditioned waiting room, but it turned out to not be brilliant at all.

I took a private van from in front of my hotel to the airport for only $2.50, but the airport wasn’t was I was hoping it would be. I got out of the van and discovered that the international airport that serves Ko Samui consists of 4 or 5 large huts with thatched roofs. Not only didn’t they have air con, but they didn’t have windows or doors or even walls. I’ve seen loads of places like this in tropical resort areas, but never an airport. Even the Bali airport has proper buildings. I had almost 3 hours before my flight and only a bit of shade for protection from the heat. It wasn’t too bad, but my flight left almost an hour late so I was happy to finally be on board.