Islands Less Trampled

Regular contributor John Borthwick goes island hopping through a treasure trove of lesser-known Thai islands.

Forget the mega-mosh islands like Phuket and their party-land cousins such as Khos Phi Phi, Phangan and Tao. Thailand still has shores aplenty where tattoos, bucket booze and jet skis don’t define your time. Consider a few of these koh:

Koh Yao Noi and Koh Yao Yai

The fantastic limestone isles of Phang Nga Bay jut from the sea like sleeping dragons. Amid these zoomorphic snoozers you’ll find the twins of Koh Yao Noi ("Little Long Island") and Koh Yao Yai ("Big Long Island"). They sit east of Phuket and west of Krabi (and a world apart from both), still run mostly on slow-boat time and boast few beer bars and day spas. Neither island is a Robinson Crusoe wilderness — in fact there are good resorts on both, such Koh Yao Yai Village — but the beaches aren't jammed with hawkers and hire chairs. Your resort’s lawn mower might be a buffalo and the nightlife a cricket's chirp.

Getting there: One hour by ferry from Bang Rong pier, northeast Phuket.

Old Thai Canoe

Mu Koh Ang Thong

Travellers used to escape to Koh Samui. Then they escaped from it to Koh Phangan. With the proliferation of beach parties, roads and resorts, some are escaping from there, too. To its northwest are the 42 islands of Koh Ang Thong National Park. With excellent scuba diving, snorkelling and kayaking, they are good for a very long day-trip by speedboat or a more leisurely live-aboard boat excursion. Expect both crowds and seclusion, depending on which island and what time of day.

Snorkelling at Koh Ang Thong

Koh Tarutao and Koh Lipe

The Tarutao/Adang-Rawi archipelagos are as far south as you go on the west coast of Thailand before hitting Malaysia. Here, the towering rock formations and crystal waters of Koh Tarutao National Marine Park, a 51-island group around 30 km from the mainland, are still off the radar for large tour groups and day-trippers.

Following a bizarre history of prison camps and piracy during the 1930s and ‘40s, the Koh Tarutao archipelago became in 1974 a National Park. The only accommodation is at the park facilities — you’ll need to reserve a room or campsite in advance (www.dnp.go.th). Meanwhile, nearby Koh Lipe — not part of the park — has many resorts ranging from dive lodges to luxury bungalows.

The reward for getting to Koh Tarutao is the pure simplicity and isolation of it all; then throw in jungle, sea eagles, monkeys and empty beaches. If you need aircon, WiFi, ATM and 7-11, then Koh Lipe is the place.

Getting there: By speedboat or ferry from Pak Bara to Tarutao. Then speedboat to Lipe. National Park entrance fee for foreigners, 400 baht; accommodation reservations are strongly recommended. National Park islands are closed April—November.

Koh Laoliang. While you’re down this way, consider Koh Laoliang, a small island in Koh Petra Marine Park, 20 km off the Trang coast. Remote, peaceful, good for climbing and camping.

Koh Adang in the Adang-Rawi archipelago

Mu Koh Similan and Mu Koh Surin

Divers rave about these two Andaman Sea clusters, both national marine parks, well northwest of Phuket. The waters around the nine Similan Islands offer dramatic swim-through reefs, superb corals, a huge variety of tropical fish and stunning visibility. Morays, mantas, lionfish, giant grouper and leopard sharks are on the visual menu. Further north, the densely forested Surin Islands are home to several sea gypsy communities, but their real drawcard is underwater, even for snorkelers. At nearby Richelieu Rock divers frequently see whale sharks, rays and hammerheads.

Accommodation is limited mostly to tents, on the Similan island of Koh Miang and at the Surin park headquarters. Avoid Thai holidays. Advance booking recommended, through www.dnp.go.th.

Getting there: Speedboats depart from Khao Lak for the Similan Islands and from Khuraburi for Koh Surin. The crossing takes about one hour. The islands are open from November to May.

Koh Phra Thong. If you’re in the area consider Koh Phra Thong about 10 km southwest the mainland port of Khuraburi. In the middle in a group of three islands, Phra Thong is flat, has long empty beaches fringed by palms and no crowds.

Mu Koh Similan

Koh Surin

Koh Kood

Koh Chang in the Gulf of Thailand has been rapidly and unsympathetically developed down its west coast. Its beaches are still fine for a seafood-eating, happy hour/happy ending sort of holiday but if you want somewhere more pristine head to Koh Kood in the same eastern archipelago, not far from Cambodia. Spacious Koh Kood has good resorts like Cham’s House at Haad Takien beach and Six Senses Soneva Kiri (about as upmarket as you can go without needing oxygen), but also plenty of space and jungle. There’s great diving and lots to do for visitors who don’t want to do too much. The sands haven’t been hived off to beach umbrella bosses and transport to taxi extortionists — problems that turn some beach “paradises” to purgatories.

Getting there: one hour by fast ferry from Trat.

Haad Takien beach, Koh Kood

Koh Phayam

Little Koh Phayam (pronounced “pie-am”) floats just south of Burma’s last outrider islands. No cars or real roads, few bars, no spas and no karaoke yowls — well, not yet. There are many small resorts, like the very friendly Bamboo Bungalows, and a handful of more upmarket ones. You get around on motorbikes on narrow paths. Come late afternoon, Phayam gets truly gorgeous. The cicadas crank up and the lightshow begins. Above the ghost islands of Burma the thunderclouds stack, twitching with lightning. Paradise “unimproved.”

Getting there: one hour by speedboat from Rayong.

Koh Phayam

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Muay Thai Live - The Legend is Alive and Loud at Asiatique

Regular contributor John Borthwick gets sensory overload at the newest, loudest and most violent spectacular in Bangkok.

Fists of Fury meets Romeo and Juliet? Ong Bak VI meets Rambo IX? The King and I goes cage-fighting? Chose your analogy, the stunt action show Muay Thai Live – The Legend Lives, showing nightly at Bangkok’s Asiatique the Riverfront, is the biggest, loudest, bone-crunching-est spectacle in town.

Muay Thai Live sketches the development of Thai martial arts from the mists of Siamese time, through endless battles in the Ayutthaya period (against tactfully unnamed enemies, aka Burma), to street-fightin’ man stuff and finally to muay thai, the code.

It is loud, hugely energetic, skilfully choreographed and relentlessly violent. A cast of 18 stuntmen/fighters and one endangered damsel fly around the boxing-ring stage, shredding each others’ limbs and six-packed torsos, and smashing skulls like pumpkins. Mere instants after being pulverised, goodies and baddies alike bounce back to enjoy miracle reincarnations and rejoin the ding-dong/ting-tong fray or at least the next scene.

What is fascinating is that all this apparently spontaneous fury and sound is synched with split-second accuracy. When Villain A has his leg broken in three places and cork-screwed off by Good Guy B, the wince-making, crepitus grind that we almost viscerally experience is not (of course) the actual sound. It is stunt actors impeccably timing their smashes and kicks to the booming pre-recorded sound track. Not lip-sync but fist-sync, knee-sync. Seventy minutes of it — and not a beat is missed, not one maiming shot is mis-cued.

Machismo, Thaichismo, captions in four languages, homicidal pratfalls, a muay thai ladyboy, hoodie mafia, tear-jerking sentimentality and blokes with epic kung-fu names like Tiger King in Disguise and Warrior of Broken Swords ... it’s all there, in a spectacular that much resembles a computer game come to life. Or 1980s World Championship Wrestling gone tom yam gung, gone digital, gone crazy.

State-of-the-art light and sound technology are lavishly deployed here to truly pack a punch. Teenage boys will love it all (though, dudes, don’t attempt these stunts at home). Girlfriends and parents will indulge them. Muay Thai Live – The Legend Lives is a tale vividly told by director Ekachai Uekrongtham, full of sound and fury, and signifying ... well, as the Thais say: up to you.

Exit via the gift-shop, of course. No photography is allowed inside the theatre but later you can pose with the cast for a pic, your own Muay Thai and Me — The Selfie Lives moment.

Details: Reach Asiatique the Riverfront by free, 15-minute shuttle boat from Sathorn pier (adjacent to Saphan Taksin Skytrain station), or taxi along Charoenkrung Road.

Muay Thai Live is performed at 8 p.m each night at The Stage, Asiatique the Riverfront. Standard seats, 1,200 baht; premium seats, 1,500 baht. 
Book at www.thaiticketmajor.com/muaythailive

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Coup? What Coup?

Regular contributor, John Borthwick checks out post-coup life in Thailand and finds that it’s safe to go back in the water.

Peace be with you...

“If you didn’t read the papers or watch TV, you’d never know that there had been a coup,” Andy, a longterm Thailand resident and professional Muay Thai coach, tells me on Koh Samui. I arrived in Bangkok about a week after the coup of 22 May 2014, by which time life had settled back to near-normalcy. Martial law? Where? I saw a few soldiers at the airport and, later, several HumVees parked beside the highway. No roadblocks, no ID checks and not an even halfway serious application of the curfew hours.

The curfew was quickly lifted in major tourist centres and then, by June 13, across the entire country. (An early priority — very Thai — was to lift it in time for the next full moon party on Koh Phangan.) Were I not a keen consumer of news, I too might have said, ”Coup? What coup?”

During the early days of martial law, global news services including BBC World and CNN managed to find small flash mobs in Bangkok and, using enough stock “khaki” footage and “crisis” commentary, give the impression that the city, indeed the whole country, was on the verge of eruption. Foreign governments issued travel warnings, and visitors by the thousands cancelled their flights.

Clearly there had been a long political crisis in Thailand. The Army eventually responded to the deadlock with a bloodless coup d’etat. As in the past, the declared intention is for the generals — the National Council for Peace and Order — to hand over the reins to an elected government. Fifteen months is the perhaps optimistic projection.

Few Thais want military rule. But even fewer wanted to see their country paralyzed and polarized as it had increasingly become. In my time there I did not meet one Thai who vehemently opposed the coup. (Certainly there are those, many even, who feel otherwise, but I did not encounter those opinions.) Mostly, people just wanted to get on with their livelihoods and, regardless of their political inclinations, in general had welcomed a circuit-breaker in the Red vs Yellow political stalemate. Their more immediate worry was the damage being done to Thailand’s reputation for both investment and tourism by simplistic, dramatised network news reportage.

Equally baffling for them was to see foreign governments issuing alarmist statements, such as Australia’s: “Martial law continues to be imposed nationwide ... exercise a high degree of caution ... due to the possibility of civil unrest and the threat of terrorist attack, including Bangkok and Phuket.” Sixty-two countries posted travel advisories, including — incredibly — 19 “red alerts” against all travel to Thailand.

Meanwhile, any Thai or tourist on the ground knew that it was perfectly safe to go back in the water (so to speak) in Phuket, Samui, Tarutao or the Ping River, because it had never been unsafe.

On June 12, the influential businessman, American-born Thai citizen William Heinecke, published in the Bangkok Post an open letter to the foreign diplomatic corps and international media. Among his points were:

— I am distressed by the interpretation by a number of Western governments and the international media of both the Coup ... and the situation that led to the Coup. Put succinctly, many of you have gotten it wrong.

— The military showed great restraint as it stood by watching the situation deteriorate, allowing ample time and opportunity for the politicians to resolve the crisis. The price for that period was paid for by the Thai people ... and only when it was clear that that there was no other reasonable solution did the Thai military step in.

— There are no concerns whatsoever for personal safety within Bangkok’s large expatriate community or the millions of tourists still enjoying their holidays in Thailand, yet this is not mentioned in the international media reports or travel warnings.

— Thailand remains a peaceful and welcoming country.

See soon you in Koh Chang, Samet, Surin, Mae Hong Son, Khao San Road or any part of Thailand you like.

Enjoying the good life in Thailand. Pics: John Borthwick

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Smoke on the Water: Nakhon Phanom's Fire Boat Festival

Regular contributor John Borthwick heads north to the Mekong River to witness a fiery nighttime flotilla.


Somewhere out there across the black tide of the Mekong River is Laos. There’s a full moon rising, but not much else to see. "Be patient," says my friend as we wait, along with thousands of others, on this riverbank at Nakhon Phanom in northeastern Thailand.

Upriver I spot something glowing — blazing. Something huge. With hypnotic slowness, the apparition drifts into view. It is a low boat, perhaps 50 metres long, supporting a 20-metre high flaming image composed of (I am told) 19,999 small lanterns depicting Thailand’s king and queen and a phoenix-like Garuda bird.

The huge vessel drifts past like a fiery ghost. Another boat of equal intricacy follows, then another. In Thai these are known as rua fai, but English approximations like "illuminated boats" or "fire boats" do no justice to these spectacular artistic conflagrations.

A fire boat on the Mekong

The original rua fai were small candle-lit rafts that carried flowers, incense and a little money to other villages downstream. The flame symbolised burning away the previous year's suffering while petitioning the deities for good weather and prosperity.

Thailand's tourist authorities saw the potential of the fire boats, if super-sized, as the focus of a major festival or Nakhon Phanom, 735 km northeast of Bangkok. The Lai Rua Fai (or Illuminated Boat Procession) Festival, held on the full moon of the 11th lunar month (late October—early November), heralds the end of both Buddhist Lent and the rainy season, and the beginning of the harvest. As Nakhon Phanom's major event of the year it sees Thais flooding in from Bangkok and across Isaan for parades, ceremonies and musical performances. The town population of around 40,000 people almost doubles during the festival.

Having been blessed by monks, we watch a large street parade of wax model Buddhist temples (that don't melt in the midday heat even though we spectators almost do) as well as dragon boat races by day and fireworks by night. And then comes the main event, the parade of fiery boats.

Street parade, Nakhon Phanom

Little drummer boys, Nakhon Phanom

The boats, painstakingly constructed for months by local communities, burn in brief glory. Having passed by us, they come ashore downstream to expire like dying swans. Next morning they will be just a burnt-out fleet of bare hulls, each supporting a billboard-sized framework and up to 30,000 smoldering little kerosene lanterns.

The fireboats, 13 in all, drift past us like images by an Oriental J.W.M. Turner, lighting the Mekong night with their fiery tableaux — of Garuda, Ganesh and Naga serpents, not to mention motor cars and more royals. Some years ago one boat caught fire and the evening's entertainment was enhanced by the sight of the crew leaping for their lives into the river.

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Koh Samet - Paradise Near Enough

Regular contributor John Borthwick escapes to little Koh Samed, the closest resort island to Bangkok.


At around 200 kilometres from Bangkok you might expect Koh Samed to be over-paved and full of ravers. On the contrary, this predominantly jungle-clad island still has clean, tranquil beaches and, during the week at least, a lowkey booze scene.

Koh Samed (aka Koh Samet) was once known as Vast Jewel Island, a safe anchorage for sailors. In the 19th century its beauty was the inspiration for Thailand's best-loved romantic poet, Sunthorn Phu, whose tale of a lovesick mermaid and an exiled prince is commemorated in the colourful statues of the two lovers on Hat Sai Kaew.

Statues at Hat Sai Kaew

Hat Sai Kaew (“glass sand beach”) on the northeast of the island is Samed’s longest and most popular shore, an 800-metre strand of fine white sands, restaurants and bungalow hotels. From here, beaches loop down the east coast like links in a silica chain that become increasingly pristine — and decreasingly busy — the farther south you go.

Wongduan Beach

Ao Cho beach

Among the island’s virtues are its woeful roads — their washboard ruts successfully repel invaders who otherwise would over-run the place in coaches, limos and tuk-tuks. To get around, visitors either ride in songthaew pick-up trucks or hire light motorcycles or quad bikes. Having explored Samed by land you might want a different perspective. Boat excursions include snorkelling, fishing or just cruising around the island. The marine life and coral here aren’t Andaman-class but there are plenty of intro dives, night dives and certification courses.

Although this narrow, 13-sq km island in the Gulf is part of a Maritime National Park, that hasn’t stopped Thai developers building tourist facilities along its best beachfronts — the controversial paradox of public land becoming privately “owned”. Accommodation ranges from ageing bungalows to new spa resorts, and plenty in between. Rates rise according to the season (mid-October to March being more expensive). Due to Samed’s proximity to Bangkok and Pattaya, weekend rooms are in demand, so make your reservations in advance.

Tip: book a package for your first few nights accommodation on Samed that includes transport from BKK/Pattaya to Ban Phe public wharf (not to Ban Phe town), the ferry hop to Na Dan (Samed’s only village) and transfer to your resort. You’ll cut out the transport hucksters, hassles and several long waits.

In general, there’s gloriously little of note to do on Samed but eat, drink, read and be lazy. Post-sunset, look out on a dark horizon that’s hung with the carnival lights of squid boats and consider that, although the term “island paradise” — anywhere — is just a marketing crock, sometimes Koh Samed can feel like Paradise Near Enough.

Fire dance at Khlong Chao. Pics: John Borthwick

Getting there: A three-hour drive from Bangkok (or one hour from Pattaya) to Ban Phe wharf in Rayong Province, then a seven-kilometre ferry to the island. National Park entrance fee (mandatory) is 400 baht for foreigners, 40 baht for Thais.

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The Kingdom in Words — Best Thailand Books

Regular contributor John Borthwick bookworms his way through some of the best reads about Thailand — in fact, fiction and sci-fi.


“Thailand is the Italy of Asia. Great food, beautiful women, joyously corrupt and totally dysfunctional.” So writes Jake Needham, author of taut, intelligent thrillers set in Thailand. The Big Mango and Killing Plato are perfect stuck-in-the-airport novels or an on-the-beach read. In fact, your Thailand reading can fall into three phases: On The Plane, On The Beach and Back Home.

On the Plane

Jake Needham’s plots are steeped in international politics, big money bastardry and the onion layers of Thai corruption. (The Wall Street Journal Asia notes, “Mr Needham seems to know rather more than one ought about these things.”) Add sharp dialogue and pace, and you have the classic The Big Mango and recent delights like A World of Trouble. Needham’s work is notches above the recurrent template of farang fiction about Thailand, of go-gos, goons and gumshoes.

The Ideal Man: The tragedy of Jim Thompson and the American way of war by Joshua Kurlantzick is an excellent new biography of the legendary Jim Thompson, “silk king”, spy, socialite and disappearing man. The book’s sub-title sets the scene. Exceptionally informative about post–WWII Thailand and its most glamorous foreign resident.

Jim Algie’s Bizarre Thailand: Tales of crime, sex and black magic is nowhere near as sordid as its tagline suggests. Arcane local knowledge, and funny, too. In a similar vein, but people-focused, also check out Bangkok Babylon and Thailand Confidential both by Jerry Hopkins (biographer of Jim Morrison).

Money Number One: The single man’s survival guide to Pattaya and A Fool in Paradise — the titles say all that one needs to know about “romance” in Thailand. Aussie expat Neil Hutchison’s funny-ouch! anecdotes should be mandatory in-flight reading for all arriving foreign males between the ages of puberty and senility.


On the Beach

Ex-lawyer John Burdett’s four novels featuring his eccentric Thai-farang police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep — in a Bangkok of bizarre murders, dirty politics and curious sex — are smart, street-credible page turners and full of gloriously bent characters. Start with Bangkok 8. Burdett’s cast of good- and evil-doers is infinitely more nuanced than the penny dreadful dames and private dicks in the prolific Christopher G. Moore’s series of who-dunnits, also set in Thailand. Moore’s short story collection, Chairs is recommended, instead.

Jasmine Nights by Thai renaissance man and aristocrat S.P Somtow is rightly billed as “the classic coming-of-age tale in Thailand of the 1960s.” Set in a time-warp family enclave (“our remote little island kingdom on Sukhumvit Road”), at one point Somtow’s father tells him that the coming Vietnam War will soon change everything for them: “This place we’re in now is a piece of paradise ... But in this tiny Eden, there is no hint of the change that will sweep the world. We’re not really of this earth ... but it can’t last.” While it does, the story is sexy, magical, poignant.

Flavour-of-the-year Norsk noir novelist Jo Nesbo penned a Bangkok crime tale way back in 1998 that has only now been translated to English. Cockroaches sees his Oslo police detective/defective Harry Hole in Bangkok investigating the murder of the Norwegian ambassador who has turned up dead in a seedy motel. As they do. Go-gos, temples and opium dens(??) are the screensaver backdrops to Harry’s hunt.

Canadian poet-novelist-travel writer Karen Connelly knows Thailand and its language well. Try her adroit, youthful account of a year in the Kingdom, Touch the Dragon: A Thai journal. A much later book, Burmese Lessons: A true love story is a gritty, open-heart account of journey and loving in the Thai jungles amid exiled Burmese resistance groups.

A Woman of Bangkok by Jack Reynolds was first published in 1956. The Asian Wall Street Journal clocked it as “Among the ten finest novels written about Asia.” That’s a big call for a “young foreign man meets unscrupulous local vixen” tale. Nevertheless, it’s a plot still played out to this day, nightly. Which might explain this compelling novel’s re-emergence.


Back Home (and wishing you weren’t)

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi is a dystopian tale of gene scammers, agri-corp wickedness and an engineered, quasi-human woman, the “windup girl” of the title. All set in a future, post-diluvean Bangkok where government departments war for keeps against each other. William Gibson meets Blade Runner meets GM-induced famine.

Private Dancer sees Irish crime writer Stephen Leather (or at least his tragic protagonist, Pete) tread the same ground, shed the same tears and not learn the same lessons that Jack Reynold’s callow hero didn’t learn 50 years earlier. By the 21st century, however, everything in the Big Mango’s bar world is harder and far more sinister. Down, deeper and down, lovestruck Pete sinks into his obsession with a ying fatale. Slow Learner could be the book’s alternative title.

In Borderlines, fine English writer Charles Nicholl headed north to the Mekong and into Burma in search of rebels, jade, opium traders, insights and an elusive friend, Katai. “... sometimes I think that it wasn't just Katai who ‘got away’, but Thailand itself, the whole strange trip. I never really got to know where I was going, never reached my destination. Perhaps the code of the road is as simple as that. You never do get there. There is just the road, and what it reveals along the way.” Sounds familiar?

Happy reading!

John Borthwick is the author of Summer in Siam, a collection of essays about travelling in Thailand.

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Up/Down Chinatown

Regular contributor John Borthwick wanders Chinatown’s fascinating Yaowarat Road.

With its Blade Runner alleys, sidewalk astrologers, herbalists, goldsmiths and cheek-by-jowl eateries, teeming Yaowarat Road could be nowhere but in Chinatown. Yet not just any Chinatown. Bangkok’s, it is claimed, is South-east Asia’s largest.

In Feng Shui terms, Yaowarat Road is a “golden dragon area”, an ideal place for doing business. Five minutes on the street demonstrates the point. With Chinatown sprawling between, and beyond, Yaowarat and Charoenkrung roads, the whole place seems programmed to perpetually buy and sell, sell and buy, not to mention eat, drink and run.

Guess what part of town you're in?

The side sois off Yaowarat are microcosms of Sino-Thai enterprise, specialising in textiles, flowers, furniture or electronics, and everything else from hat-racks to rat-traps. Soi Itsara Nuphap 167, for instance, runs between Yaowarat and Charoenkrung. Enter it and you’ll think you’ve stepped into a Blade Runner set, minus the humidity and homicides. Breathe in, inch forward and by the end, several hundred metres later (and however long it takes), you’ve sampled a universe.

This being Chinatown, you’re never far from food — be it a street stall, café or restaurant — that offers respite from the intensity. On Santhipaab Road (No. 539) you’ll find excellent fried oyster omelettes at the little Nai Mon Hoi Thod eatery. When evening falls, footpath restaurants spring up along Yaowarat to provide you with a progressive feast of sea- and every other kind of food. Walk, stop and sample, then do it again; and also do the right thing by skipping the eco-uncool shark-fin and birds-nest soups.

Nai Mon Hoi Thod - delicious!

Not the easiest of finger foods...

Chinese settlers came to Thailand in numbers during the Sukhothai period (1238-1438) and their history in this Rattanakosin area dates back to even before the establishment of Bangkok in 1782. Much later, King Rama V encouraged more Chinese commercial trade and at that time ordered the construction of several main roads here, including Yaowarat in 1891. Bangkok’s Chinatown, one of the oldest overseas Chinese communities in the world, now covers about two square kilometres. Its maze of alleys, often redolent of herbs, incense, perfume and stir-fry, is also a business and commercial centre vital to the Thai economy.

Pics: John Borthwick, 2014

Yaowarat Road flows day and night like an asphalt Yangtze and its taxis, tuk-tuks, cars and pedestrians jostle with a fast-forward urgency, but not all is stress and getting. Shanghai Mansion Hotel, at 479, was built in 1892 and in its eventful life has been a Chinese opera house, stock exchange, textile trading house and department store. Pop in and check out the lobby’s chinoiserie — red sofas, lanterns, checkers and decorative screens — all paying homage to Deco-decadent 1930’s Shanghai. If you feel like staying, there are themed suites that have names like Cherry Blossom Havens.

You can reach Chinatown on foot from Hualamphong station (a 10-minute walk) or from Ratchawong Pier (via Ratchawong Road and Sampaeng Lane to Yaowarat). It is a world apart from Bangkok’s familiar Sukumvit-Silom-Khao San axis.

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Khanom's Pink Dolphins

Regular contributor John Borthwick checks out pink dolphins, “pancake rocks” and a piranha-free fish spa in little-known Khanom.


Fabulous Khanom. What — you’ve never heard of the place? All the better. This small fishing town with nine kilometres of white sand beach sits on the mainland shore of the Gulf of Thailand, mid-way between Surat Thani and Nakhon Si Thammarat. It’s well south of Koh Samui and about as different from Samui’s tourist moshpit as somtam is from Caesar salad.


While some Thais know of Khanom for its rare pink dolphins, the destination is now registering on the radar of other discerning travellers. We head to the town pier to join local character, Mr Dang on his dolphin-watching cruise boat. Khanom locals are proud of their pink, Indo-Pacific dolphins (sometimes also known as Irrawaddy dolphins). There are some 60 of them, although they remain vulnerable to entanglement in the nets of local trawlers. Dang seems to have made an appointment today with several of them. As we cruise this marine national park the dolphins romp around us, ride the boat’s bow pressure wave and then, lingering in ones and twos, woof down the sardines that Khun Dang’s deckhand throws to them.

A pink Irrawaddy dolphin

Dolphin spotting from Mr Dang's cruise

We cruise further through the islands of the marine national park and come to the extraordinary geological display known as “pancake rocks” where the rock strata, that cooled in some prehistoric volcanic epoch, have separated into parallel sheets, more like the pages of a massive tome written (literally) in stone.

A stack of pancake (rocks)

About five years ago a pair of young Finnish flash-packers wandered along this coast and finding the remote beach of Hat Na Dan they had the wit (and, fortunately, also the finances) to buy a prime little slice of it. Today, Atte Savisalo and Kati Hakkinen are justly proud of their luxury, 28-room boutique retreat, Aava Resort & Spa, which was recently voted by Tatler Travel Guide as one of the “101 Best Hotels in the World”.

In Finnish, the name Aava means, “open, spacious, calm” and the experience here is just that. Endless white beach, endless blue sky and no obligations except to take a dip, read a good book, have a spa session, check the local market, and then another swim — what’ll it be, the pool or sea?

How gorgeous is this beach?

Having exhausted these possibilities, we head inland to explore the fantastic stalactites of Wang Thong Cave. A subterranean phantasmagoria of metaphor rocks comes alive beneath our flashlights — crystal pillars, frozen waterfalls and Dali-esque phantoms in silica and slow-mo time.

Our final stop for the day is a freshwater stream at Tontarn Natural Fish Spa. Now, this fish spa is not your shopping mall variety — you know, where folks sit around for 20 minutes having a “feet-in-the-fishbowl” experience. At first we dangle our legs in the cool, running stream and then, suddenly, it’s shrieks and crazed giggles all around as our toes are nibbled by small, black ki kom fish. Dozens of them per foot. Despite the din and our awful piranha jokes, after an hour we all emerge with feet still attached to our ankles — and much cleansed, right down to little teeth-graze marks on our toenails.

Going in for a feast!

Later that evening, those same feet carry us across the sands to an al fresco dinner of lamb, mussels and merlot, and much more, as served at tables beneath countless stars on Aava’s endless beach.

To get there: Fly from Bangkok to Surat Thani, then road transfer to Khanom, 90 minutes away.

Happy dolphins! PICS: John Borthwick

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