Two On Tour

Continuing to scout Thailand for somewhere we might want to live one day

Thursday 20 February

I wake up to a message from Ian that the Jam’s Rick Buckler has died, aged 69. Very sad. I sit out on the balcony for a while with a cup of tea watching old Jam videos on my iPad before getting on with a busy day ahead.

Our flight isn’t until late afternoon. We pack and settle the utilities bill with Gabor, which adds HK$30 a day to our still-modest budget for our month in Pattaya. After a final delicious lunch at nearby Mrs Aom’s, our ride to the airport shows up and we arrive at provincial U Tapao airport mid-afternoon.

This is the first time I’ve flown between two points in Thailand. The flight to Ko Samui is most notable for its almost complete absence of Thais. In fact, it’s almost completely lacking any east Asian faces at all: pretty much every passenger is a farang. We arrive in Samui an hour later at sunset. The baggage reclaim area is a single carousel under a thatched roof in a sort of large open-sided hut – but this makes Samui sound more bucolic than it really is. Once we’re on the road – the Furnesses have thoughtfully arranged for someone to pick us up from the airport – the streets of Samui  give every indication of being as choked as those of Pattaya.

Our flat at Whispering Palms Condominiums is further from the coast than I’d anticipated. Or rather, the island is bigger than I expected. First impressions of the flat: it’s fine. Any concerns I have are about feeling a bit far away from the action, but it’s merely a first impression. After unpacking, we wander down the lane to the nearby main road, where there are plenty of places to eat and have a beer to celebrate arriving in our latest destination.

Friday 21 February

I start the day with a morning dip in our condo pool. I’ve left it a bit later than I should have: most of the pool is already in the sun, so I don’t linger long. We’ve been advised to use bottled water even for the kettle, so somewhere to buy water is a priority. I’m about to walk several hundred metres to our local 7-11 when I find a tiny ramshackle shop selling a few essentials almost right outside our condo driveway. Perfect.

We have no food in the flat yet, so we find a friendly local place for lunch. It’s on the main road, but the food is excellent and the staff are lovely and. We’ll go back. It’s a short but hot walk to the vast Lotus’s supermarket, where we eventually find everything we need except a decent loaf of bread.

At sunset, we meet up with Sam and Clare Furness at a rickety bar on the far side of the airport, near their home (Jason’s currently working in HK). It’s good to see them. Sam looks very thin. He later explains this is due to being prescribed medicine for his recently-diagnosed diabetes that contained Ozempic, that wonder weight-loss drug. Apparently, he went from 80 kilos to just under 50 kilos before he discovered that he’d been prescribed completely inappropriate medication. He’s now recovered to 60 kilos, but still looks slight for a man of five foot six.

Sam’s invited Lauren and Ross, a Brummie couple he met just this morning playing padel. Like us, they’re long-term travellers and we’re soon deep in conversation. It occurs to me that in nearly 18 months of travelling, we’ve never talked to another couple of full-time travellers even though there must be thousands of them around us. We’re just not that gregarious.

After a couple of sundowners, we say goodbye to Clare, who’s off to HK tomorrow, and Lauren and Ross, who we arrange to meet again next Tuesday for a quiz night. Sam takes us down to Fisherman’s Village, a few kilometres down the coast, to eat and talk until it’s time to head home.

Saturday 22 February

I’m enjoying a quiet day and looking forward to the footie until late afternoon, when I receive an AsiaEdit job with a tight deadline tomorrow. I immediately crack on with it, quietly wishing it hadn’t come through.

It’s our first Saturday night in Samui, so we navigate the obstacle course that passes for a pavement to our local sports bar, The Black Duck. It’s perfectly fine for our modest needs. Everton thrown away a 2-0 lead to draw 2-2 with Man Utd in an entertaining game.

Sunday 23 February

After a quick morning swim, I tap away on my AsiaEdit job until late afternoon. After wrapping up, I take a solo walk to Lotus’s in search of yoghurt. Google Maps suggests there’s a shortcut through the local village opposite us, with its quiet streets, aromas of food cooking, drying laundry and sleepy dogs. It’s lovely to wander through a real Thai neighbourhood and enjoy being in another world to the ugliness of the main road and its relentless cars and scooters. Unfortunately, the shortcut no longer exists: the route appears to have been blocked, possibly by the locals to stop traffic passing through the village, for which they would be immediately forgiven. I trapse back the way I came and follow the main road round to Lotus’s.

Monday 24 February

It rains. All day. Fortunately, we have enough food and drink in the flat, which we don’t leave at all. But its not all twiddling our thumbs: we bag another housesit in the UK this summer, this time in glamorous Macclesfield.

Tuesday 25 February

It’s still wet and unsettled, but it brightens up long enough in the morning to trapse down the now muddy lane to Lotus’s for groceries and get some laundry done in a small store on our lane. Almost the moment we arrive home, laden with groceries and fresh laundry, another deluge falls for half an hour.

Good news: I receive very positive feedback on the editing job that I did for AE at the weekend: it’s enough to nudge my rolling average score back to where it was some months ago, when I could get work more-or-less whenever I made myself available. It’s reassuring to have easier access to that back-up source of income once again, but I’m not in a rush to take on more work from AE given how time consuming it is for such limited remuneration.

In the evening, we meet up with Sam at The Jolly Fisherman bar, which is running its regular Tuesday night quiz. Sam introduces us to his teammates Carol and Lester from Southgate, north London, a lovely couple in their sixties who have recently moved to Ko Samui. Throughout the quiz, we pepper them with questions about living in Samui. Quizmaster Matt is desperately incompetent, with poorly thought-out questions and an unnecessarily convoluted scoring system. But, hey, we win the quiz.

On the way home, our Grab driver is a woman in her early twenties. Such a different world to Turkey.

Wednesday 26 February

It’s still wet and unsettled. I spend the morning on some financial housekeeping and research. After lunch, we take a Grab the mile or so to Central Samui, the island’s premier shopping mall, in the centre of Chaweng. Our Grab driver has recently been to Hong Kong: he enthusiastically shows us photos on his phone of every meal he ate there while torrential rain cascades outside and the traffic inches forward.

Central Samui turns out to be rather pleasant. It’s open to the elements, but it’s sheltered. On this wet afternoon, it’s full of others like us looking to kill a couple of hours. Most seem to be doing this by getting a new tattoo; we’re really only there in search of a decent loaf of bread. But by the time we leave a couple of hours later, I have a handsome new Quiksilver shirt, and we’re stocked up on mosquito repellant, posh soap, and yet more groceries. We never did find any genuinely decent bread, but we do now at least have something vaguely brown.

After an iced coffee, we decide to walk back to the flat by skirting around the shore of Chaweng Lake. It’s a lot more peaceful than following the main road. Something we’ll do again.

Thursday 27 February

It’s finally dry and settled enough to get out and explore a little beyond the supermarket or local mall. We wait until the sun’s getting low and the colours are deepening before walking to the wat that stands on a small hill overlooking Chaweng. It’s a good choice: the inside of the wat itself is quiet and beautiful, but the biggest appeal is the views over Ko Samui and beyond: north towards Ko Pha Ngan, rising out of the sea a few miles offshore; east towards the tiny airport; south to Chaweng Beach; and west towards the central hills, where the sun is casting 50 shades of ‘Jesus light’, as K like to call it. We loiter for as long as we can, taking in the views and finally getting a sense of the island’s geography, until the wat’s about to close.

Friday 28 February

With the improved weather, we’re continuing to explore our own neighbourhood. Today, it’s time for a stroll around the perimeter of the modest charms of Lake Chaweng. While there *is* at least a concrete path all the way round the lake, the strip of land beyond the path is relentless churned-up mud. It looks as if there was once a plan to landscape the whole area, but it’s been abandoned. Apart from a few joggers, mostly locals, we encounter no one. Hot and sweaty, we leave the lake shore at the north-west corner and head into Central Samui for a few groceries and a refreshment.

I’m supposed to be cooking tonight, but by the time we’ve finished our iced coffee and smoothie, it’s later than we anticipated. Instead, we walk back to our neighbourhood and return to the restaurant at the end of our lane for fried rice and pad thai.

We haven’t watched any Thai TV or movies for a couple of weeks, so we spend the evening with Netflix watching Thai movie ‘How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies’, SE Asia’s biggest movie of 2024. It’s predictably sentimental, but still thoroughly engaging with relatable messages about family dynamics, money and legacy. Perhaps it could have explored the misogyny of tradition more, instead of merely touching on it? (But “Sons get the goods, daughters only get the genes” is such a brilliant line.)

Saturday 1 March

And we’re into March. We’ve only been in Samui for a little over a week, but my thoughts are already rolling ahead to the coming months and new adventures in new places this spring and summer.

In the meantime, today marks our transition into the middle of our time in Samui as we pick up the Furness family car and drive it back to Whispering Palms condos. Chez Furness is a two-bedroom, airy, modern, secluded villa with a dinky pool. It’s a little white for my tastes, but with one wall painted a striking contrast colour, it could be lovely.

We’ll have the car until next weekend, when Jason – the only Furness who drives – returns from Hong Kong. I’m a little nervous about driving for the first time since Kefalonia way back in the autumn of 2023, but we pootle back safely, watching out for potholes, pedestrians, and scooters trying to wriggle past on the passenger side. Reversing into the only unoccupied parking space back at Whispering Palms is by far my biggest challenge.

Later, at Sam’s suggestion, we head back to the Jolly Fisherman (in a Grab – I’ll be drinking) to attend an inaugural information session for Samui expats. It draws a modest crowd, many of whom are representing the various services that the event has been convened to promote. Our walkaway is that we really should get ourselves vaccinated against dengue fever next time we come.

Sam takes us on to the Frog and Gecko bar and restaurant on the beach further into Fisherman’s Village, where we find plenty to continue chewing on until he heads off for a night of Northern Soul somewhere nearby. Great music, no doubt, but we excuse ourselves and head home.

Sunday 2 March

Just before lunch, the internet disappears. Rebooting doesn’t bring it back, so we report it and dig in for someone to come round to fix it. This is supposed to happen on Monday, but this is Thailand so I don’t hold out a lot of hope. Other than a solo stroll to the supermarket and back, today is a day of very little action.

Thankfully, I’ve downloaded a few films to watch offline. We spend the evening watching Anora, Sean Baker’s perfectly pitched latest film. Overnight, it will  go on to win an armful of Oscars.

Monday 3 March

We’re waiting for the internet to be fixed, so today means staying at home until a technician arrives. I spend much of the day organising photos, while the car sits untouched outside. In the end, the internet problem is solved without anyone coming into the flat and by mid-afternoon we’re free. We could take the car somewhere but decide to stick with the rhythm that we’ve already established today, busying ourselves with our own little projects.

My thoughts are churning ahead to New Zealand now, so we spend the evening watching ‘Once Were Warriors’ on Netflix.

Tuesday 4 March

We spend Tuesday pootling around the island in the Furness family saloon.

We head first to Lamai, the next resort town after Chaweng. In what turns out to be a smart move, we park at the local supermarket and walk to the sea. Some rather unspectacular rocks at the south end of the long sandy beach have somehow been elevated to major touristy attraction status; the resulting snare of bumper-to-bumper traffic up and down the narrow access lane is grim. After a few obligatory photos, we want to get onto the beach. But here, like Chaweng, and parts of Jomtien side in Pattaya, private developments have effectively severed public access to the sea. We take a stand and march through a private resort making a beeline for the beach. A member of staff challenges us, but I just mutter that I’m heading for the beach and we march on. There’s not a lot she can do as we’re on the beach seconds later and the resort unequivocally does not own the beach.

Further up the beach, we stop for lunch with a sea view before finding our way through narrow lanes back to the main road and the supermarket car park.

From Lamai, we head to a temple on the southern tip of Samui. We’re not dressed appropriately to go inside, but we spend a few minutes enjoying the peaceful views across the southern end of Samui. We’re the only ones here and the solitude is blissful.

We continue our clockwise loop of Samui to the Hin Lad Waterfall. It’s a good 30-minute walk from the end of the road to the waterfall itself, on a rough path through thick jungle full of screeching insects. It reminds me of hiking in Hong Kong and for a while I’m lost in thought contemplating some of the happiest times of my life on our Sunday rambles through the Hong Kong jungle. Despite our best efforts, we don’t reach the waterfall itself: K is overheating and we’re getting short of water, so we turn back after resting a while by the river.

Despite a traffic snarl up in Rathon on the west coast of the island (through traffic insects with traffic coming off the ferry to mainland Thailand), we manage to arrive back at the flat shortly before sunset. Driving has been easy enough: I just need to keep watching out for scooters on the passenger side before turning left.

Thursday 5 March

I’ve mildly jarred my back, probably on that brief jungle trek yesterday in search of the elusive Hin Lad waterfall. Given that we have a car this week, having a bad back is far from great. It feels a bit more flexible after a morning dip in the pool, so after lunch we drive to the Tarnim ‘Magic’ Garden in the hills towards the south end of the island. After leaving the ring road, the narrow road up into the hills is frequently very steep. On a couple of occasions, I have to will the car to keep pushing forward. The ‘magic’ garden itself is just about worth the drive: a few statues and structures in a river glade, adding a touch of mystical ambience to the surrounding jungle.

In the evening, we join Sam and our new friend Carol at the Frog and Gecko in Fisherman’s Village for the weekly pub quiz. It’s packed. Quizmaster Graham has put together an extremely good quiz in which most (all?) rounds have a finite number of answers*. After six of the eight rounds, we lead the pack of 15 teams, only to piss it away with a shocking wipeout round that sees us score minus nine. Even scoring the full 20 points on the final round can’t save us. We finish somewhere adrift in the middle of the pack, our hopes for a cash prize of about GBP70 well dashed.

• e.g. Ten announced years, and ten events that took place on this day in those ten years; a word that has some connection to the day of the quiz (in this case, Cornwall – it’s their ‘national’ day) and ten questions that are anagrams found in that word; today is Ash Wednesday, so ten questions the answers to which contain the words ‘ash’ in that order; ten songs (from various years) that all appeared in films released in 2024

Thursday 6 March

My back is giving me a fair bit of jip, so we opt for a quiet day despite the car sitting outside. We’re starting to assemble an itinerary for or UK trip in August/September (although as yet we’ve still to assemble one for Hong Kong next month).

We spend the evening watching the new Dylan biopic ‘A Complete Unknown’. It’s a great title: the implied double meaning didn’t sink in until watching it. When the credits roll, it seems solid enough. But on reading more the following morning, when I’m writing this, it feels both more impressive (yes, Timothée Chalamet and Monica Barbaro learned to play and sing all those songs) and more relevant (Dylan himself had a lot of input, including some tweaks to the dialogue). The director James Mangold’s elevator pitch captures the whole film perfectly: “It’s about a guy who was choking to death in his hometown. He ran away from his family and friends and everything he knew. He came to New York and created a new family and a new identity and new friends and flourished. Then he started to choke to death and ran away from there too.”

And, sure, like many biopics, it’s essentially a fable. But what else would you expect with Dylan?

Friday 7 March

We spend the afternoon at Cheongmon Beach, the Furness’ local paddling pool. It’s rather lovely. Certainly our best experience of the Samui coastline so far. After a stroll and a paddle, we settle at a beach bar for a couple of hours, sipping iced orange coffees and reading our books. Life really ain’t too bad.

Saturday 8 March

My back’s still playing up, so we opt for a quiet day despite still having the car. Investment research. Spanish. Tidying photos. Reading – there’s plenty to do without leaving the flat. We return to the Black Duck in the evening for a rather disappointing game between Forest and Man City. The disappointment is tempered by Forest edging past Man City 1-0.

Sunday 9 March

That’s a wrap for the car, which we return to the Furness villa after lunch. We probably could have got more out of having wheels this past week, but a combination of my back and a lack of urgency led to it standing in the car park on all but three days.

As we’re trying to return the car, Google Maps malfunctions and tries to kid us that the Furness villa is 2.5km away. I know we’re in the right neighbourhood, so I park on a verge and explore on foot until I finally locate the villa a few hundred metres away. I retrace my steps to where K’s waiting in the now-sweltering car. It’s just a two-minute drive to return it to its rightful owners.

I’ve not been working much recently, so I take over cooking duties tonight: grilled salmon and stir-fry veggies.

Elsewhere, the Sunday Hikers complete a loop of Plover Cove Reservoir for the first time in 12 years:

Monday 10 March

I’ve had less paid work this past month than at any time since I stopped full-time work a year and a half ago. I’m now wondering how I ever have time to do what freelance work comes my way: filling the days is consistently effortless. My main priority at the moment is to gradually divert our funds out of cash and fixed-term deposits and into low-cost tracker ETFs that will, I hope, deliver a better long-term return and make paid work more-or-less superfluous to our needs. I’m not in a rush: the US stock market takes a big tumble today. I’ve been expecting this for some time: sooner or later the markets must decide that the Trump administration’s economic policies really are economically illiterate.

In the evening, we meet up with Jason and Clare Furness, newly back from Hong Kong, at a local place a few minutes’ walk from us. It’s good to catch up. Unfortunately, we forget to take a photo.

Tuesday 11 March

With one week to go, we both feel that we’re beginning to treading water here in Samui. There are a couple of things that we still want to do, but New Zealand is now very much on our minds.

We cross one thing off our list today by visiting the Big Buddha. It’s not much different from many similar Big Buddhas all over east Asia, which is perfectly fine. It gives us a definite location to aim for, and we can riff on it to grab an iced coffee nearby at a quiet cafe by the sea, buy a new pair of swimming googles at Central Samui on our way back, as well as do our last substantial grocery shopping Tops supermarket before walking home along the lake shore.

We spend the evening finishing the Iranian political thriller ‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’. At almost three hours, we have to spread it over two nights, but it doesn’t feel a moment too long. Another superb film.

Wednesday 12 March

We’re back at the Frog and Gecko tonight, joining Jason and Clare, and Carol and Lester, as a six-piece team, ‘Cow Pat Guys’ (it’s a pun on the Thai for chicken fried rice), at the Wednesday pub quiz. It’s another excellent quiz, but also poignant: it’s quite possible that we’ll never cross paths with Jason and Clare again after tonight.

Even if we do eventually settle in Thailand, we both feel that Ko Samui is not the place for us. Yes, it has the warm sea and a large enough retiree community to make new friends. But these past two months have helped us realise that we don’t really want to live in a resort town. Samui in particular – far more so than Pattaya – also lacks Asian tourists. It feels at best strange and at worst uncomfortable seeing almost exclusively white faces in the restaurants and bars, in the supermarkets, in the condo pool, and almost anywhere where people are on the buying side of the transaction and not the selling side. It feels like a playground, not a real, living, breathing place.

Thursday 13 March

We finally visit our local beach, Chaweng. And it’s much more pleasant than Sam Furness had led us to believe. It’s rather lovely, really. On a tip from our quiz team friend Lester, we find a gap in the unrelenting resorts where we can easily walk from the road to the beach. From there, we dawdle south for half an hour and stop for a lime soda/mango soda in the shade. Afterwards, we thread our way back to the main road through the nearest resort and head to Central Samui for a final round of grocery shopping in Thailand.

We’re without internet again, so we spend the evening re-watching New Zealand film ‘Boy’.

Friday 14 March

We join a boat tour of Mu Ko Ang Thong National Marine Park. It’s an early start and a long day, but it’s good to be back on a boat for the first time in many months. The tour is a bit of a production line: there must be at least 100 of us on the boat. Most are farangs, but we’re picked up with and find ourselves sitting next to, a local family of three in matching rainbow-coloured tie-dyed t-shirts. Unfortunately, the impersonal nature of such a large group doesn’t make the day very conductive to chatting to our fellow daytrippers.

It’s a 90-minute jaunt from Nathon Town to the marine park. We’re among the first to arrive at the boat, so we grab a coffee and a banana muffin and sit outside at the front, where we’ll have a clear view ahead and be mostly shaded from the sun as we head north-west. I’m glad I’ve brought a book as there’s not a lot to see for at least an hour.

Our first stop is at a small beach backed by a small camping site. Getting onto the beach is an adventure: a pontoon of interlocking floating plastic blocks leads to the sand. It’s a bit like trying to walk on a bouncy castle. We reach the beach slightly dizzy. From here, there’s a ‘nature trail’: this actually consists of steep stone steps that rise up into the limestone hills to a viewpoint 500m above the beach – and it’s nose-to tail human traffic in both directions. It’s hot and I’m only wearing flip flops, so we compromise at the 300m viewpoint and make our way back down. Back on the beach below, some dusky langurs have come down from the hills to feed in the trees just behind the beach. They quickly attract a small crowd of curious onlookers.

Back on the boat, there’s a lunch of mussaman curry, fried chicken and rice, and pickled veg. Next, we’re off to another island, where we climb up almost vertical steps to view a salt-water lagoon, take a dip in the sea on a tiny crowded beach where a small cafe is playing ‘Another One Bites the Dust’. Unfortunately, the cafe is powered by a noisy generator right there on the beach. Finally, we hop into a kayak and paddle for half an hour or more to a more peaceful neighbouring beach, from where our boat picks us up and we head back to Nathon Town. It’s a rather wonderful experience, but my arms are going to be sore as hell tomorrow…

Saturday 15 March

After all that activity yesterday, our middle-aged bodies are feeling the pain today. It’s a day to lie low and recharge. We eventually head out to meet Jason, Clare and Sam in Chaweng to watch Southampton predictably lose to Wolves. This time really is the last time we’ll see them, at least for the time being. I’m glad we made the effort to go ‘downtown’ and meet up despite the match not kicking off until 10pm. It’s more conversation than football as Saints go down 1-2 and edge closer to the unwelcome record of amassing fewer points in a season that Derby did 20 years ago.

Sunday 16 March

A very quiet, domestic day. Swimming. Laundry. Spanish. Reading. K took the photo below on Saturday, but it’s equally relevant today. Always busy, but we’re mostly laying low now until we fly to New Zealand on Tuesday…

Monday 17 March

It’s our last day on Ko Samui, and indeed in Thailand. It took me some time to warm to Samui, but today is poignant. It’s time to move on to new adventures, but I’m reluctant to leave behind a place where we can swim in a warm outdoor pool every morning and have very few cares in the world.

For our final afternoon, we head to Chaweng beach. Our Grab driver is a 20-something lady with cropped hair and – by contemporary standards – a modest number of rather elegant tattoos. When I tell her that she doesn’t need to drop us off exactly where we specified as long as we can access the beach, she drops us at a ghastly beach club that’s playing deafening trance ‘music’ at three o’clock in the afternoon.

We can at least cut through the grounds, full of Gen-Zers with their sleeves of tattoos and their weed, but once on the beach we beat a hasty retreat and head up the narrow beach, paddling in the warm sea as we go. Twenty minutes up the beach, we turn around and head back south, paddling ankle-deep, past the ghastly beach club to the same quiet spot when we stopped last week. We enjoy a refreshing cold drink, which I sip lost in reflection at our travels so far.

We walk back to Whispering Palms around the shore of Lake Chaweng shortly before sunset. Back at the flat it’s time to pack and head back to The Old House, our belatedly-discovered friendly local, for a last Thai meal of green curry (me) and tofu minced-pork soup (K).