I arrived in Bangkok on a beautiful morning, checked into my “suite”, a small, boxy room with no design logic and felt immediately at ease. This is the paradox of Thailand. The comfort factor is extraordinarily high even when the physical circumstances are modest. No matter how ugly Thai modernism may be, there are always cracks in it: somewhere to buy a pork bun, somewhere to have a coffee, some small ledge on a surface where you can sit down and watch the world go by. Thailand is poor in some respects, once you go behind the facade. But in another sense, it’s far richer than a country like Australia simply because it has more stuff in it, like many old countries: Britain, France, India, Morocco. There is just so much depth, and that depth brings life to the society and the culture in a way that newer, more uniform modern places cannot replicate.
I’d come with a single purpose: to spend nine days on Koh Phangan. I’ve been here several times, a couple of times in the 1990s, briefly in 2013, and again in 2015. Each visit has felt a little different. This time, I wanted to return with focus, to see where things were at.
The island has changed, and so have its visitors.
I stepped off the ferry feeling reflective. The population of Koh Phangan hasn’t grown dramatically, but the development is striking. Large shopping-style complexes line the main street in Thong Sala. The roads, once one of the great pleasures of the island, are now full of fast, aggressive traffic. A substantial wellness industry has appeared more or less from nowhere. Nearly every beach now has a road to it, including Bottle Beach, which last time required an almost comically difficult hike scrambling up steep, muddy slopes in brutal tropical heat.
I rented a beat-up Honda Click, probably 80 cc, which felt mildly terrifying on roads made of broken concrete, with ruts deep enough to bounce you sideways into the forest. I rode more or less the full circuit of the island over the first few days, which didn’t take too long but wasn’t possible not so long ago. I hiked to a scary lookout, rode up to a hilltop bar on a 45-degree road, had one beer with the sole other person there, and rode back down carefully. The west and north surprised me with lots of development where there was once almost none.
The development isn’t simply a matter of more people; it’s that the people who come now demand more. Travellers are far more prosperous than they were 20 years ago. Where someone once happily settled for a small traditional hut in a spectacular spot, there are now hideous concrete blocks offering a shallow idea of modern luxury. I think of it as a kind of domesticated imperialism. Rather than immersing yourself in the local traditions and ways of life of your host community, you import your own. The person with a big suburban house travels the world looking for an even bigger suburban house, missing the point entirely. That narrow idea that a lux hotel room is the measure of a trip is one of the saddest things about contemporary travel.
There are also many digital nomads now. Mostly Europeans with comfortable remote incomes, living here semi-permanently and demanding gyms, co-working spaces, fast Wi-Fi, and supermarkets. The co-working cafés are full of people on video talking to colleagues in whatever country they left behind. I’m not sure “digital nomad” is even the right term. They’re less nomads than people looking for somewhere cheap to live at a high standard of comfort, rather than travellers with genuine curiosity about the cultural depths of Asia. That said, their presence has raised the quality of cafés, bakeries, and food on the island to a genuinely impressive level. You get an extraordinary amount of quality for your money here. Since I’ve never really liked sitting on a beach for more than ten minutes, the density of good places to eat and drink suits me very well.
Finding the old Koh Phangan in the cracks
My accommodation was a large traditional Thai wooden house set back from the main road, Spartan, cool, quiet, with lovely living spaces and a dark bedroom right at its centre. I stocked the fridge with groceries from the supermarket, found a French press in the kitchen, and located the best coffee on the island at a café literally ten metres from my front door.
The highlight of my wandering days was stumbling into a tiny espresso shop in Thong Sala run by a man named Siam, yes, his real name, who had ridden a tuk-tuk all the way from Bangkok to set up his café here. He made me a double espresso through a manual hand press. Then I had a Leo beer. Then another. And another. I spent about five hours there, talking with Siam and his friends, long-term locals who remembered the old Koh Phangan of the ’90s. It was exactly the kind of afternoon that makes travel worthwhile: unplanned, unhurried, and genuinely connected.
The old Koh Phangan is still alive, concealed in its corners. The nightly sunset party at Zen Beach creates a genuinely enjoyable atmosphere with a friendly crowd, great music, and sunsets. I found a chocolate café just fifty meters from my accommodation, where they played acoustic music for a stylish crowd of older, long-term locals who exuded a distinctly hippy vibe. There, I savoured the best hot chocolate I can remember. I also treated myself to a Thai massage and spent some time reading Cassandra Pybus’s extraordinary book on Truganini on the veranda. These experiences filled the hours and made the time feel fleeting, even though they were truly substantial.
The Full Moon Party, same same, but different
I’ve been to the full moon party before, sometime in the hazy ’90s. This one was a lifetime later. I left the Honda Click at a 7-Eleven on the advice of locals, both to avoid the police checkpoints on the road into Haad Rin and to avoid the Honda Click apocalypse of trying to locate one indistinguishable bike among hundreds on the way out. I arrived early, around 8 pm, found a stool and table in one of the alleys leading to the beach, and set up with one of those noughts-and-crosses games played in bars. I ordered beers and spent a pleasant couple of hours watching the festival walk past. People stopped to play, which turned out to be a surprisingly good way to meet people in what is otherwise definitely cattle-class.
The music was okay, though the competing sound from different bars made it hard to settle anywhere. A couple of smaller clubs had a good vibe. By midnight, it was standing-room-only, very hard to move, and the beach was thick with fire twirlers, who are interesting for about ten minutes and tedious thereafter. I left in one of those terrifying, packed jeeps full of exuberant, young people having the absolute time of their lives, then back to the wooden house on the west coast.
Koh Phangan has outgrown its Full Moon Party. There are better parties around the island, smaller, more intimate, with better music and room to dance. The Bambu Hut Sessions at Eden Beach, only reachable by longboat, felt like the Koh Phangan of the ’90s: spectacular setting, great music, and a crowd that was there for the music.
I’ve been to Koh Phangan now at intervals spanning a lifetime. It has changed enormously, mostly in the last decade, it appears. But I don’t think it’s that it has changed so much as that it has accumulated more variety and more layers. It’s far less intrepid than it was, less dangerous, and more the kind of place that attracts dickheads. But the depth is still there, in the cracks, if you know how to look for it, which is like anywhere, I suppose. You must be willing to spend a slow afternoon in a tiny espresso shop in Thong Sala and let the day unfold from a blank canvas.
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