Ko Samui and Why I Hate Tourism

Bright and early Patrick drove us to the pier to catch our ferry for Ko Samui - the legendary resort island in the Gulf of Thailand. We gave him money for gas in an awkward exchange that left us feeling like he expected something more, but what could we do? The trip was short and easy. As we pulled into the port we were surrounded by taxi drivers offering us rides and asking us where we were going (this foreshadowed the horrors we were to experience throughout the rest of our stay in Thailand), who we tried our best to refuse politely. We walked around the scummy, smelly town, which had very little to do with a tropical beach island, in search of some lunch. After a pretty good meal of Pad Thai (our staple) we found the public taxis -sawngtaew - and made our way around to the other side of the island.

Unlike the beautiful scenic drives we have had on other parts of the trip this ride was damn depressing. The poverty of the desperate Thais, who moved to the island in hopes of milking some money from the tourists, plagued the route around the island.

We had no idea when to get out of the taxi, and we were getting kind of worried when it passed through the town we wanted to go to without stopping, but eventually he pulled down a side street that brought us closer to the beach and we got out. The streets were full of sleazy bars, 7Elevens, internet cafes, and Europeans. It was very hard to find a hotel, so we made our way onto the beach and walked around until we found something in our price range - 2 dollars each for the night...

After we checked into our room we decided to walk down to the end of the beach where the famous "grandmother" and "grandfather" rocks were supposed to be. If you haven't seen pictures, they are a pair of rocks with a striking resemblance to intimate parts of the respective anatomies. (Why they have to be grandparents I have no Idea...) To get to the rocks we had to find our way around a series of ginormous granite boulders jutting out of the water. We hit a dead and turned around to try another route. An English girl was about to try the same route we were coming from, and she asked if we knew where to go - she ended up tagging along with us. As we continued around the boulders, we came to another dead end - a sheer cliff with a 50 foot drop onto jagged rocks. Buutttt we could see the rocks finally and the loads of tourists surrounding it, and it was too temptingly close to turn around to find another route. A Thai guy below us pointed to our left and yelled something that sounded like "rope", so I went to investigate - and sure enough there was a rope wedged between a couple boulders that hung loosely down the face of the cliff.

I - being the brave idiot that I am - shimmied my way down through a crevice on the rock to the rope and repelled my way down the sheer drop and onto a rock that was low enough to jump to the beach below. When I got to the bottom I had to force my heart to stop pounding as I looked up and Brian and the English girl about to try the same thing. We all made it (don't worry). The excitement wasn't over however .. we still had to make some nerve wracking leaps from boulder to boulder to get to the freak show. After taking our pictures and going for a refreshing dip in the warm sea, we took the road back to the hotel. As it turns out there was no need to risk our lives. Oh well, it was exciting.

We walked around the sketchy town that night, spent the morning on the decent beach, and booked it off Ko Samui - never to return.

We took a ferry to the next island - Ko Pha Ngan - which is the home of the famous full moon parties. Walking off the pier, we could already tell that this was going to be much better than Ko Samui. It had a very hippie-backpacker vibe. The town had some nice shops and restaurants and didn't look like a ghetto. We stepped onto the beach and were blown away by the beauty - soft white sand, palm trees, bungalows perched upon the rocky hills that enclosed the bay, and lots of backpackers. We sat around on the beach for a while, watched an amazing sunset, and found some dinner before checking out the bar scene.