New Year's On Samui Island

New Year’s On Samui Island
© Jon Donlon 2007

By air, it’s only fifty minutes or so to Samui’s sun-washed beaches from Bangkok, but the popular tourist island is a world away from the urban hustle of Thailand’s capital city. While there is little variance in many of the commercial services provided for travelers —the chock-a-block discounters, the economy tailors, and the small Thai cafés, restaurants, and especially the astonishing number of bars—the laid back tone is entirely different. And New Year’s on the island featured a memorable show of glowing paper lanterns, floating out over the Gulf of Siam in elegant, illuminated dots of slowly diminishing size.









Like much of the Asian tourism boom, Samui Island is marked by apparent lack of planning and an exuberance of growth and organic development. Greener than might be expected, based on the kind of “carry capacity” (numbers of visitors) these locations are asked to deal with, Samui exhibits the curious combo of spoilation and glamour commonplace in today’s nature hot spots. In short, it’s a long while since Samui’s been an untrammeled island paradise. Still, the place is clad with swaying palms, and the water is inviting.

A week before New Year’s we found the island filled with vacationers and the shops bibelot-packed after the fashion you’d expect in the warren around the duomo, on the road to mount St. Michel, or in the French Quarter in New Orleans. And tasty Thai food was easy to find, anywhere. The roads were abuzz with a bewildering array of rental scooters, zipping about in the sunshine.

Years ago we were lollygagging in a café on the narrow roadway up to Mont St. Michel (companion to St. Michael’s Mount across the channel in England, home of childhood’s “Jack in the Beanstalk” tale), complaining that the beautiful timber-fronted buildings around us were filled with awful tourists trinkets. “They always have been,” said a guy at the neighboring table.

More knowledgeable about local history than I was, he pointed out, quite rightly, that Mont St. Michel had been on the tourist trek for a few hundred years, and for those few hundred years the merchants sold people what they wanted. Today is no different. Newer to the tourist trade, perhaps, but no less willing to cater to prevailing taste, Samui Island’s cyber cafes, bottle shops, bars, and occasional “Thai Massage” storefronts were jumbled cheek-to-jowl in pockets of dense commercial sprawl. I bought a t-shirt of a Samui “gecko,” hoping to be reminded of the charming creature’s nocturnal chirping when I wore it in the future. On Samui, merchants, as everywhere, try to give people what they want.