**THAILAND ON TWO WHEELS
Fantasy island**
The solo traveller takes a second look at paradise and finds it about as good as the first
(Bangkok Post dd. 10aug06 // DN)
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On Ko Chang the mountains come right down to the water adding a little extra nuance to a walk on the beach.
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A single road runs around about 90 percent of the circumference of the island. Sinuous hardly describes it.
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A couple of salty dudes in Bangbao, kicking back. There are some tidy little open air houses along the pier in this village.
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In Ban Phe southeast of Rayong a lot of road side vendors were selling sea shells by the seashore.
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There are still plenty of one-star accommodations on Ko Chang, though how long they’ll be able to hold out is a question.
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At the south end of the island the village of Bangbao offers food and drink and dive trips.
Late in the rainy season of 2004 I rolled off a rusty old ferry onto the island of Ko Chang for the first time and saw almost at once that everything I’d read about the place was true. Craggy mountains, lush forest, white sand beaches that stretched for miles and not a big hotel in sight. It was truly the land that time forgot and one of the most beautiful places I’d ever been.
About two months later a tsunami - I should say, The Tsunami - hit the Andaman coast and suddenly real estate developers turned their attention away from Phuket, Krabi and Phangnga to the protected Gulf of Thailand in general and Ko Chang in particular.
The land that time forgot was being recalled to mind. The get-rich-quick bandwagon was headed to Trat Province and entrepreneurs were jumping aboard. Ko Chang was, according to the media, exploding! I thought, since I was in Pattaya, anyway, just finished with my trip to Isan, I should ride Hot Fudge down the coast and have a second look at the place. See it one more time before it was too late.
A return visit to Trat Province would mark the end of my motorcycle trip around the country. It was just a bit over a year ago I’d set out from Bangkok to see the Malay Peninsula, travelling down the Andaman coast and up the Gulf. Since that time I’d been all over the North, from Uthai Thani to Mae Sot and Mae Hong Son; to Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai and south along the Mekong River. I’d seen a great portion of the vast Northeast from Korat to Ubon to Udon to Chiang Khan; and now I was headed south along the eastern seaboard to Ko Chang once again, with my fingers crossed.
I left Pattaya mid-morning and rode southwest on Highway 36, the shortcut to Rayong. South of Rayong I stayed with the local roads as much as I could, following the shoreline wherever possible through little fishing villages and Thai beach towns. This part of the country remains almost virgin (foreign) tourist territory, as yet undiscovered by the multinational hotel chains and restaurant and coffee shop franchises. The sea is just as blue as elsewhere in Thailand and the beaches just as white, but the tourists in these parts are mostly caramel-coloured.
South of Chanthaburi it got tougher to find a local seaside route and so I got back on Highway 3, Sukhumvit Road, the same Sukhumvit that carries bumper to bumper traffic through Bangkok and to a lesser degree through Pattaya and Rayong and continues south to the bottom of the country. It’s not any better motorcycling in Chanthaburi than it is in Chon Buri, but it goes where I was going and so I went.
There are a couple of ferry docks on the coast west of Trat, the most southerly of which had a boat just about to leave as I got there. It wasn’t the rusty old tub I’d taken on my last trip, but a new, up-to-date model, packed with tourists of all ages and ethnicities, an invading army of adventure-seekers. The backpacks of the young and deeply tanned were strewn around the deck like duffel bags. I could tell by looking at this crowd that the stories of Ko Chang’s “discovery” were most likely to be true.
The island, part of the Mu Ko Chang Marine National Park, is a 25-minute ferry ride from the coast. Why its development lagged that of other Thai islands is unclear. Some said it was because of its semi-protected marine national park status, but it may simply have been that attention and financial resources were directed elsewhere. For many years Ko Chang was off the real estate development radar screen. It only got electricity in 1991. Before that you had to cool your beer in a stream, read the latest thriller by the light of a butane lantern. A bit of heaven in other words.
Ko Chang is no less accessible to Bangkokians than Ko Samui or Phuket, but while the later got built up extensively over that last two decades, Ko Chang (Elephant Island) managed to slumber on. The island is extremely mountainous for one thing, much of the interior inaccessible except by foot. Thais can’t legally own mountain real estate (though the law is often bent and even broken), so development was concentrated along the beach which is where tourists would want to be in any case. There wasn’t a lot of it when I was there in September of 2004 and what there was was mostly of the Mom and Pop variety, small cabana resorts and open-air shops and restaurants built of wood and bamboo and thatch.
Today, as in the past, a steep and sinuous road takes ferry passengers from the dock over the mountain to the windward side of the island where most of the resorts are. I had scarcely descended to level ground before I could see that Ko Chang was indeed in the midst of a boom, that the newspaper stories I’d read were no exaggeration. Signs of a building frenzy were everywhere I looked. New resorts were being built, existing resorts expanding; the forest bulldozed away to be replaced my brick and mortar.
My first sense was one of alarm. Paradise, I feared, was once again about to be lost. But as I rode on the jungle reasserted itself. That was just a built up area I’d ridden through: a town. A town is OK, nice even. And they weren’t doing a bad job of it. Considered judgment was being shown as far as I could tell, quality work being done. Some of the construction was an improvement, in fact, over what I’d seen a year ago. Rusticity was simply giving way to gentrification, the way it always does, but it was far from a disaster; it was just progress as we’ve come to define it. Unfortunately.
I know it’s natural for travellers, me included, to fall in love with pristine spaces and to hope they will remain free of the tourist pressures that ultimately degrade them, but it’s unrealistic. Uncorrupted beauty is too great an attraction to be left unto itself and for a simple reason: there’s no money in it.
I got a room in one of the established, family-run resorts on a little crescent beach lined with palm trees, a place that had just about doubled its size in the last year, but without ill effect. I took a welcome shower and walked over to the outdoor restaurant. I sat at plastic table with a checkered cloth and ordered a bottle of Regency Thai brandy and some soda. Heavily forested mountains lay close upon me to the south. Little islands floated before me on a blue-grey sea. My server, a cute island girl, brought my “makings” and fixed me a drink. When she’d gone, I raised my glass and offered up a toast.
Ko Chang, like Thailand itself, could still take my breath away.
**Copyright 2006 Lloyd Sullivan. To contact the writer, email to [EMAIL=“lsulli2@yahoo.com”]lsulli2@yahoo.com. **