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A Goshawk in the Rubber Tree
A travel feature about the emergence of an excellent new island in the Gulf of Thailand.
Inspired by extensive travels, romps in Europe and Asia and a motorbike road-trip from Trat to Tibet, Kamthorn Orn-in developed a yearning and a dream. “I had been intending to build a resort for a long time,” Kamthorn told me. “Finally, we managed to build the resort, but we only built it here because we couldn’t afford to buy land on the busier western side of the island. Here, where there is no beach, we had to come up with a different concept, and that’s why we have a destination health spa embedded in the resort.”
Different indeed: the aged rutted wood that was used to construct everything from railings to furniture was scavenged from old pepper farms, where the wood had been discarded when farmers switched from wooden stakes to concrete pillars on which to train pepper plants. And the wooden trays formerly used by prospectors sieving for nuggets of gold in rivers are now the hoods of lamps, while the former wheels of buffalo carts have become the legs and frames of chairs. The rooms are deliberately rustic, almost entirely built of wood, including roofs covered with palm-fronds. Yet the bathrooms are fashioned from cream-coloured concrete, speckled with coloured stones, and given an artistic finish by imperfectly round arch recesses and a larger arch that separates the bathtubs. “I got most of the material from southern Esarn,” Kamthorn explained.
Called The Spa Koh Chang Resort, it’s the newest and most original accommodation outfit on the island. The boutique resort’s 26 rooms are set around a lagoon, and ranged on a hillside on high stilts among a tropical garden, with a waterfall cascading beneath the bungalows. The grounds are full of delightful features like wooden sun-loungers, palm-frond umbrellas, lights hooded by aged wood, rattan swinging chairs dangling from ceilings in the lobby – all creating an atmosphere of intimacy and homeliness, something reinforced by the seclusion of the resort itself, which feels as though a private hideaway. Marketing it as a destination spa – guests can opt for detox and cleansing programs, and eat healthy western food – has proved encouragingly successful in its first months of operation.
It’s a success that underpins the way tourism in Koh Chang has matured and diversified in the past few years. A paved road, better ferry service, and Bangkok Airways flights all seem like old news now, but it was those improvements that created a momentum of ascendancy that has seen visitor numbers climb to about 800,000 annually. Many hoteliers also believe that the tsunami on the Andaman Coast also boosted the island as an attractive alternative. But whatever the causes, the transformation has been dramatic: the rugged backpackers’ escapade of yesteryear has now morphed into an upscale destination, and at least half a dozen plush resorts have sprouted up in the past few years to cater for the new tourists. Leading the lot, in terms of design, is the Amari, which has large rooms in browns and creams, massive beds, oriental furniture with traditional touches, tasteful lampshades, as well as an exquisite spa and big pool. Nearby, there are the notably funky round bungalows at the Aana – the igloo-shaped bungalows, with pitched rattan-covered ceilings, are a refuge of whites and creams inside, and outside have terraces complete with plunge-pool. And, for something more private and exclusive, there are the Aiyapura’s Private Pool Villas, large rooms fitted with all manner of stuff, including piano and, out on the terrace, a private pool. Meanwhile, more swanky resorts are at the construction stage: the Dusit are about to open a 96-room resort in “Thai contemporary design” this summer, and the Ramayana, another recent upstart in Koh Chang, are building a second resort on the island.
Now, as the main beaches on the west coast become crowded, the developments are moving to the quieter eastern side of the island where, due to the lack of beaches, the business have to come up with imaginative concepts. These include the inventive Spa Koh Chang Resort and, a few kilometres south, Salak Phet Seafood. The latter, a large Thai-style open-sided restaurant set out on the water of Ao Salak Phet, has gone from strength to strength thanks to its large portions of no-nonsense fresh seafood cooked in Thai classical ways.
The eastern part of the island remains gloriously natural, little changed since Koh Chang and its archipelago, a scattering of 52 islands, were designated a National Marine Park in 1982. The two small fishermen’s villages hereabouts – Ban Salak Khok and Ban Salak Phet – have not been touched by tourism except, at Ban Salak Khok, the construction of a restaurant and the offer of kayaks for rent to paddle around the large mangrove forest. The mangrove is protected, and so is the entire hinterland of the island – an interior spine of mountains cloaked in dense old-growth jungle. Nature abounds here: you have to watch out for the short-tailed macaque monkeys dashing across the road, and once I stopped to watch a king cobra gulp a toad – the snake, in the middle of the road, totally ignored me.
On the western shore developments have been somewhat restrained, and most of the upscale resorts are clustered in exclusive enclaves at Had Kae Bae. Yet Had Sai Khao, the main town and longest beach, is another story – a dense knit of mid-range accommodation have usurped the entire strip between the road and the beach, and the beach is now over-run by raucous heady visitors. This beach also has restaurants galore now, all clutters of tables on the sand in the evenings, and bars blaring loud dance music late into the night – most of them, bars and restaurants, disappointingly low in quality. (Good restaurants are found in Ban Bang Bao, and in the upscale resorts, particularly the Amari’s Thai restaurant and Aiyapura’s French restaurant.)
“I think the development is too much now on Koh Chang,” told me Boonchana Kulsrivorathai. Boonchana used to run the Siam Beach Resort in Had Tha Nam, Koh Chang’s quietest beach, until he fled to Koh Kood to set up the Koh Kood Resort and Spa. Koh Kood, some 60km south of Koh Chang, is the new frontier in island tourism in the Gulf of Thailand: an island where the likes of Boonchana can delight among nature’s idyll, the cacophonies of toads and cicadas at night, the brahminy kites and sea eagles circling above the treetops by day, and the reveries possible in the quietness of empty beaches and deadness of starry nights. “I like driving on the road and having trees on both sides of the road,” Boonchana crooned.
Boonchana’s artistic sensitivity shows on his face and in his resort. The thirty bungalows nestle among the trees, even having trees growing through the porch, and they perfectly blend in: wooden walls, palm-frond roofs, and funky open-roofed concrete bathrooms that are skirted with white pebbles. It’s a minimalist design – the only décor accessory is the traditional Thai Buddhist tree motif, symbol of protection and promoter of well-being, painted above the bed’s headboard. And the bungalows are a veritable cocoon of tranquility; the combination of well-woven palm-frond roofs and shade from the trees keeps the room so cool that I didn’t need the air-conditioning, and many afternoons I had blissful snoozes while birdsong wafted in through the open door and window.
“It would have been easier to build concrete bungalows,” Boonchama said when I commented about the rooms. “But I wanted the resort to be in touch with nature. This means very heavy maintenance, and we have to change the entire roofs every two or three years.”
The resort, like all others on Koh Kood (there are about twenty), is only open from October to May. Yet, even in the high season, there were only two rooms occupied during my stay, and I saw very few other tourists in my wanderings. “It doesn’t get much busier than this,” Boonchama told me. “The decision to build here is a long-term investment.”
Me, I felt free and reassured, and I felt gratitude that such a place exists. I was in Koh Kood’s nicest bay, called Ao Bang Bao, a horse-shaped bay fringed by forest and, at its inner mouth, a strip of sand and azure water. I could sit at the edge of the pier and watch colourful fishes weaving through the lucid water. And the road was as Boonchama had described it, a narrow concrete strip cutting through virgin forest that almost forms a canopy overhead. Cruising around the island on a rented moped was pure joy – there were white egrets lolloping along the road, brahminy kites soaring overhead, kestrels hovering above the treetops, and goshawks dashing in the forest – and only a straggle of mopeds on the roads. Koh Kood only has a couple of villages and 1,500 inhabitants, rubber farmers and fishermen. At the largest village, Ban Ao Salad, built on stilts on the water of Ao Salad, I was the only tourist, sitting on the terrace of a house sipping a coffee and watching the world go by in an unhurried quality – children frolicking in the water, boats coming and going, fishermen working with diligence and patience.
Koh Kood’s position as a tentative outpost of island tourism is partly due to erratic access. The powerboat from Koh Chang or Trat mainland, which takes an hour, makes for an uncomfortable juddering ride, and any serious choppiness sees the service suspended (this is the reason why there is no service in the rainy season). But things are about to change: an eighty-room resort is arising in Ao Bang Bao, Evason are building an exclusive hideaway in the north of the island, and the governor wants to build a small airport.
“We do need an airport for better access,” Boonchama said. “But the government should then control the level of development, as well as the design and materials used in resorts. It’s a very special island now, and it should be kept special.”
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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