My new home, Ban Phe, is no paradise. It is however, only a half an hour’s boat ride away from a small island that’s close enough. My weekdays here in town are spent in the classroom, learning how to teach from a guy who, in the most pathetic of ironies, is an awful teacher. The frustration is endless. At least I have my weekends, and this Saturday and Sunday I spent on this tiny paradise island just off the coast of town.

A Thai national park, Ko Samet is a small kite-shaped island, with a coastline serrated into more than a dozen bays, each with their own combination of white sand beaches, rock formations, and tropical fauna. Tiny sand crabs, digging their homes one tiny ball of sand at a time monopolize certain beaches, while others are home to hundreds of little white, chirping geckos that hang upside down from the ceilings around bright light fixtures. Mosquitoes are everywhere as well, but it’s a small price to pay for such pristine beaches.

The main beach on Ko Samet sits at the end of the island’s only paved road, that is to say, at the edge of the island’s “town.” On the blinding white sand of this beach falangs gallivant in their Speedos, enjoy jet-ski rental, parasailing, and other beach games. A token Bob Marley bar plays Legend, a few men walked the beach selling traditional Thai blankets, old fully dressed women roam the beach giving massages, and others balance two large baskets of fruit on a pole bent over their shoulder selling fresh mango, pineapple, watermelon and grapefruit. This may all sound nice, but the great parts of Samet isn’t the easy-access beach full of tourists. The best beaches are those you must walk around several bays or traverse eroded dirt paths on a motorbike to find.


Lara and I skipped past the main beach in and tried both paths to discovering new beaches. By both walking and driving the motorbike around, we found relaxing beaches without the buzzing of jet-ski motors, without Euros smuggling grapes in their Speedos. Now the only problem now is, which beach do we stay at next weekend?



Boats at Ko Samet's pier, looking back on Ban Phe. Let me say, I was surprised to see that the dirty little town I live in looks so beautiful from across the way.

The bungalow Lara and I stayed in for the weekend. Definately not the greatest place on the island since the woods are filled to the brim with mosquitoes, but it was homey for a couple days.

A swing hangs in one of Samet's bays. Someone suggested this picture ruined the moment, but now it seems to have immortalized through the magical internet.


Lara waiting at the pier in Ban Phe for our boat to take us away for the weekend.


This was the pier where I spent a lot of my time, eating, drinking, writing, drinking a little more, sleeping, drinking one or two more, sleeping again and then burning my poor nose.

Motorbike Adventures, an Elephant, and a Wet Market

On our first day in Ban Phe, Lara and I rented motorbikes and explored our new home just like we used to do when we lived in Khao Lak. It wasn’t immediately easy to find bikes, but we eventually found a home with a small sign advertising bike rentals for 180B (or $4.50.) There was no one around except a woman sleeping on a couch so I gently woke her up and, shaking the sleep out of her eyes, she happily rented us a bike. After filling the tank with three large Coke bottles of petrol, we drove along the coast east, then back west, exploring along the town’s main seaside road.

It had been a long time since I’d driven a motorbike on the left side of the road but my learning curve had to be quick because I was sharing the road with other bikes, cars, pick-up trucks, semis, stray dogs, and elephants. Okay, AN elephant. I thought it would be a while before I saw one, but there, on the first day, we saw an elephant swaying his trunk along the beach. By the time I was able to park the bike and we started walking back, the owner had lead him out to the road. Despite the cruelty of keeping an animal like that as a pet and paying bills by charging people to feed it, we couldn’t resist the elephant. We paid 20B to pet him and feed him some sugar cane.With such a quick start to the day, we hoped to see something else spectacular, but for kilometers and kilometers, all the coast had to offer was small restaurants, bars and people selling beach toys out of the back of their van. Ban Phe isn’t much of a travel destination in Thailand, but the island of Ko Samet, only two miles off the coast, is the nearest island to Bangkok. The only reason someone would spend the night in Ban Phe is because they missed their boat to Samet. I suppose that if you missed your boat all you’d want is some food and a couple drinks, thus the multitude of simple restaurants. Still, there can’t be that many people getting stuck in Ban Phe and I’m unsure how so many places are able to stay in business.Riding back west along the coastline Lara and I only found more of the same and kept driving until we eventually found a long pier extending out from a string of restaurants. We’d been looking for any reason to stop and this seemed as good as an. We parked the bike at the next available spot, right in front of one of the restaurants. In awe of all the live seafood swimming, scrabbling, scuttling along in the small Styrofoam bins, we stopped and asked the owner what kinds of seafood she had. That may seem like an stupid question but along with the shrimp, squid, and fish, there were several other sea creatures we'd never seen before. The owner was all smiles, and happily explained the full live menu in front of us. Not quite hungry yet, we thanked her kindly then went to check out the pier. The pier’s concrete was crumbling off but that didn’t stop a handful of men from lazily fishing off the end. They weren’t terribly friendly but we watched to see if they would catch anything and eventually left when they hadn't had as much as a bite, concluding we were bringing them bad luck. On the walk back to the beach we realized there was only one option for dinner that night: fresh seafood from the same sweet old lady. We returned back to the restaurant and selected out the best of the day’s catch: 5 prawns, 3 crabs, one horseshoe crab, and 5 little sea bugs that looked like lobster tails with legs. I asked her to cook them up however she saw fit, grabbed a couple beers, and we made our way to their picnic tables on the beach. We didn’t wait too long before some Tom Yam Goong was set on the table, the classic spicy yet sweet-and-sour Thai soup. Next were the crabs, all three on one plate, along with two sticks and two wooden disks. I tried to figure out how to properly use these simple tools to eat the crab, but couldn’t get past the idea of just smashing the things open. Before I bashed one of the shells in, a Thai man came over and showed us the way. He plucked each of the legs off like they were grapes from a vine, then peeled back the top shell of the crab like it was an easy-open top, exposing its strange, cooked guts. He then motioned that the sticks and discs were used to smack the legs open to get at the meat. My bashing method then seemed so primitive.


Next out was the horseshoe crab and I immediately regretted ordering it. For some reason, I had expected some good meat from the creature but it was served upside down, with the underside of its shell scraped back, exposing some strange exoskeleton of hundreds of small brown balls. I didn’t immediately give up on it, but one fork-scrape later, I moved the shell to the far side of the table and apologized to the animal for sacrificing it needlessly. The living lobster tails came out next, cooked in some incredible garlic sauce, and they were the best part of the entire meal. For once, food in Thailand tasted just like I had expected it to. The little sea bug’s flavor and texture was somewhere in between lobster and shrimp. A-roy mahk mahk; very, very delicious.