Beyond The White Lotus: Thailand’s overlooked coast from Koh Si Chang to Koh Samet

“Bangkok rises like a fever dream from the humid delta. Buddhist monks in saffron robes glide past neon-lit go-go bars.” Gah! It’s time to escape the Thai capital, if only to avoid descriptions like that, the sort of blather that late British writer A.A. Gill skewered as “Mills & Boon travel writing”.

I’m going to investigate, solo, a stretch of Thailand coast south-east of Bangkok that’s nothing like the White Lotus lands of television’s Phuket and Koh Samui. You could call most of this the Overlooked Coast.

Sea change at Si Chang

I start at Sriracha pier about 100km south of Bangkok, from where it’s a 45-minute ferry trip out to little Koh Si Chang, the closest resort island to the city.

Ashore, I hail a Skylab tuk-tuk, a mutant three-wheeler that looks like rehabbed space junk powered by an old Corolla engine.

As we orbit the island the driver, Wan, tells me he used to be a fisherman but adds, “These waters are all fished out. Now I just catch tourists.”

Koh Si Chang is optimistically marketed as the “Island of Eternal Love”. Wan drops me at its ornamental Chudadhuj Gardens where the kings of Siam once strolled and Thai romantics still do.

Sichang (as it is also known) is a snoozy, aromatic, quick sea-change place for Bangkokians. Think tamarind trees, frangipani and no cars.

There’s a quality boutique resort, Somewhere, a beach that’s more so-so then Hi-So and the inevitable Big Buddha statue. Nothing to provoke a selfie stampede, but an unhidden gem.

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The condo towers of Pattaya jut on the horizon like Surfers Paradise gone walkabout. To reach them I return to the mainland and then roll south, bypassing cape Laem Chabang, Thailand’s main deep-water port.

Thirty kilometres later, the highway delivers me to … well, what moniker can do justice to Pattaya?

The city of extremes

Fun City? Sin City? Sodom-sur-Mer? Pattaya has made a career of outgrowing its own inept tags.

From a somnolent fishing village to a war-era Apocalypse Now party town, from golfing mecca to retirement magnet and tourism boomtown, Pattaya keeps on being a different Pattaya.

I count 33 golf courses in the surrounding region, all wasted on me. The beaches? Europeans love them (no gravel, no fee!) but most Australians have better options within an hour of home.

What Pattaya does deliver though is buckets of fun. Not for everyone, but spontaneous, sometimes crass, flirtatious, chaotic fun. And excellent hotels. I spend several days in one, the Melia Pattaya City. Spanish finesse, Japanese-Peruvian cuisine and totally Thai.

The next beach south is Na Jomtien with clean water, uncrowded sands and family-friendly seafront resorts. Room to move, swim and think, but a little boring if you’ve forgotten to pack the family.

Bang Saray, 15km and a world apart from Pattaya, has a casuarina-shaded shoreline with pop-up eateries and lush fruit orchards. There’s a slew of bars but the extensive expat community isn’t really here for follies and cocktails.

It’s more a do-little, good reads, ambling and emailing sort of place. The more vigorous activities on offer include golf, or diving on the offshore islands.

From the past darkly

Nearby U-Tapao regional airport boasts a huge 3.5km runway built by the US Air Force during the Vietnam War. I have a vivid memory, way back in the day, of finding myself under its flight path as a B-52 Stratofortress lifted off overhead.

The most sinister thing I’d ever seen. Eight screaming jets belched beneath its pterodactyl wings. It was, I presume, en route to democratise the hell out of some hapless dot in the jungle.

Shakespeare nailed it: “Something wicked this way comes.” Ironically, U-Tapao today welcomes Russian and Chinese tourists by the thousands.

Vans, buses, taxis. You catch whatever rides you can here, regular schedules being an arcane mystery. Soon enough, I’m out of Chonburi Province and into the next one, Rayong, home to the Map Ta Phut industrial estate, hub of Thailand’s booming Eastern Economic Corridor.

Having known enough Thais who moved away to escape its toxic exhalations, I head out to sea instead.

Poetry in exile

Six clicks off-shore is one of those Thai anomalies, a national park island with scores of commercial tourist resorts. The explanation is simple: don’t ask.

Once known as Vast Jewel Island, the beauty of Koh Samet inspired Thailand’s best-loved romantic poet to pen the magical realism tale of a lovesick mermaid and a prince exiled to the island.

Ramble along one of its less developed beaches and you get the romantic drift.

Royal poet Sunthorn Phu (1786-1855) is the Siamese equivalent of Shakespeare, with an added touch of Lord Byron. Unlike the English rake, he wasn’t considered “mad, bad and dangerous to know” but was inclined to romantic scandals and political intrigue, and he liked a drink.

Colourful statues of Sunthorn’s mermaid and a flute-playing giant sit on Hat Sai Kaew (“glass sand beach”), the busiest of Samet’s 14 beaches.

The cape of fair endings

Rayong province has scores of overlooked, under-visited coves along its 100km coast. I finish my trip on one at cape Laem Mae Phim. At 800km cape to cape, it seems far enough.

The wide, empty beach beside Ao Khai (“Egg Bay”) has kayaks for hire, a few seafood restaurants and the four-star Centara resort.

I kayak the bay, cycle the cape and then clock off to read more A.A. Gill, that most acute of travel thinkers. (“Plenty of Westerners do yoga as exercise, which is a bit like walking the stations of the cross as aerobics.”)

Reading him is simultaneously inspiring and dispiriting: that much panache in one wicked pen just doesn’t seem fair.

Meanwhile, there’s grilled fish and garlic on the wind. Come sunset, the horizon looks like heaven’s back fence on fire.

Two couples stroll along the beach. Three would be a Mae Phim crowd. In all, an almost a Mills & Boon ending to the day.