Ko Yao Noi: Where Pretty Much Nothing Happened

Sunrise from my bungalow

Eight days on Ko Yao Noi can pretty much be summarized as: nothing really happened.

I had no intention on this trip to cram in as much stuff as possible, in the usual helter-skelter American vacation fashion much ridiculed by Europeans, Israelis, and Aussies, who tend to take their vacations in month- or year-long increments. After nearly a month of travel to Michigan for Christmas, then San Francisco, then Bangkok for a few excellent but not-exactly-relaxing days, it was time to just kick back.

Ko Yao Noi is a little island off between Phuket and Krabi. It has beaches and gorgeous scenery, but remains relatively un-touristy. Certainly tourism has left its stamp there: all the nice beaches and viewpoints are surrounded by hotels, shacks offering climbing and kayaking tours, and relatively pricey restaurants (US$3 for pad thai, egad!). But all in all, the tourism industry seems almost an afterthought and, crucially, hasn’t greatly corrupted the residents or the culture, who mostly seem to live their lives as they would if we farang weren’t there, especially if you wander more than 100 m from the perimeter of the island. This is the diametric opposite of, say, Patong, where any remnant of actual culture has been traded away for a farang Disneyland with hawkers who ask US$40 for a $2 towel but will take $8, Indians selling identical poorly-made suits, and ladies selling, well, everything.

My first hint that something was different was on the long-tail boat from Bangrong Pier on the island of Phuket to Ko Yao Noi's Manoh pier. After a few days of having to negotiate with tuk-tuk and cab drivers and basically wary of being ripped off at every turn, I foolishly jumped on the boat without even thinking to ask the price. The boat left shortly thereafter, and I immediately realized my mistake and smacked my head. I expressed my predicament to a German fellow on the boat with me. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You get on the boat, and then they tell you the price. This isn’t that kind of place. It’s not Patong.” And indeed it was not. There were no hawkers, no go-go girls, no negotiation, no rip-offs. There was also apparently no crime, which is a good thing considering that my bungalow was less secure than Woody Allen’s character at the beginning of Play It Again, Sam.

Also on that boat was an Englishwomen who had come to Ko Yao Noi a few weeks ago to marry her long-time partner and enjoy a honeymoon in one fell swoop. (She still called him her “partner” — “husband” sounds so stilted, she said, and fiancé is even worse, and sounds so feminine besides!) They had planned to move around a little bit, but having discovered Ko Yao Noi they saw little reason to leave. They had stumbled on a little island near Ko Yao Noi sea kayaking, and decided it was an ideal place for a remote beach wedding. They hired some locals to clean it up — they set up a pavilion and some decoration — and had a banquet at a restaurant in Ko Yao Noi, open to anyone who wanted to go. Posters inviting the masses were still stapled to every telephone pole on the island when I arrived.

I stayed at Tha Khao Bay View, a little “resort” consisting of seven bungalows up on a hillside on the east side of the island. The bungalows a family operation — a daughter, mother, grandmother, and a few in-laws, I think — who were friendly almost to a fault. The open-air bungalows, at 700 baht or US$25, were very no-frills — just a queen bed with a mosquito net in a room, a balcony, and an attached bathroom.

I shared my bungalow with some sort of solitary wasp or hornet that had burrowed into the wood of the balcony railing — an enormous fellow that could best described as a flying Vanagon with a stinger. I alerted the proprietors to its presence, but they told me not to worry. “It no sting. If you put hand over hole, it sting. So you no put hand over hole, OK?” I wondered if anyone had ever actually tried covering the hole with her hand. “I try use chemical. It not come, then it come.” Fair enough; you can’t always bend nature to your will, especially if nature is capable of eating your house. I resolved to refrain from putting my hand over the hole, and instead just thought of the creature as a eccentric and annoying but generally harmless neighbor. This worked well enough.

Sunset from the pier

My typical day on Ko Yao Noi can be summarized as follows: Awaken at the sunrise, since the bungalow’s sheer curtains don’t block any light; admire the panorama for a moment and fall back asleep. (One day I actually managed to stumble out of bed at 6 a.m. and snap some photos. Then of course I stagged back to bed and slept for another few hours.) Eat breakfast, often at Sabia Corner, a group of bungalows and restaurant run by an Italian woman who bakes fresh bread. Slather on some sunscreen and sit on the beach and read. Have a light lunch of pad thai, spicy squid salad, or something similar. Order a mango shake from Pasai Seafood, sit in the hammock, and read more. Go for a sunset run. Get dinner at La Luna (a surprisingly good brick-oven pizza joint) or one of the many cheap Thai restaurants on the island. Do a bit of writing and flip through the flashcards on my iPad for new Chinese words/characters from the day’s reading. Go back to my bungalow, watch a movie, and fall asleep.

One of my personal goals for the trip was to get a bit more active, and so I did. Tooling around the island on my Honda Wave 100 cc scooter and laying on the beach did not exactly get the heart pumping, so nearly every day in the cool sunset air, I went for a 5–6 mile sunset run. Sometimes I set off directly from the bungalows and looped along dirt roads running through rubber plantations, or from the west side of the island, taking in the sunset at this random pier set amongst fish farms.

In eight days, there was barely enough variation in my schedule to be worth a mention, except maybe for few hours of easy sea kayaking (to the island here, the site of the wedding mentioned earlier). I kayaked out a few hours before sunset, watched the sunset from the island, and kayaked back under the stars. Unfortunately the tide had gone way out so the last 50 meters involved dragging the kayak through a swampy, mucky mess. Thank God for mandals — had I been wearing flip-flops, they would have been lost for good.

About a week later, I decided it was time to move on. I did a bit of research, found a liveaboard dive trip leaving for Thailand’s premier diving spots in two days, booked a hotel in Phuket, and told the resort owners I would be checking out the next day. Onward and upward! Well, in my case, onward and downward, about 30 meters.