It's ruined now. It was almost completely gone when I was there in 1992, so it must be gone now. But a very real part of whom I thought I was in my early twenties happened when I arrived to Ko Samui in 1986. For one thing, I had just arrived in the real tropics three days earlier, and that was Bangkok, hardly a paradise. Now I had always imagined what a tropical world would look like, and Ko Samui surely was amazing; a round mountain jutting out of a turquoise sea, surrounded by powdery white sand and blanketed from shore to shore with beautiful royal coconut palms (my ignorance of the fact that Koh Samui was historically a huge plantation for coconuts was in my favor; I loved palms, and tens of thousands of them, a whole forest, was simply amazing to me.
We arrived at one of the cheapest bungalows at Bo Phut beach. It was so old in fact that it had no individual bungalows made from palm to rent, but rather was more like a motel made out of stucco. Electricity came from a generator that was turned off at 8 p.m. Not that we had any need for electricity anyway; candles were included in the price.
There was a fishing village down the beach with great food (amazing how delicious a freshly caught can be, even simply fried in oil). One of the high school girls (I myself was only 22 at the time) had a crush on me and asked me something about her English homework every time I passed. The village adults always laughed at her, she would then laugh too, and bolt away. I'm sure everybody's been bought out by now by Club Med and living in stifling Sura Thani. And I bet all the seafood is now coming in by ship from the mainland, half of it exotic and frozen.
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