Some say you should never go back. Places change. You change. But sometimes the pull is too strong, even when you know the past is gone.
In the 1970s, I washed up in Thailand almost by accident. I’d left Ireland with a rucksack and no idea where I was going. Seven months later I reached Bangkok with almost no money, and a lucky encounter landed me a teaching job—a rare prize for a foreigner. On my first night, I fell for the people: the courtesy, the grace, the food, the easy philosophy of life.
Waiting to start work, I heard whispers of Koh Samui, a remote “laid-back” island. A tip in a dockside bar led me to a small cargo boat heading there. For two nights I slept on deck, eating rice with the crew as we hauled building supplies south and returned with coconuts.
The wooden pier in Nathon led straight to a tin-roofed hotel on stilts, run by a barefoot Chinese mother and her children. No restaurant—whatever you brought, they cooked. Down the street, a concrete “hotel” doubled as the local brothel, home to cargo crews without family on the island.
Days slipped by gently. Noodle soup eaten barefoot in the sand. Monkeys dropping coconuts for export. A rickety ride to Lamai Beach—kilometres of golden sand and coconut palms, almost deserted. No airport. No timetable. No rush.
Two decades later, I went back. The wooden ferries were gone, replaced by speedboats. The pier was concrete, the Chinese hotel vanished, the brothel replaced by bars and taxis. Lamai was now a strip of neon, pounding music, and day-drunk tourists.
Then, one evening in Nathon, I stopped dead. A carved wooden door I knew well stood in a tin-roofed shack—the door of the old Chinese hotel. The boy I’d once known answered my knock, now middle-aged. He’d stayed when the rest of the family sold up, working for the electricity company. He’d kept the door, out of sentiment.
It looked absurdly grand on that humble hut—but it bridged the years to a simpler island, a gentler time.
When I first left, I told myself, I’ll come back someday. Perhaps what I really returned to say was, I haven’t forgotten you… and thank you.