There is a version of Southeast Asia that is disappearing — not gone yet, but receding steadily with every new resort, every new road, every guidebook that discovers a place and sends a thousand people after it. I was lucky enough to know that version well. Koh Yao Yai, in the early 2000s, was part of it.
The island sits in Phang Nga Bay, halfway between Phuket and Krabi, surrounded by the limestone karsts that make this stretch of the Andaman Sea look like something painted rather than real. Today it attracts a quiet, discerning kind of traveller — someone deliberately avoiding the Phuket crowd. In the early 2000s, it attracted almost no one. Which suited me perfectly.
The man who looked after us
There was a local man — I will not pretend I remember his name clearly across twenty-odd years — who simply took charge of our stay. He cooked our meals from whatever was available that day. He gave beach massages in the afternoon, under trees where monkeys genuinely played, not as a staged attraction but because the monkeys lived there and didn't especially care about us. In the evenings, as the last light left the sky and took the electricity with it — there was none to speak of after dark — he built fires on the sand.
It was a profoundly simple kind of luxury. No menu, no schedule, no entertainment programme. Just a beach, a fire, a man who seemed to find genuine pleasure in making two guests comfortable, and an island that had not yet decided what it wanted to be.
The order
One evening I asked for wine and cheese. It was not an especially considered request — it was the end of a warm day, there was a fire going, and wine and cheese felt right. The owner of the small place we were staying came to find me not long afterwards. He was not embarrassed, exactly — more gently puzzled, the way you might be if a guest asked for something that had simply never occurred to anyone before.
He explained the situation. The island had neither wine nor cheese. Both were on the mainland. He could send word — there was a boat — but it would take time. Two days, perhaps.
I looked at him and said I wasn't in a rush. I would wait. I extended my stay without a second thought. The fire was going. The monkeys were in the trees. Two days seemed entirely reasonable.
The arrival
When the order arrived two days later, the whole island seemed to know about it before I did. Staff appeared on the beach. Locals came down from the trees and the path. The owner himself arrived at something approaching a run, carrying the wine and cheese with the pride of someone who had moved heaven and earth — which, on a small island in Phang Nga Bay in 2002, is more or less what he had done.
We shared them on the beach. Wine and cheese, passed around in the firelight, on an island that had sent to the mainland on a boat because a guest had asked, and because the idea of not fulfilling the request had apparently not been seriously considered.
I have stayed in some of the finest hotels in Southeast Asia. I have been looked after by staff trained to a standard that would satisfy any international luxury benchmark. None of it has ever moved me quite as much as that beach, that fire, and that fanfare.
Koh Yao Yai today
The island is still there. It is still quieter than its neighbours, still surrounded by those extraordinary limestone formations, still accessible only by boat. There are proper hotels now, and electricity that stays on after dark, and a small but growing number of visitors who have discovered what the Phuket crowd has not yet found. The monkeys are still in the trees.
We still send guests there. It remains, for our money, one of the finest places to spend a quiet week in Thailand — and one of the best arguments for choosing somewhere slightly off the obvious path. The cheese and wine will be easier to find now. But the spirit of that island, the warmth of the people and the extraordinary beauty of Phang Nga Bay — that part has not changed.