Exploring the Peerless Piers of Thailand’s Koh Kood

Perfect blue skies. Perfect blue seas. The Thai island of Koh Kood is an affordable and accessible alternative to the Maldives, with the bonus of the world’s best cuisine.

Thailand’s islands are rightly popular destinations. Koh Samui and Koh Chang are perhaps the most visited; Koh Phangan is famed for its full moon parties. Many spend a lifetime dreaming of visiting such tropical exotica and, on the whole, these islands are pleasant, if crowded, destinations offering decent food, drink, sun, surf and diving. You might want an alternative.

The highlight of any island trip is always the ferry journey that gets you there. The sea breeze, the sounds of the water and the leisurely pace plug straight into calm. If you’re unlucky, you might be herded onto a speedboat, sat behind dirty glass and subjected to a Thai soap opera for the duration of the crossing. Stanislavski who? If you have a choice, always opt for the slow wooden boat.

When Koh Kood mercifully appears on the horizon, the side of the island facing the incoming boats presents only a small port backed by dense forest. Upon disembarking, a Thai woman with a whiteboard calmly points to the name of your hotel and a pickup truck with a hard bench in the back. Thais call them songthaews. Getting bounced around in one is part of the Thai experience.

You can do worse than stay at a glamping site called The Survival. Its gimmick is spacious teepees in age-of-exploration beige, comfy beds and reassuringly cool aircon. Showers and toilets are communal, uncrowded and well-maintained. The boat may get you there before check-in, but cocktails and larb gai on the beach make up for it.

If you’re unlucky enough to be someone who sears and sweats rather than glows and bronzes, you’re going to need industrial grade suncream and a hat. Dress for the cool you have, not the Italian cool you have no hope of emulating. Bring very dark glasses if you’re sensitive to bright light – even a decent pair of Ray-Bans will struggle to reduce the glare.

If you grow bored of cocktails, sunbaking and doomscrolling, you might give some thought to something more active, such as seeing the island. Diving, scuba and snorkelling trips can be booked at any resort. The water around nearby Koh Raet was full of tourist boats in the late afternoon.

A mainstay of any Thai adventure is renting a dubiously maintained motor scooter. The added thrill of not dying makes it all the more satisfying. Check the brakes before leaving your resort. The island’s interior is a modern road cut through forest. The roads are quiet and largely traffic-free. The only drama is the monkeys fighting in the trees.

The island of Koh Kood is located in Trat, on the south-eastern side of Thailand, close to Cambodia. It is the last of a string of linked tropical islands. You can easily get a boat from one of the other islands – a cocktail on the Cococape pier on Koh Mak is a worthy stop on the way through. Alternatively, book a resort package that includes pickup at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport.

The island can be easily explored in a leisurely paced day. You’ll see beaches and resorts, endless piers and the occasional deepwater port. Koh Kood is an Instagrammer’s playground. Look for the shoals of fish. The island has only its tourist good-life ecosystem and moves to the rhythms of the lapping ocean. The only mild annoyance is the choice of music in some of the resorts. Yes, you’re going to hear Gloria Gaynor singing about surviving and a lot of Hotel California. Given that islands swarming with hostile uncontacted natives do still exist, mild Ed Sheeran exposure is getting off lightly.

The island offers little in its interior besides a few waterfalls. Don’t expect much, as these run dry during the tourist season. The size of the well-eroded boulders in the dry riverbeds suggests they must be spectacular during the monsoon. The Thais have a peculiar love of waterfalls, alcohol and unsafe behaviour, so be cautious of how others are behaving.

Pick any beach, resort or bar when you fancy a break. Thai food is genuinely the finest in the world, and most menus will contain explanations in simple English that fail to do the cuisine justice. Authentic Thai food is an order of magnitude better than what’s served in restaurants across the world. If you hunger for the familiar, most places can knock up a fine burger or a decent pepperoni pizza. Vegetarians and vegans might go hungry. While most food is cooked to Western preferences, be aware that the Thai palate – especially in its colourful drinks – leans heavily towards sugar.

Learn the phrase ‘mai pet’, meaning ‘not spicy’, and be mindful that the Thai definition of this is still often hazardous to the Western bowel. Avoid finely chopped chillies and those soaked in the condiments served with the food. You run zero risk of food poisoning, but adverse reactions to chilli are another matter entirely. Avoid it unless you like bathroom interiors.

The day done, return to your resort for the sort of sunset Monet dreamt about, a swim in that ocean and the obligatory fire show. Thai sunsets are always spectacular; the water here is warm, clean and unusually free of both jellyfish and surfers. The fire shows, usually at weekends, consist of young men twirling fire around on ropes, freely demonstrating why none of them seem to have any body hair. It’s a massive cliché and largely inescapable. An evening meal and cocktails on the beach round out the day nicely. The kitchens and bars close early. Bring repellent, sleeves and trousers for the night. Nocturnal things hunger too.

Of course, awareness of your surroundings is always wise. Thailand is generally very safe, but violence does flare up, usually between locals over alcohol and petty matters. Lone travellers need not be concerned.

If you’ve ever pictured walking out onto a wooden pier overlooking perfectly clear blue seas, under equally blue skies and shaded on all sides by coconut palms, then Koh Kood is for you. It offers Maldives-like experiences at a fraction of the cost, against the background of all of Thailand’s other sites and sights. There are plenty of wannabe desert island getaways around the world, with eco-obsessions and imported sand. Koh Kood is what they all aspire to be: the genuine article.

Hail Caesar!

Starz’s Spartacus: House of Ashur is a triumphant return to writer/showrunner Steven DeKnight’s Roman world of sex, gore and quality storytelling. It proves an entertaining tale of survival in a will-to-power world that owes more to the exploitation movies of Roger Corman than the aristocratic infighting of Game of Thrones.

Spartacus and his army are a memory, and the Roman survivors yearn for fresh entertainment in the arena. Enter the gladiatrix. The show was criticised at the outset as Tenika Davis was cast as the new champion. She’s introduced throwing centurion red shirts around like rag dolls.

Yet she is not the Mary Sue many feared. She’s little more than the b-plot and spends most of the ten episodes getting beaten into the dust. Many feared a watered-down follow-up built on concession to identity politics. Be clear, that fear is misplaced. This new show is brilliantly written and executed in a glorious excess that equals the shows that came before it.

After being resurrected by the gods, former gladiator Ashur inherits the house and gladiator training school of his former master. Rivalries between gladiator houses get deadly. He’s also taken with the widowed daughter of a senator, which complicates matters as Ashur twists and turns his way through life-threatening problems created by the untouchable elite of Roman society. Unlike much of modern writing, consequences flow from action; ego and hubris bring death and ruin to many.

The writers go about this with subversive humour evident in their best creations – the three dwarf gladiators, depicted as freakish amusement to the crowds – until their threat is savagely established. Brilliantly played, the characters are deadly, debaucherous and gloriously foul mouthed.

It’s easy to see why writer/showrunner Steven DeKnight’s Roman world can sustain a story beyond that of Spartacus. This is a well-realised hell-scape, pitiless and hope-free. The new series might lack the anti-slavery message of its predecessor, but it retains its pure wargasm with no attempt at realism whatsoever.

Whilst other shows go for highbrow magical realism, attempted authenticity, and grand ambition, DeKnight’s people are driven by lust, domination and revenge. This is a far more raw and honest view of an unpleasant age.   

The infamous arena battles remain gore-soaked comedy – a live action Itchy and Scratchy. The scenes are well-placed through the plot – entertaining interludes between the dense turns of a complex story. DeKnight has done something unique with this series – he’s brought exploitation cinema back with a colour-saturated bang. Bridgerton this is not. Repressed passions in this world turn into public orgies.

This is a world you aren’t meant to envy – everyone is a beast where survival comes at the expense of others. Even the weakest characters plot. Wives scheme; prostitutes manipulate; slaves flatter.  All the characters are drawn with a boo-hiss villainy, all emotions are theatre and no-one is particularly likeable. The reborn Ashur is only empathetic as the story is told from his perspective.

While many might dismiss this as a return to the exploitative tone of yesteryear, there is an obvious intelligence and satire behind it all. Many shows today are written in a lazy modern vernacular. DeKnight has his actors chew well-crafted faux Roman dialogue as if it were Shakespeare. The show deserves a high grade just for its commitment to being as extreme as it is. It isn’t subtle, but why does it need to be? It is a show built around gladiators murdering each other for public amusement. It isn’t supposed to be easy viewing. Repulsion should be part of an honest reaction.   

The final arena contest itself is no surprise, but that final twist…. Hail Caesar, indeed. Series two, if greenlit and apparently already written, promises to take the story into a new day where Ashur is done fawning around the powerful.

Overall, DeKnight’s revival is a brilliantly realised return to a familiar world – just don’t get too close to the screen. Proximity can be terminal.

4/5 This revival casts aside all concessions to ideological casting and spins a well-crafted story that easily sustains a sequel in a post-Spartacus Roman world.

Starz

10 Episodes seen

Living on a Burmese Train Station

Pyinmana, Central Myanmar, is a railway town halfway between Yangon and Mandalay. Between 2015-2018 I documented families living on station platforms, informal economies, and everyday life during the brief period of political reform . After the 2021 coup, these images now mark a world few will see.

  • The platform on Pyinmana station where people lived. Note the boxes on the left of the frame. This was home to a mother and her two daughters. Pyinmana Station, Central Myanmar, 2017.
  • This woman was sleeping on the platform. Pyinmana Station, Central Myanmar, 2017/18.
  • This girl was the oldest of the two living on the platform. Her mother asked me to photograph her – she’d never had her picture taken. I printed the images and gave them to her. She saw me coming, I held up the pictures, she snatched them from my hand and ran off to show her family. I like to think I made a child happy. Pyinmana Station, Central Myanmar, 2017.
  • After photographing the girl, children appeared whenever they saw me. Note the look in the boy’s eyes. He’s high on betel nut, which they chew. It stains the teeth red and causes throat cancer. Pyinmana Station, Central Myanmar, 2017.
  • More local children. Pyinmana Station, Central Myanmar, 2017.
  • This man slept rough and lived in this spot. There was many amputees. Pyinmana Station, Central Myanmar, 2017/18.
  • This pair were waiting for a train. Note they never get their sandals on the mats. Pyinmana Station, Central Myanmar, 2017.
  • A lady selling items to people leaving the train. Pyinmana Station, Central Myanmar, 2017/18.
  • A bicycle taxi. Pyinmana Station, Central Myanmar, 2017/18.
  • A monk. Pyinmana Station, Central Myanmar, 2017.
  • Locals in the station’s waiting room. Pyinmana Station, Central Myanmar, 2017/18.
  • A guy booking a ticket. Pyinmana Station, Central Myanmar, 2018.
  • The local train. Pyinmana Station, Central Myanmar, 2017.

Bangkok is not your futurist dystopia

I grew tired of Bangkok’s tourists, relentless consumerism and Hello Kitty, and made a Logan’s Run out along one of the city’s major waterways. I expected to find those oft-described gleaming spires of Bladerunner-like urban futurism. Instead, I wandered through a crumbling Heath Robinson environment, finding only low-fi make-do-and-mend survivalism.

For some time, I’d been feeling like a home-caged dog scratching at a door. I needed some space, and that is surprisingly hard to find in Bangkok. It lacks footpaths, having been built for car and motorcycle. The city has plenty of parks, but walking in circles speaks to the self-defeating routine I was trying to escape. Aimless wandering is for malls. I’ve seen enough sci-fi to know to follow the water. I aimed for the canal. Free of commercial pressure, the first person I met threw a bottle of water at me. Guess he had strong views on tourists keeping to designated areas.

It always seems oddly hyperbolic to describe Asian cities in similes derived from dystopian fiction. Bangkok isn’t Metropolis. If anything, it has more in common with the domed city in Logan’s Run. The city’s famed luxury malls are generally a Glenn A. Larson fever dream reminiscent of yesterday’s tomorrow. Outside, Bangkok is a strained mass transit system serving heavily populated civic centres and concrete brutalism. Primary coloured jumpsuits are thankfully absent, but many now shop in their pyjamas. If your brain is anything like mine, it can’t process even a tiny fraction of all that data. You start unconsciously filling the gaps with pop culture shorthand.

Of course, Bangkok doesn’t have a direct analogue of Logan’s Run’s Carousel either. The Thais haven’t yet taken to a public spectacle of executing anyone turning thirty. However, they do worship youth, and all the malls have floors devoted to cosmetic surgery. It wouldn’t surprise me if half of the beautiful people around me were living out a surgically augmented lifespan. In the movie the crowds chant ‘renew, renew’ as people are vapourised – the only renewal evident here concerns last year’s iPhone. Soma? Yes, there’s plenty of that in evidence – Nose Tea, FUKU Matcha and any other number of comically exotic brands. Generic Thai Tea isn’t quite the blue milk of pop culture legend: it’s orange and tastes foul. The Thai palette lands in its own unique register.

If you wanted an escape from the mall-heavy heart of the city, you’d do worse than following Logan 5’s example. Exit not along the highways but on foot through the industrial bowels. I followed the water out along the Khlong Saen Saep canal.

The advantage of living long term in a tourist destination is you eventually stray from the beaten path. In this subaltern subterranean world, I found drunks, ducts and decay running beneath structures of steel and glass. From down there, you can see many wonders – Bangkok’s copy of the Shard, the 80+ storey Baiyoke Sky Hotel, or the Mormon church at Makkasan, which looks more like it landed than was built. The slums are neatly tucked in behind.

Central Bangkok reeks of software-developer parametric architecture. With a little knowledge, you could easily predict which program the designers used. All copies without an original. I started to sense I was taking an archaeological trip through the back catalogue of industrial architecture. The further I travelled, the more towering HVAC cooling towers I encountered.

Armies of labourers are busy rebuilding the canal-side walkways. The new footpaths encourage runners and cyclists. I spent a lot of time dodging the motorcycle taxi drivers who use the footpaths as shortcuts and de facto speedways. Then it struck me – a walk such as this couldn’t have happened until recently. Yes, gentrification has penetrated even here.

Several decades out from the centre, the high-rise luxury gives way to functional low rent and shanty. Brave attempts at tarting up brutalist blocks in cosmetic slap are everywhere. Aging buildings wear too much makeup too. I pass condos with childishly silly names, Muay Thai training schools, and the occasional brothel. The further you get from the centre, the more the buildings drip and depress rather than delight and sparkle.

This bizarre collage of aged concrete, crass and creativity eventually gives way to uneven walkway slabs on stilts. The density of the shanty thins too. Factories and workshops dominate. You’ve passed the zone of comfortable habitability.

The temporary structures standing in the fields will leave no trace in the urban fossil record, nor will they go out of fashion – these shelters stand a Platonic ideal drawn from survivalist functionalism. In many ways the shack is a stronger evolutionary step than the condo – one’s a sharpened stick, the other a plastic fork. There’s no renewal here either. The ratio of structures abandoned due to markets and tastes shifting is significantly lower.

The harsh reality out in the fields croaked at me from the semi-darkness. It is more scorched earth than cursed. The Thais are honest when they talk about civilisation and its boundary. They’ll happily tell you exactly where the one ends and the other begins. They see in city-state terms. It’s become a fashionable trope in the West to see walls as confining. We’ve forgotten they’re a squeeze chute that calms and pacifies.

I’ve always suspected there was something wrong with dystopian fantasy. City states evolved for reasons – safety in numbers and protection from predators. The likes of Logan 5 are corruptors of youth and public morals. You’d have to have a very twisted sense of reality to imagine all those subsistence farmers and labourers wouldn’t want to change places with you. In the mall, hands grasp at new goods. On the periphery, they grasp at living until tomorrow. Dystopian authors always fail to imagine there’s something worse waiting out beyond the city limits. The adventures of Paul Rosolie or John Allen Chau confirm life is nasty, brutish and short out there. It’s not just a failure of imagination; it’s a failure of worldly experience. The dome – real or metaphorical – is a barrier against merciless entropy and hardship. The resulting infantilisation is a consequence of living in a safety net.

Turning back to look at Bangkok’s urban sprawl, the lights were coming on, and the futurist illusion was starting to emerge. LEDs and neon hide the grim functional reality. I missed the aircon. A night outside promised a sweat rash and torment by mosquito bite. I really needed a hot shower and a good meal. The error made in Logan’s world – and mine – was looking for an additional sanctuary beyond the secure one we’ve built. That’s basic greed. Logan 5, his creators and anyone else walking in their non-conforming footsteps are guilty of the ultimate urban crime – novelty-induced ennui. We call such people reckless thrill-seekers for a reason.

YouTuber’s autobiography isn’t just the Shawshank Redemption for nerds

Waiting for Nerdrotic is pop culture YouTuber Gary Buechler’s surprisingly honest account of a life of drug addiction and the serious crimes of his youth. He couples this with high praise for the support mechanisms of Alcoholics Anonymous. Alongside telling you why Marvel Comics matter, he’ll also tell you the secret of not getting murdered in the exercise yard at Folsom prison. Like any good story, his comes with a redemption arc.

Gary Buechler, better known as Nerdrotic, has well over a million YouTube subscribers and double that in regular viewers. His latest video is The Force Awakens – How Disney Destroyed Star Wars. He is one of the more visible pop culture commentators on the social media giant who’ve grown to prominence over the last decade fighting at the forefront of the culture war. They’d typically ask if you’ve noticed the decline in the quality of film and TV, before happily explaining why Hollywood’s forced diversity and hostility to traditional fanbases has reduced once billion-dollar movie franchises to notoriously low-quality shows locked away on streaming platforms nobody watches. Buechler’s extended circle of contributors are former TV executives, retired filmmakers and practicing screenwriters. Their appeal is credible insider insights and commentary that are more entertaining than the material they’re criticising.

Despite his success and following, Buechler’s autobiography is far from the sensationalist self-aggrandisement you might expect. He tells us more about his failures than his triumphs. Born in San Diego in 1969, he was adopted and says he displayed signs of addictive behaviour at a young age. He compulsively collected comics. His school performance declined and he ended up with predictable drug problems after he was sexually abused by a male teacher. He describes leaving school after punching a member of staff. Uneducated, unskilled and happy in his addiction to drugs, comics and movies, he broke into a house to steal money. A series of farcical events followed involving a small dog, a broken door handle and a homeowner who happened to be a champion military marksman. The arresting officer told Buechler he was lucky to be alive. He was sentenced to four years in Folsom prison.

Eventually moved to a less dangerous institution, his new cellmate talked him into attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He says it turned his life around. He was released after two years. He married twice, the second time to an old flame, adopted her child and they had one of their own. He opened a comic shop in San Francisco.

After 17 years drug-free, his relapse began when he was prescribed highly addictive painkillers after an accident hanging a Superman Returns movie poster. After getting clean and relapsing a second time, his wife dumped him at the doors of a sober living community. It worked. After the chaos of years on cocaine and painkillers, he sold his comic shop and returned to selling car parts.

The routine of a regular job helped, but he’s clear the ensuing boredom is a bad sign for addicts. In 2014, he turned to podcasting, he says to keep the brain functioning. Thus was his Nerdrotic channel born. He makes it clear it was a coping mechanism for a sober addict with ADHD. 

His book is not a sneering or self-congratulating I-made-it-big-on-YouTube story. It’s a sobering warning – and heartfelt advice – for fellow addicts. His relative fame is just the hook. It is, if you will, Alcoholics No Longer Anonymous – and he willingly accuses himself for the sake of others. His viewers will know how much he hates today’s fashionable victim narratives. The title Waiting for Nerdrotic isn’t a reference to his YouTube success at all. It’s self-recrimination. Addiction? Again?

The niche appeal of its author and the transcribed nature of the text mean the book is unlikely to be a bestseller or win any literary awards. Parts of it are drawn by famed comic book artist Kelley Jones. His inclusion anchors the book in comics culture, making it one for the fans. Buechler, unlike the mainstream, would take that judgement as the highest praise.

Waiting for Nerdrotic: From Prison to YouTube
by Gary Buechler
Legacy Launch Pad Publishing — available now