Each one written
for one window.

Somchai meets you inside the terminal, not at the rank — he’ll have been there forty minutes, because the Phuket arrivals hall is a genuinely unpleasant place to be lost in. Fifty minutes south to a courtyard house in the old town.

Nothing scheduled for the afternoon except sleep. At six we walk Thalang and Dibuk roads while the Sino-Portuguese shophouses still have light on them, and eat hokkien mee standing up at a stall that has been in the same doorway since 1974.

The whole day hangs on the tide table. The sea caves that open into the hidden lagoons — the hongs — have about a metre of headroom, and they are only passable for roughly ninety minutes either side of low water. On a March departure that usually falls between 06:30 and 08:00.

So: coffee in the car at 05:50, on the water from Ao Por by 06:40, inside Hong Island before the first day-tripper boat leaves Phuket. You will have two of the lagoons entirely to yourselves, and be back at the pier by eleven while four hundred people are queuing to get in.

Afternoon is yours. Most people sleep.

Forty minutes across the bay to an island with one road, no nightlife and a Muslim fishing community that has politely declined to become Koh Phi Phi. We put two blank days here on purpose. Trips that are all mornings break people by day nine.

If you want something: a longtail out to Koh Hong at first light, or bicycles through the rubber plantations before the heat. If you don’t: there is a hammock and the tide goes out about eight hundred metres.

Three hours inland to rainforest that is about 160 million years older than the Amazon, and a reservoir with limestone towers standing straight out of it. You sleep on a raft house — plywood, a mattress, a door that doesn’t lock, and the lake four inches under the floor.

The reason to be here is 5:30am. Mist sits on the water for about an hour, and the gibbons start up on the ridge behind. Boat out at six, engine off, and you drift. It is the quietest thing on the whole trip.

Second morning is a guided walk to the Nam Talu cave mouth with Pom, who has worked this park for nineteen years and will find you a hornbill.

The pivot of the whole trip, and a genuinely interesting drive. You cross the spine of the peninsula at Phanom and the vegetation changes within twenty kilometres — rubber and oil palm giving way to coconut, the rain shadow doing its work.

Lunch is southern Thai at a roadside place outside Ban Ta Khun: gaeng tai pla, which is fermented fish-gut curry and one of the most aggressive things in the Thai canon. There is also chicken. Ferry from Donsak at 15:00, on Samui by 16:45.

We keep you on the south coast between Laem Set and Hua Thanon, which is the part of Samui that still has fishing boats on it. Chaweng is thirty minutes away and you will not need to go there.

Late afternoon, Hua Thanon market as the day boats land — and the specific reason for the timing is that the Muslim fish stalls sell out by about 17:30 and the grilled stingray with turmeric is the thing.

Out at 07:15 on our own boat rather than the 09:30 group departure, which matters because it puts you on the Wua Talap viewpoint stair — 430 steps, properly steep, about forty minutes — before the sun gets on it.

From the top you can see the whole archipelago and, on a clear March morning, the mainland mountains forty kilometres west. Then the emerald lake at Mae Koh, lunch on board, and two hours of kayaking the channels at Koh Sam Sao.

Divers: fast boat to Koh Tao, two tanks at Chumphon Pinnacle and Southwest. March is the best whale shark month of the year on this side — no promises, but the odds are as good as they get.

Everyone else: up into the Samui interior, which nobody does. Coconut plantations, the Na Muang falls before the tour vans, and a long lunch with Khun Ead at a house restaurant above Ban Saket.

Ploy Ratanakorn has cooked for us since 2016 and runs this out of her own kitchen for no more than six people. It starts at the market at 06:30, because that is when the southern herbs arrive and she wants you to smell the difference between fresh and day-old krachai.

Then four dishes, all southern rather than the Bangkok repertoire you get everywhere else — gaeng som, khua kling, a turmeric fried fish, and a coconut relish that you will try and fail to reproduce at home. You eat what you made at half twelve.

Short flight up, and we put you on the Thonburi bank rather than in Sukhumvit, so the last night of the trip is a river crossing rather than a shopping mall. Dinner at a six-table place in Khlong San.

Morning departure: the airport run is timed off your flight, and if it’s an evening one we’ll give you the morning on the canals with Nok instead of a hotel lobby and a late checkout charge.