July 6 , 2026

I wake up far too early; it is still dark, and my ribs are aching. The bed is comfortable, but unfortunately the mattress doesn’t have enough play to provide appropriate buffering for my injured ribs. I can carefully rotate to my left and lie on my left side for a short period, which is already some progress. But why couldn’t I sleep properly? Well, drinking a double espresso in the early evening yesterday probably could have been the main cause. What a long and exhausting day yesterday was!

As dawn emerges, the sky is grey, then the rains begin. Given my experience in this climatic region, it shouldn’t rain for too much of the day, although there may be little evidence of sun. The morning advances, and it is time to enjoy breakfast, which is set up in the restaurant area adjacent my room. A handful of westerners and Asians are seated at the tables on the canopied outdoor terrace, a mixed European-Thai family, two young Chinese women, some older Caucasian men, and a middle aged Caucasian woman.

The breakfast buffet is relatively sumptuous, corresponding to a luxury hotel, not that of the typical budget hotels I have stayed at in non-touristic regions. One station offers breads and pastries with butter and jam, another noodle soup with condiments, another sausage and spaghetti bolognese, another rice with brown Massaman curry, another cut fruit, an another yet bael fruit and orange juice as well as coffee and tea. The food isn’t necessarily that exclusive in quality, but reasonable enough, ample in variety and amount, and the views from the terrace of the green sheet of water lapping against the sandy shore spectacular. Due to the weather, the sky, the water, and sand are all a uniform tone, which is quite unique and beautiful in its own way.

I marvel at the hotel garden and compact elegance of the resort, with its four-part bungalows facing the landscaped courtyard whose winding walkways are lined with various palms and frangipani weaving across the manicured lawn. The far side of the property abuts a rock ledge that drops to the surf below, the overall effect both visually seductive but also steeped in practicality. An amphitheatre-like staircase descends to the beach, the broad sand concourse undulating alongside a curtain of palm trees until reaching a ridge in the distance, presumably marking the top of White Sands beach.

Stylish rattan furniture lines the ramparts of the patio, even more seductive at night when illuminated by the garden’s sparse and mysterious lighting. Behind the restaurant space and administration building lies a distinct enclave of the resort, identical whitewashed cottages lining walkways gently arcing through tastefully arranged tropical greenery, including patches of giant taro, heliconia, and bird’s nest fern. The chalets center on a modest kidney-shaped pool set in a raised podium, designed so as provide an infinite pool-visual effect when viewed at a shallow angle relative to the sea beyond. A small glass-encased building next door encloses an exercise room which shockingly also contains larger-sized weights. I need to come back here to take advantage of the facilities, but at the moment am not feeling particularly motivated — and in any case, a walk along the beach will take priority.

At low tide, the spray of rocks abutting the lodge’s ramparts are easy to circumvent, but at high tide could pose a much more serious challenge. Looking to the south, it is evident that whatever lodgings lie along the shoreline don’t have the benefit of any beachfront exposure. From the shape of the surf, the succession of waves almost identical in profile, I conclude that the seabed adjacent the shoreline recedes in a very shallow manner, a marker of a high quality recreational beach. On the other hand, with no steep drop-off there is no chance of surf of any sort forming here. The sand itself is also exceptional, not extremely fine, but consistent and clean, presumably cleaned regularly by the resorts or municipality, but it also seems evident that detritus is not being washed onto the shore from the ocean.

Despite the ideal beach that extends for some distance, there are few people playing in the water. Perhaps there are so few people visiting here? Perhaps everyone is waiting for better weather? Is it because the beach is so shallow that it takes trekking too far out at low tide to enjoy enough depth for splashing around or swimming? Closer to shore, the oyster-covered rock litter looks daunting, guaranteed to result in serious injuries if approached with anything but the utmost caution: when exposed at low tide, only with thick-soled and securely fastened shoes, and at high tide, not at all …

At low tide, much of the expanse of beach is utterly flat, with barely perceptible pools of water gathering across shallower portions of wet sand. The continuous procession of bungalows lined along the shore are at times barely visible under the canopies of the enormous banyans and other majestic hardwoods. Few people play in the water, normally a sign of the water not being particularly hospitable, although here it’s more likely the opposite, that the water is so utterly shallow.

I continue on foot, passing the variety of hotel establishments, some seeming to be abandoned, others quite busy, but that certainly isn’t a reflection of the exposure to the beach the various places enjoy. There are also occasional restaurants, but the overall feeling is one of minimal intrusion of commercialism into the enjoyment of the beach experience. The entire stretch of sand is amazingly clean, and there are no shops of any sort or ambulatory vendors on the expanse of sand before me, bar one individual waving his beach towels at anyone in his vicinity.

The weather is also resolutely dreary, at least until I reach the farther end of the beach, when the sun miraculously emerges from behind the veil of clouds, illuminating the landscape in bright colours and revealing a beauty that could not have been imaginable under the previously leaden skies. The sea now has a luminous greenish hue, the sand a radiant yellow, and beyond the shore, the land rises abruptly toward the sky, the steep hills coated in a dense tapestry of impenetrable olive green jungle. If this is the first beach you reach from the ferry jetty, I can’t begin to imagine the many other amazing beaches that the island harbours!

Walking back along the undulating sand ledge leading back to the Koh Chang Grand View Resort, I realize that the place I am now staying is probably one of the nicest along the coast in White Sands. A number of the resorts — none of which are faceless, industrial-scale, at least not this time of year — have cabins that face the water, but the landscaping around them is anodyne or nonexistent, and many of these chalets are utterly characterless if not small and shabby. The KC resort is the one showpiece of White Sands beach resorts, but it also a classic large-scale complex that espouses a degree of grandeur but is as appealing as a large cruise ship, with innumerable guests crammed into very visible common spaces, and the kind of place I would absolutely loathe to stay in.

My hotel is relatively limited in size, but is evidently landscaped in a way that optimizes character, with different types of accommodation in varyingly landscaped plots, the overall arrangement pointing to a tasteful organization in contrast to the housing options simply being crammed onto the lot without much consideration for overall design. The fact that the accommodation is not directly on the beach is also a great thing, considering how loud the surf can seem at night.

The tide is now coming in again, and I can see that the north end of the White Sands beach is lower elevation than the strip to the south, which also means that at high tide the sand around my hotel is inaccessible. Thanks to the barnacle-covered rocks that little the perimeter of the beach around the hotel, trying to walk back to the hotel along the shoreline at high tide is prohibitive — and that is exactly what I am trying to do at the moment, and that barefoot. Unless I retrace some distance back along the beach, I will have to carefully make my way through this morass of rock, and am looking at risking some very serious cuts. So much for the extreme degree of cautiousness I have been obsessed with since falling on my back in ShangriLa in China. And sadly, the time that is most convenient to throw myself in the water is also high tide, when accessing the water from the hotel is most inconvenient.