Chaweng Beach

About this audio guide

This guide to Chaweng Beach on Koh Samui traces how a stretch of coconut palms and twenty-baht bungalows became one of Thailand's busiest resort strips. It follows the backpackers who found it in the nineteen-seventies, and the airline that decided, a decade later, to build its own way in rather than wait on the government. You'll hear what that gamble set in motion, and who has controlled access ever since. Best heard facing the water, with the resort towers at your back.