Here’s a full disclosure: I have a chronic phobia of luxury resorts. Pillow menus make me jittery. A 150-item breakfast spread once gave me a tic that took days to subside. And don’t even get me started on spas. Yes, yes, the massage therapist has seen it all, but how can I be sure she is not sniggering over my exposed derriere while I am face-down and catatonic? So I set foot on Soneva Kiri not with a modest amount of trepidation; I was bracing for full-blown allergy.
A little white Cessna had flown me for an hour from Bangkok to a speck in the Gulf of Siam, and a brief boat ride from the airstrip had brought me to the resort’s jetty. On setting foot, my shoes were promptly squirreled away into an unbleached cotton tote bearing the slogan: “No news, no shoes.” The morning already white-hot, the jetty planks felt like 99°C — until someone doused my feet with cold water from an adobe pitcher, then handed me some flip-flops. I felt like a student at a special school, one with an exceptionally low student-teacher ratio. I was quickly snowed under with words: Intelligent Luxury (caps not mine), Six Senses, SLOW food — Sustainable, Local, Organic, Wholesome. Was there going to be a test later?
The hands bearing timely cold water and flip-flops belonged to Chompoo, the round-the-clock Friday assigned to me for the duration of my stay. She whisked me off to my beach villa in an electric buggy and, after installing me, quietly withdrew. I skittered around the 4,000 sq ft villa — a visual symphony in untreated wood, bamboo and canvas—trying very hard not to feel like a mite, one that is about to break out into hives. Yes, there was a pillow menu. And a menu for drinking water treated in-house with semi-precious jewels. An outdoor shower, a semi-lidded shower and a sunken jacuzzi. Then I noticed that the villa’s wraparound infinity pool was not quite infinite enough. The tide was out, revealing a vast sand-flat shimmering in the heat. Reassured, I hailed Chompoo to cart me to lunch.
I sent back the gourmet sandwich and pizza menu and asked instead for something Thai. Chompoo, hovering in the background, instantly knew what I wanted with uncanny precision. One bite of the sea-bass Penang curry and my mouth broke out in wild applause. The sea-bass skin was crunchy, the interior juicy and the sauce remarkably bright. Turns out, the fish was local and the chillies and basil were from the resort’s herb garden. I ate slowly, prolonging the pleasure; a fan whirred above. The windless sea glistened. From a railing on the porch next to me, a gecko kept watch. It was medium-sized, a splotchy black, rather unremarkable. Then suddenly, it sprouted two bright orange-webbed fins from its neck. Before I could gather my slack jaw, it made a spectacular leap and landed on a tree over 20 feet away.
That night, I heard someone munching on the rafters. In the morning, I found a dusting of ant corpses on my duvet. It was as if Soneva Kiri had sensed my phobia and was trying to soothe me. It worked.
Koh Kood, the island I was on, has a resident population of about 2,000, mostly fisherfolk. After breakfast, I headed to one such fishing village: Ao Salat. The half-hour boat ride was partly in the open sea, past clutches of squid-fishing boats. Koh Kood is less than 50km from the Cambodian mainland. Strolling on the boardwalk at Ao Salat, I got a strong whiff of the distinctive scent that permeates the borders of economically disparate countries. It is an intriguing mix of angst and optimism, of what-if and can-do. The catch had come in early; it was now nearly noon. Some folks were sacked out in hammocks, some were repairing nets, some setting salted fish out to dry. The walls of their spotless wood-rattan-thatch homes were decorated with starfish, the entryways hung with exuberant ferns in coconut-husk planters.
With me was Khun Ann, the chef at Benz, Soneva Kiri’s Thai speciality restaurant. She paused at one of the homes off the boardwalk and peered into the water under the entryway plank. There were traps teeming with pu ma — horse crabs, large blue-green specimens. They all looked magnificent to me, but Khun Ann was picky. She had the vendor fish out a dozen and then rejected them all because the flesh felt too soft. By the time she had picked out a bagful to her satisfaction, the anticipation was killing me.
We gathered our catch and sped back. Close to the resort, the boat turned into the mouth of the Yai Ki river and went upstream past dense mangroves ringing with cicadas. Benz is a refurbished river-shack where I had a lovely multi-course meal. But the pu ma was unforgettable. Khun Ann had steamed the crabs and made a simple dip with garlic, cilantro roots, fish sauce and lemon juice. The crab flesh was juicy without being mushy, sweet laced with the briny sea. And the dip lit it afire.
Late that afternoon, heavy clouds gathered, portending much-needed rain. I would’ve gladly watched the show propped on a pillow, but I was due at the spa. I had managed to talk them down to doing just my back, focusing on my shoulders and neck, which had conveniently tightened up at the thought of being massaged.
My therapist was Thu, a moon-faced girl, who looked not a day above 15. When I told her this, she dissolved into a deep, “Thank you, kha!”, then a pause, then, “Really?” She was 28. Her first broad strokes were a revelation: her hands were simultaneously pillowy and firm. Over the next hour, my back would thank her hands many times. But what I carried away with me are the pauses. In between the rigorous phases, Thu’s fat, firm hands would pause on me, like an old, unhurried love. Outside, the rain drip-dripped from the higher palm fronds onto the lower.
Soneva Kiri was trickling into me like a tide into a vast flat bay. Not unlike the bay that I looked out on from my villa post dinner, studded with lights from the squid boats luring their catch. The rain had stopped. The distant licks of lightning marked where the system had moved to. The sky was once more a starry blanket on an island in the middle of nowhere. I was thinking about luxury, about how everyone must have a personal ideal of luxury. And how über-luxurious it would be to be presented that ideal without having to fully spell it out. I drifted off under a gauzy mosquito-net, with a single firefly marking time high in the rafters.
On my final morning, Chompoo and I drove through Kood island to a bay at its southern tip: Ao Phrao. The drive took us past rubber and coconut plantations, past a minuscule post-office, a school and a hospital, through rainforest, over dry stream-beds and waterfall chutes that hinted at the deluge to come in a month. Ao Phrao — Coconut Bay — is a spectacular beach overrun with coconut palms and flanked by a clutch of fishing huts. We took a foot-trail from Ao Phrao that rose gently into a cliff hugging the coast. There was an angry sun out, but we walked in the shade of tall ficus trees with dense fern undergrowth. On the cliff-side of the trail, there was moist vegetation, and on the other, gorgeous red boulders worn smooth by a turquoise sea. And then I heard it, a rhythmic hoot. It sounded like the warning call of a macaque. I was agog. There was a macaque, and it was warning another one about something. What? My hopes, however, were quickly dashed. The hoots were coming from Chompoo’s cellphone in her pocket.
The hike ended too soon. I turned a corner and there, lying fatly below me, was an immense half-moon beach of dazzling white: Ao Chak. Chompoo had gone ahead. By the time I walked down to the beach, she had laid out a picnic in the shade of a pair of squat palms. So there I was, beached on powdered sugar, a few feet from turquoise waters. Next to me on my rattan mat was a wicker hamper with my picnic parcelled into pretty banana-leaf boats: a salad of asparagus and Thai kale dressed with tamarind, beef and rice balls in lemongrass spears, pork satay and fruit.
I was struck by the design of this meal. The salad was crunchy and refreshing. Sliding off each hearty beef-rice ball, the smooth exterior of the lemongrass spear released the barest hint of the oils. The caramelised fragrance of the pork satay presaged its toothsome juiciness. As I ate, the crystalline tide inched towards me, scattering the crabs. Above me, the palm fronds murmured. This meal and its setting truly filled up all the five senses. And what about the sixth? That would probably be the warm glow spreading inside me like an oil spill. Because Chompoo had listened carefully to the things that I was not saying and put this together on her own. For me.
That’s luxury.