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All Fools - The Cannibal Island.

There was an island once. A beautiful tropical paradise island. Swaying palms, white sand beaches, tropical rain-forest covered mountains. Then the island ate itself. It was no April Fools Day joke.

I am still on Koh Samui - a ship of fools in The Gulf of Thailand. The island did not really eat itself. It's residents ate the island; they ate each other, they have destroyed a large part of their own future in a ravenous orgy of greed and lust for money and perceived power.

When I say "residents", I speak not of the Farangs here (westerners) nor of the Thai people that have come here from all over Thailand to find a life of peace and quiet. I speak of the Samui residents, those Thai that were born here. A completely different type of Thai.

20 years ago Samui was a fishing village. A few intrepid travelers came here from elsewhere and stayed in small bamboo & thatch huts on the beach. Then 15 years ago the backpackers started arriving in numbers. The residents of Samui saw what a great chance for earning a buck was coming their way. But the greed got to them. The lust for fast & easy money burnt out what little sensibility they may have had.

Samui sprang up fast, but five powerful families on the island held firmly to the strings controlling the puppet police force and local government. Both "government" bodies are not fully controlled by the Thai Government in Bangkok. They have a façade of being part of the Thai Government - but these government departments on Samui are mainly controlled by these powerful local families who exert such strong influence throughout via family ties.

You can go to Lami or Chaweng beach now and see the results of years of greed. Massive development - no planning. The roadworks have gone on for years with the money for same coming down from Bangkok's Government and large percentages of the money going directly to family pockets. You can barely drive a car though Chaweng now. Million dollar-plus luxury resorts back onto a mule-track.

Raw sewage seeps into the back lake behind Chaweng. The money that was given to the Samui provincial government to develop a sewage treatment plant went 100% to family pockets and a few holes were dug in the dirt with a pipe or two sticking out for good looks.

As the Asian economies die back, now is the time that Samui should be ensuring an ongoing business in tourism and a positive & sustainable development policy. Instead of that we have corruption and rampant development with no infrastructure planning whatsoever.

This is Samui. Amazing Samui. Samui people are different. The descendants of the straits pirates, they are both arrogant and ignorant. Obsessed with power and money. Their greed is gradually destroying Samui. Land is developed and sold off to resorts without any planning or environmental considerations. Permits are gained by bribe. Money for much needed road works is bled off to the extent that no road contract can ever be finished. Half-done jobs are the order of the day on Samui.

It is impossible to hire staff here. The Samui people will not work, especially not for a Farang running a restaurant/bar-come-construction-design-&-Internet domain host/design business. You have to hire down from Bangkok.

The police constantly hang out in Nathon Town with their hands out for money. "Hey you! No helmet! 200 baht please" - straight in the back pocket, right out in the open, no need to hide police corruption on Samui as the whole place is bent and twisted.

Even the immigration department down here who control all the papers that allow a Farang to live here, well they are bent as well. Used to be able to buy a work permit there for 20,000 baht. The Bangkok Government busted them for that though. One official got transferred. Now it costs 50,000 baht to "buy" a permit. It is just as easy now to fix it up legally - register a company and set up a real business. That costs about 75,000 baht by the time you are finished. And it's legal.

Right now on Samui the police need more money. So they are trying to push the price of marijuana up. Some of the police supply dope to some of the main dealers on the island. A couple of weeks ago the police went to most of these dealers and said "give me the names of five customers or we send you to jail". The dealers having little choice handed over this information and the police set about busting everybody. Over 50 arrests in one month - and most of these resulting in the arrested person handing over between 20,000 to 100,000 baht to get out of the shit.

Then the cops put the wholesale price up to the dealers on the grounds that "it is getting dangerous now". They make the danger then cash in on it. This is typical Samui style.

The only chance for a future for Samui is in tourism. The only chance for tourism to really succeed, to really boom is for proper and honest planning to be undertaken. There are a few outsiders, Farangs and Thais, who are slowly trying to change the status quo here. I am one of them and it is a touchy job - very easy to offend a local Samui Thai. Offending a Samui Thai can and often does end with a bullet in your head. Two personal acquaintances of mine here have already suffered this fate. One Thai, one Farang, both dead.

I am involved in planning and development of many of the hotel and resorts on the island. I do a lot of the AutoCAD work and take care of a lot of the Internet advertising for real estate developers and resorts here.

Those of us slowly working for a real future for Samui are trying to inject an idea of planning for the future to make even more money into their tiny little minds. We see slow progress - but it IS progress and we push on.

Dinners with local government dudes, meetings with millionaire hotel developers, lunches with the provincial road works boys. Slowly trying to make them all see that with proper planning and cooperation they will make even more money. With no planning they will cease to exist. They do understand this but the habits of generations die slowly and the corruption is so widely spread from the bottom to the top.

Samui people don't care if they cannibalize themselves and their island. But some other people do care and these other people are slowly winning the war.

Samui has a future - as long as the Samui Thais don't have too much to do with it.