Nathon

Every time I caught the morning ferry from Nathon I arrived at the pier before four, which meant sitting at the town’s all-night noodle shop in the dark with the ferry workers and the truck drivers who were taking loads of produce back to Surat Thani. The noodle shop is on the main street directly facing the water, and it has the atmosphere of a place that does not care what it looks like because the food has been good enough for long enough that the proprietor has lost interest in the aesthetics. Bare fluorescent tubes, plastic stools, a clock on the wall that is wrong by thirty-seven minutes. I ate boat noodles there at four thirty in the morning twice and both times I wanted to stay in Nathon another week just to be able to go back.

Nathon is the administrative capital of Koh Samui, which in practical terms means it has a hospital, a post office, a bank that actually functions without tourist-rate charges, and a morning market where almost nobody is visiting from somewhere else. Most travellers pass through Nathon twice — arriving and departing — and experience it only as a transit point. This is one of the small tragedies of contemporary island tourism. The town is not photogenic and it does not try to be, and that refusal is in itself a kind of character. The shophouses along the main street are the same style as Bophut’s — two storeys, narrow frontages, wooden shutters — but here they have not been painted and polished; they carry their age in flaking ochre and green, which makes them look more honest.

The market starts before five and runs until about nine. The section dedicated to prepared food is the reason to be there: khao tom cooked in deep earthenware pots, salted egg with bitter melon, deep-fried dough strips with condensed milk poured from a can, moo ping on bamboo skewers charring over coconut shell charcoal. The vendors know each other and talk across the lanes. A man sells fresh coconuts from the back of a truck and uses a machete with the relaxed precision of someone who has made that same cut forty thousand times. Everything costs less than you expect.

I once spent an entire morning in Nathon without a plan, which is the correct way to spend a morning in Nathon. I walked the market, bought a bag of tamarind candy from a woman who seemed mildly suspicious of my interest, sat at a cafe that was also a hardware store drinking overly sweet instant coffee, walked the pier and watched the loading operation for the car ferry — a production of coordinated chaos that somehow results in all vehicles being aboard and the ramp raised in forty minutes — and then ate lunch at a place on the back street with a hand-lettered sign that said FOOD. The fish was local, the rice came in a clay pot, and the bill was the kind of number that makes you feel obscurely that you have stolen something.

There is a small temple at the south end of the main street with a courtyard full of old frangipani trees whose trunks have grown large enough to cast genuine shade. On weekday mornings, monks from the local wat walk their alms route through the market streets and the vendors prepare small offerings in advance — a scoop of rice, a banana, sometimes a packet of instant noodles — and the whole transaction happens in near silence, everyone moving with the efficiency of a ritual that needs no rehearsal because it has been repeated daily for generations.

When to go: Nathon functions in all weathers and all seasons. It is a working town, not a resort, and has no high season of its own. The market and the ferries run regardless of what the weather is doing. If you want to experience the town rather than pass through it, arrive on the night ferry and be at the noodle shop before the first light.