Thai holiday island Koh Samui’s fresh water shortage is blamed on ‘rapid development’, but it is a 30-year-old problem
- The Thai holiday island of Koh Samui is facing a shortage of fresh water, blamed on increased tourist demand, but this was already a problem in the mid-1990s
- Meanwhile, a tourism ad campaign for the Philippines featuring photos from other countries has left the island nation embarrassed
“Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.”
It seems unlikely The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is well known in Koh Samui but the 1798 poem’s most famous (and most incorrectly quoted) line is apt.
Surrounded by the azure waters of the Gulf of Thailand, 75km (47 miles) from the Thai mainland, the holiday island (permanent population: more than 70,000) “is facing a shortage of fresh water due to a lack of rainfall and increased demand”, reports the Bangkok Post.
With public and private reservoirs drying up, the island “only has enough local freshwater supplies for just 30 days”. And that was 14 days ago!
With this year’s El Nino weather system likely to reduce rainfall even more than usual and the high tourism season just about to kick in, the situation is likely to worsen, with those least able to pay the increasing bills for supplies now being piped in from Surat Thani, on the mainland, expected to suffer the most.
Samui welcomed a million tourists in the first five months of this year, reports the Bangkok Post, and, perhaps wary of turning off that particular tap, the Thai newspaper gives few further details other than to say that the lack of water on the island has raised costs for tourism businesses, too, and that “any time water does not flow from the tap, [residents] must pay 250 [US$7] to 300 baht for about 2,000 litres (440) of water for daily use”.
Popular Thai island Koh Samui has reinvented itself – here’s what is new
Britain’s The Guardian newspaper paints a starker picture: “Jutharath, who works in a massage parlour in the Bo Phut area […] said that for the past three months, taps had worked only one or two days a week. ‘There was a time when it was gone, no water coming out at all for the whole week,’ she said.”
Jutharath has been buying water from pickup trucks.
Instead of benefiting from the post-pandemic resurgence in tourist arrivals, businesses are having to use their profits to buy water, says the Tourism Association of Koh Samui.
Poor planning is to blame, according to Dr Kannapa Pongponrat Chieochan, an assistant professor at Thammasat University who has researched water-saving initiatives in Koh Samui.
Kannapa told The Guardian that, “Infrastructure had struggled to keep up with the size of the population on the island, which had grown substantially as people moved from across Thailand to work in its growing tourism industry”. She pointed a finger at “a rapid development of resorts, hotels, golf courses and spas”.
But how rapid is “rapid”? It’s not as though this problem hasn’t been decades in the making.
“The drought-stricken resort island of Samui is on the verge of running out of water,” reported news agency Agence France-Presse in July 2002. “Last week the island’s above-ground water sources came close to drying up, and the waterworks was opening up its pipes for just half an hour a day.
“Now, private reservoirs are also running dry.”
In 2001, 837,000 international tourists arrived on the holiday island.
That 2002 report quoted the managing director of Samui’s Coral Bay Resort, Doris Chiatanasen, as saying: “We’ve been buying water for months because public water has not been flowing since February. It’s been on and off.” The report also referenced a 1995 study that had concluded water shortages would be a big obstacle for the growth of tourism on the island.
Leafing back through the archives to 1995, we found a South China Morning Post news report that states: “The Thai government may bring in tough restrictions on development on the popular tourist island of Ko Samui.
“The Tourism Authority of Thailand has dusted off a study the Thailand Institute of Scientific and Technological Research did on Samui a few years ago.
Popular Thai island Koh Samui has reinvented itself – here’s what is new
“At the time there were already 8,000 hotel rooms and island residents were complaining about water shortages, and the study proposed improved infrastructure. But tourism to Samui continued to boom, and there are now 9,000 rooms.”
Twenty-eight years later and there are now 25,000 rooms available for rent on Samui. The tourists are still flooding in but we suspect we haven’t heard the last of the island’s water woes.
There passed a weary time. Each throat
Was parched, and glazed each eye
A weary time! a weary time!
How glazed each weary eye.
02:04
Philippine tourism advert shows stock footage of Brazil, Indonesia and other countries
Philippines red-faced after fake tourism campaign
Visit the Philippines and experience the best of … errrr … Indonesia, Switzerland, Brazil and the United Arab Emirates.
That appeared to be the message from advertising agency DDB Group Philippines, which had been commissioned by the country’s Department of Tourism to produce a video to accompany the new “Love the Philippines” tourism campaign.
It took an eagle-eyed blogger, Sass Sasot, to notice that not all of the shots used by DDB in the promo video were of places actually in the Philippines. Oops!
DDB has “publicly apologised, taken full responsibility, and admitted in no uncertain terms that non-original materials were used”, according to the tourism department. Not that that was enough to save the ad agency from getting the sack.
Visit US hotspots to avoid the crowds
This week’s winner of the Cheap Holidays in Other People’s Misery Award (all credit to the Sex Pistols’ Holidays in the Sun for that one) is Laura Motta, senior director of content at Lonely Planet, who was asked on an ABC News Live television show where disorganised Americans should consider for a last-minute summer holiday.
Motta suggested bucking the trend and avoiding the crowds by visiting cities (such as Phoenix and New Orleans) that “are having really hot weather, to the point where it makes you not want to go there” and recommended seeking out “an area that has a lot of a/c”.
And that delivered in the same week the planet experienced the hottest days ever recorded and Flightradar24 tracked its busiest ever day for commercial aviation (134,386 flights were logged on July 6), occurrences that are not unconnected.
