Sukorn Island is one of the favorite places we like to bike.  It’s only 60 km (36 miles) to the pier where we can chain-gang-load all our gear and bikes onto a long-tail boat and take a 30-minute passage to one to Thailand’s southernmost islands in the Andeman Sea.  It takes a couple of boats to get riders, bicycles and gear across and then we load the dunnage on a three-wheeled cart for the short trip to our destination on the island, while we tag along on our bikes.  In the past trips to Sukorn we’ve not had our traveling chef and provisioner, Go Cho, so we’ve supped on the local fare.  But Cho, who has one of our favorite restaurant in Trang, goes all out on these trips bringing the kitchen to the camp, not to mention all the things we might tote along on a raft trip, like pots and pans, utensils, condiments and wash up supplies.  Of course he can’t go anywhere without a 4-liter rice cooker, 3-liter electric kettle and a blender, a couple of 25-meter extension cords, fans and power strips for charging devices. He has at least 8 courses of foods and seafood is his passion, so this trip we had two sizes of shrimp (lunch and breakfast sized – 2″) and dinner sized (4-5″), plus a large crab for everyone, grouper, squid, octopus, sea bass and a number of other unidentifiable sea creatures.

Lunch, dinner and breakfast is the standard menu with snacks for the ride over and back, two 20-liter water bottles and a 100-liter cooler full of ice cubes for cold drinks, chilling the fresh foods and beer.  All that can be said is that no one goes hungry, left-overs are recycled for the next meal and I can’t believe how much Thai’s can put away.  I can do one and a half, maybe two full servings, and these men and women, go two and three times plus grazing on the tastiest items after they’ve put down their spoons.

Triptych of our lunch

GOPRO photo of island cement road

Sukorn Island doesn’t allow vehicles (only construction trucks and cement mixers) so cycling is ideal.  All supplies and materials are “carted” around on 3-wheeled scooters (basically a scooter with a one-wheel side car).  Since we last visited Sukorn they improved a number of crumbling roads with double-wide cement roads so it’s even better.  All minor pathways are meter-wide cement paths such that two scooters can pass traveling thru the fields and rubber tree plantations.  Besides fishing the main products coming from the island are rubber, rice, watermelons, and beef.

One other product is Batik cloth: we only know of one artist whose studio is a high road-side table on the less populated windward side of the island. Fortunately she’s there every time we visit and after purchasing a few items she happily gave us a demonstration of how she works the cloth.  I took several short videos which we hope to show back home.

A couple of things I haven’t photoed before:

A man cutting 40′ planks with a chainsaw.  Most likely to build or repair one of their long-tail inter-island boats.

And although watermelons are ubiquitous during the time we’re visiting Thailand, it’s very rare to ever see a watermelon patch.  My Belgian friend, Rik, spent several years looking for one on all his weekly scooter excursions.  We found several on Sukorn, and even sampled some of the fruit left in the field as unsuitable for sale. These melons are said to be extra sweet because they are so close to the ocean and the ground water used to water them is slightly different.  Our group only took 30 melons home with them on the boat.