Bang Bao Resolution Resort: Koh Chang's Tropical Paradise

Bang Bao Resolution Resort, located on Koh Chang's southern tip offers fewer tourists and a smarter more tranquil experience.

by Jack Corbett

Click on the picture to watch the video

It was here that we found a true gem in the rough, the Resolution Resort. I call Resolution Resort a gem in the rough for a number of reasons. First, it's so unexpectedly good. Although it has garnered good reviews at agoda.com, they still aren't top notch. As you read further on, you will find out why, but for now suffice it to say, Resolution Resort deserves to be put in the top tier. The problem seems that it takes so long to get to Resolution Resort and the roads are so challenging. Above all, Bang Bao isn't White Sands Beach with its long coastline and multitude of restaurants and bars. Thank God.

Let me tell you how bad it was getting there that first night. I had it all so well planned. My girlfriend and I were going to avoid Songkran in Pattaya which extends for ten miserable days and nights by traveling to Koh Chang where we could lie around the beach all day long avoiding all the rift raft. Playing James Bond I did a little intelligence work before starting what I thought would be just a four or five hour journey. This would be a good medium length jaunt to test out the new Honda Civic, I thought. But I'd have to beat Songkran, which has become the stupidest holiday invented by mankind. Now Songkran might have started out as a good idea but it's developed into a terrible monster, and that's why I was about to spend over five hundred dollars staying in hotels for eight nights when I already live in a condo on Wongamat Beach near Pattaya

Sonkran's the Thai way of celebrating the Thai New Year. The idea is to sprinkle a little water on everyone around. But thanks to the worse kind of Westerners to ever set foot in Thailand, it has become a war to see who can get everyone else the wettest.

Come to Pattaya on the last day of Songkran and you won't be able to move in traffic. Even on a motorcycle. The main roads in the central part of the city are log jammed with thousands of pickup trucks filled with urban guerrillas armed with high powered squirt guns or small plastic tubs used to subject anyone who ventures too close with a complete drenching. Each pickup truck carries what appears to be a 55 gallon drum of water. It is one continuous parade with the pickup trucks operating as wanna bee tanks and thousands of people accompanying them as the foot soldiers. The streets are lined with 55 gallon drums of water and thousands of people either squirting or throwing water on everything that moves.

The event is a magnet for the soccer hooligan English who view the whole thing as a license to commit mayhem with impunity. So they save their money and wait for months as they look forward to assaulting their neighbors. And believe me, water can be a deadly weapon. Hundreds of people die during the week of Songkran in Thailand on motorbikes and in motorbike related accidents alone. And the squirt guns used are oftentimes not ordinary squirt guns. They are high powered devices that are sometimes fueled from back packs. The water supplying some of them oftentimes is filled with ice or urine.

People, and here I mean, Thai and Westerner alike, revel in drenching the drivers and passengers on passing motorbikes. So one can imagine what happens to a motorbike driver's concentration as he's getting squirted with a high powered squirt gun in the face or having several people dumping tubs of water on him as he tries to drive through a mob of idiots who would love to see him have an accident.

I hate it. During Songkran imbecility rules. But thankfully, in most cities and towns Sonkran only goes on for two or at most three days. But not Pattaya which needs to be renamed Hooligan City for what has become nearly a two week sliver of complete chaos. So I asked a few Thais including people working in Koh Chang resorts if I'd be safe driving to Koh Chang on April 13th? I was told: "No problem." Thing is I should have learned by then that whenever a Thai says, "No problem," there's really a big problem there after all.Little did I realize that nearly everyone in Bangkok including all of the cities dogs and cats would be out in their cars and pickup trucks trying to escape all the madness too. And the 13th must have been the designated "Escape all the Madness Travel Day." It should have taken me less than four hours to drive to the ferry that takes people to the island from the mainland and back. Instead it took over seven hours. For one thing all along my route people were celebrating Songkran at different times of the month. By the time we drove to Rayong the traffic had gotten to be pretty miserable and there were actually people out in their pickups on the express highway dousing the cars all around them. At the traffic lights there were people darting around through the lines of traffic throwing water all over the vehicles trapped by the lights. And where there wasn't any traffic lights there were oftentimes policemen stopping traffic, who were not stopping the water throwers. It all started south of Rayong and it continued all the way up to where we actually got on the ferry. And that was just 700 meters from where we actually drove my car up onto the boat, a 700 meter line of cars it took two hours to get through.

I had not planned on arriving on Koh Chang Island after dark, but here I was, driving my car off the ferry after the sun had already come down. I think it's against the law to be celebrating Songkran after dark. But it sure didn't stop people from celebrating Songkran on Koh Chang. Actually there are signs ouf advertising a Songkran Holiday on Koh Chang on April 22nd-23rd, but here we were about to get drenched on April 13th. So we had to roll the windows up and that meant having to drive 24 kilometers up and down a twisty mountainous road having to look through darkened windows with a 60 % tint obscuring my vision. I'll just let some of these pictures speak for themselves.

To make matters worse, every so often there would be knots of people darting out into the middle of the main road throwing water on the windshields of cars that were already having a god-awfully tough time negotiating around some of the most impossibly narrow roads mankind ever created.

Going by the GPS we finally arrived at our destination--the Resolution Resort. The GPS said we were there but it was nowhere in sight. I finally had to park my car along a road that had gotten to be hardly more than a trail to get out and ask. My Thai is not very good but finally I got someone to point up this very steep hill at a light and tell me that our resort might be up there. Luckily, the person turned out to be right. There were some pretty big ruts in the road and once I actually bottomed out but then I started riding the crests of the ruts so everything turned out alright

Bang Bao is the place to stay on Koh Chang

Koh Chang map

I just hope not too many people are reading this though. I view White Sands Beach as a kind of sieve or filter that siphons off the Joe Average tourist from the discerning few. It's only a few kilometers from the ferry, and it's got this long beach that it calls White Sands Beach for some reason or another because the sand sure isn't that white. To be honest the beach is long and boring. Pattaya and Wongamat Beaches are a lot more interesting because they have Koh Larn island looming large in the middle of the horizon. And the beaches have several big twists and turns in it as Pattaya Beach merges into Wongamat Beach and continues on to the northern part of Naklua. But that's going North. Pattaya Beach does the same as it continues south onto Jomtien making at least one very abrupt turn. One thing Koh Chang's White Sands beach has going for it, however, is the water's relatively clean I suppose, not yet reaching Pattaya's pisswater pollution content although Koh Larn's waters are in a different league altogether. White Sands Beach is where most tourists go, however. It's even got its own beer bar center where you can go pick up bar girls. But that's good. Joe Average Tourist needs a place to go and I'm really happy he's not going to go where I'll be going

The sad fact is that people pollute and the more people you have in a given area the more people pollution you are going to have. Put enough people into one swimming pool and you are going to have one huge collection of grime, sweat and sun tan lotion going into all that pool water. And like it or not kids do shit and piss in swimming pools. It takes a lot of chorine to kill all the bacteria, and who knows how much cancer and how many skin diseases are caused by all that chlorine.

And as far as the ocean....the more people you have close to it the more plastic bags and other garbage are thrown out into the water or at least left out in the sand to be later picked up by the high tide. And i know you don't really want to dwell on it, but think about it....all that shitting that occurs in all the nearby hotels.....where does all that actually end up?

So let the human contaminators all stay up on White Sands Beach. I wish it well. I hope all the hotels up there continue to do well. I hope the bars continue to flourish and that the restaurants make their owners rich. Because I'm headin south and I don't want too many Joe Averages anywhere near me.

What most tourists never realize is all that good snorkeling and scuba diving that Koh Chang has to offer all happens in the south. There's a lot of terrific islands just south of Koh Chang and that's where all the dive andsnorkeling boats go. Two of the bigger islands are Koh Kood and Koh Maak, both of them large enough to have their own resorts, motor bike rental shops, etc. but there's a whole host of smaller islands that offer good snorkeling with underwatervisibilities ranging up to 60 feet. My way of thinking is this is where the best action takes place. And if you stay on Bang Bao you will only be a few minutes from the fishing village's main pier from where all the dive boats depart from. Stay at White Sands Beach and you are looking at a 40 minute taxi ride to the dive boats plus another hour on the water just getting to all that snorkeling and diving.

One of the great things about Koh Chang is that it's huge. I haven't said a thing about the Eastern portion of the island, but it does have some very scenic waterfalls. But it's undeveloped compared to the rest of the island. Bang Bao might be undeveloped compared to that whole stretch of the main road northwards, all the way to White Sands Beach, but the signs are already there that the area is getting discovered. The pier jutting out from the fishing village

has a lot more shops and restaurants than it did five years ago when I first visited Koh Chang. And there's more resorts in the area than I remember seeing back then, with new ones still undergoing construction.

Koh Chang does not have the magnificent karsts that Krabi has which spring out of both sea and land to form 90 degree limestone outcroppings that attract rock climbers from all over the world. What it does offer is a verdant landscape that goes from sea level up to 2500 vertical feet and there's a lot of it. The greenery is lush. It's a terrific place to go exploring on foot while offering a lot of room in which one can truly get away from it all. And if all that is not enough, there's all those islands to the South that are well worth visiting.

Resolution Resort Resolution Resort is only a fifteen to twenty minute walk to the Bang Bao Fishing Village's main pier. It is the last resort at the very southern tip of the island which makes it the most remote of the entire bunch. But if you want to go diving or snorkeling, its owners will arrange to have a baht taxi pick you up at the resort and then it's just a five or ten minute drive to the main pier. When you start to experience the great logistics of the area and how much extra time most of your fellow divers or snorkeling mates are having to spend just getting down to the pier, you will start to congratulate yourself for being the intelligent smooth operator you are for being able to foresee what all those other people missed out on.

Resolution Resort is a true getaway place to stay that I can recommend completely. We originally stayed here for 2 days but after our one night's fiasco with Koh Chang Kacha we called the owner to see if he had room for us for the next five nights. The ambience here is terrific as there are only 16 rooms altogether which means that one tends to meet many of the other guests at the swimming pool or at the restaurant. We found the owner and his wife here every night. Our cook was the owner's aunt, who looked after us like a mother hen. I found her to be an excellent cook and my Thai girlfriend who is a fine cook herself completely agreed. Breakfast's came free with the room. The scrambled eggs and bacon were excellent. At night we could have easily driven down to Bang Bao to join several of the other guests who often went to a restaurant down on the pier, but we never saw any reason to as we enjoyed the company of the owner and several of our fellow travelers and the food would have been hard to beat anyway. The scenery around the resort is sensational. It overlooks a beautiful lagoon and there are flowers and tall trees everywhere. It's quiet here and since there's only 16 rooms in the entire place the pool is never crowded. This pool is gorgeous with a view that's especially stunning when you are actually down in the water looking across the surface and across the lagoon. As the sun starts to go down, it's at its best, so be sure to check the video out to see what I mean.

But the number one feature of the pool is the owner does not use chorine. Instead he uses salt while employing a sophisticated system of electronic sensors that are hooked into a computer and various control devices to carefully monitor the exact amounts and timing of chlorine that is added to the water. Bottom line is, I was able to swim more than three lengths of the 20 meter long pool underwater with my eyes open and I never had a hint of red eye or burning. The pool shows that this owner cares deeply about the welfare of his guests and that he's willing to go the extra mile for their comfort and well being.

The resort has two kayaks for rent. But the first hour's free and I really think that had we taken our kayak out for an extra half hour or hour more that the owners would never have charged us the 150 baht that is their normal fee for the 2nd hour. Although the resort is secluded and quiet, Wi-Fi is available in each of the rooms and it's free. There's really nothing quite like relaxing like a Robinson Cruesoe in what seems to be in the middle of nowhere while getting his favorite newspapers on his laptop while enjoying a cup of coffee

There are getting to be more restaurants and shops in Southern Koh Chang than there were just a few years ago. And there's a few small hotels and resorts half hidden away underneath the tall palm trees that line much of Bang Bao that never were here before. I think that we will see a lot of change here over the next few years, but for now it's a terrific area to take walks hoping to see a monkey or two or something one has never seen before. There is no sand beach such as you have at White Sands, but if you are staying at Resolution Resort, you can always take out one of the kayaks to paddle over to the other side of Bang Bao Bay where there's an excellent beach. But the serenity of the place's beautiful surroundings along with the quiet and wonderful hospitality one gets from the owners makes getting off the beaten path an experience that should not be missed.