How a Small Thai Island Became a Global Destination for Wellness

I didn't just want a photo of the rainforest. I needed it.

Plunging valleys and roaring waterfalls cleave the thick emerald jungle jacketing Koh Samui, an island in the Gulf of Thailand between the equator and the Tropic of Cancer. Follow any moped inland for 15 minutes, and despite the decades of development since backpackers arrived by ferry and fishing boat in the 1970s, you'll still hit green.

This particular rainforest can be found at Banyan Tree Samui , a collection of 88 villas on a peninsula of sweet plumeria and coconut palms. I checked in to the resort's spa for the 150-minute Sukhothai Heritage experience: a stretch-focused Thai massage, coconut facial, and invigorating brown-rice-and-barley scrub that involved the therapist drenching my limbs in so much honey it felt like she was making baklava.

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Afterward I headed to the Rainforest, the spa's elaborate hydrotherapy circuit, for my appointed trek. It begins with the Rainwalk, a curving stone-and-bamboo passageway that —whooshissssss —simulates a monsoon and leads into an echoing bathhouse. There's a sauna, steam, Swiss and cold-bucket showers, an ice fountain, and finally, the 66-foot long "vitality pool," glowing winter-blue like an Icelandic lagoon. Before baptism, these mystical waters demanded a photo.

So I dashed backward through the Rainwalk, which thankfully remained dry, retrieved my phone, and started back. Whooshissssss! I bolted, slipped, and crash-landed on my butt. The universe laughed, but I got the shot.

Don't worry; this isn't a story about just another phone-addicted millennial. During my week on Samui, one of the best destinations in the world to appreciate both natural splendor and absurdly pampering hospitality, forced disconnection was an indulgence on par with the mango sticky rice I ate twice a day. Time passed, fluid as a river. Acupressure ran into spinal decompression into ayurvedic shirodhara into a dozen other treatments undertaken in service of the insatiable hydra we call wellness.

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Physical, spiritual, mental — lately it feels like wellness can mean anything. The eight Wellbeing Sanctuary villas are one way Banyan Tree interprets the concept, with yoga mats and resistance bands tucked under the TVs. When I returned from dinner at Saffron restaurant (punchy pomelo-and-crab salad, soulful massaman curry), I found housekeeping had transformed my nightstands into altars to sleep. Sandalwood incense smoldered, an essential-oil burner radiated eucalyptus, and a somnific hymn seeped from a speaker.

Charlotte, my wife, was already between the sheets of the Sealy Posturpedic. "Are you coming to bed?" she called. I was in the living room, transcribing notes about Banyan Tree's spa, which spilled into a stream of consciousness about wellness. Wellness can mean anything because wellness is personal, I typed. So let's get personal. Let's talk about Lisa.

October 15, 2008: Lisa, just wanted to thank you again for the opportunity to write for [redacted]. It's an amazing opportunity for my career and the start of a relationship I hope will be mutually advantageous.

"Avoid left butt cheek," I scribbled on the intake form at Tamarind Springs Forest Spa , the first day spa to open on Samui.

Much has changed in Thailand since Tamarind Springs' 1998 debut, but the country remains an excellent value. Take, for instance, the spa's Forest Dreaming package: 90 minutes of serious deep-tissue work, 60 of nuanced foot reflexology, lunch, and an additional hour of "Steam & Dream," during which I explored the six-acre property's ecosystem of herbal steam caves, grottoes, and rock plunge pools, all for $199.

Getting massaged for nearly the duration of Titanic, the mind wanders. In a dark cabinet, mine found Lisa. We met on a press trip 16 years ago. I was a 23-year-old writer, as thirsty to break into national print as the exclamation points in my emails of the era. Lisa (not her real name), a features editor with big worldly aunt energy, was receptive to pitches for her legacy magazine, so I sold her on a story about Thailand, where I was headed that winter. The day before I flew to Bangkok, Lisa sent, and I signed, a contract for my first real travel feature.

Her face materialized as my therapist twisted my hips into a yoga pose with the low pop of a cold bottle of Coke. Go away, Lisa. To chase her out, I cycled through mental snapshots of Tamarind Springs. There was the fountain pond the color of a filthy martini. The exfoliating scrubs, house-made with tamarind, ginger, coffee, and sesame, displayed over ice by the steam room. Since I had had to surrender my phone, my number one note-taking tool, at reception, I tried engraving these details into my memory. But I was already forgetting too much, and stress pinged like a pebble against a windshield.

As I said, this isn't that phone-addicted millennial story you've read before. This is a self-employed, recession-forged, success-addicted millennial story. Despite a mercurial media landscape, threatened by VC, AI, and an entire alphabet of nefarious acronyms, I'm privileged to be doing the job I've wanted since I was old enough to know the difference between Georgia, the state, and Georgia, the country. It's wonderful and scary. Because sometimes it feels like I'm just one missed reference photo of a vitality pool away from it all vanishing. It feels that way because it happened before, and it happened in Thailand.

October 29, 2009: Hey Lisa.... Hope you are well! Attached is a Thailand revision, trimmed to the requested 1,500 words. Look forward to your thoughts.

Generally, I think about Lisa every few months. When a promising pitch languishes, when a beloved editor gets jettisoned from a masthead, I'll find her there, stalking the periphery of my consciousness, a killer in Lilly Pulitzer. Being back in Thailand, I thought about her every day, and wondered if weed would dispel the intrusion.

Two years ago, Thailand became the first country in Asia to decriminalize marijuana. While the government is aiming to roll back this policy because of poor regulation and an alleged increase in crime, the business plans of HighLife, Smoky, and the other café-dispensaries dotting the 20-minute drive from Banyan Tree to my next stop, Anantara Lawana Koh Samui Resort , represented a collective shrug emoji.

A long koi pond runs through the garden that leads to Anantara's lobby, where the staff whisked me over to the spa for a 90-minute Cannabis Journey. The experience featured lavender and CBD oils pressed into my muscles with a cannabis-leaf compress. Afterward I sipped a floral potion of more lavender and cannabis leaves, chamomile, and rose, accompanied by the soothing white noise of a waterwall fountain.

I wasn't high, but I sure felt relaxed during the hour-long chauffeured ride to my next overnight, the Conrad Koh Samui , at Samui's remote southwestern point. Clouds had gathered en route, turning the ridge-backed granite isles scattered offshore into slate silhouettes. I studied them from the sapphire-tiled pool running the length of my villa. They looked like ancient dragons, half-submerged in the aquamarine sea.

After a swim, I visited the resort's café, Botanikka, a raw cement space furnished with promiscuous houseplants and weathered leather armchairs where "tailors" (a.k.a. baristas) roast robust Chiang Rai beans. I sipped an iced ristretto with coconut-milk foam laced with spicy, tangy tom yum syrup while viewing the works of four Thai women artists at Silapa, the year-old boutique and gallery next door. These two spaces, along with Jahn, the cosmopolitan steak house, give the Conrad a surprisingly urbane vibe. When nightfall blots out the water views, you could be in Bangkok.

At Silapa, I froze in front of Fear, Aksorn "Khing" Khumchaem's print of a puffer fish. She'd drawn the creature in its threatened state, inflated with porcupine bristles standing out against a backdrop as obsidian and absolute as the deep sea. In the caption of a 2022 Instagram post of the print, Khumchaem wondered what all creatives wonder at one time or another: "Will I make it?"

January 10, 2010: Hey Lisa Happy 2010! It's crazy to think that this time last year I was on a beach in Koh Samui.... Time flies! Just wanted to check in to see if you knew when the story might run.

Dirt trails weave through the papaya and tamarind trees of the Conrad's Iris Farm. Lemongrass sprouts from discarded tires, and delicate microgreens shelter under plastic tarps. Goats, chickens, ducks, quail, two piglets, a golden Lab named Kiki, and a Thai mutt, Coco, all live there, shepherded by Payap "Pong" Khunkayan, the bellhop farmer of Koh Samui. I found him sitting by a buzzing fan, beneath a framed photo of Thong, his dearly departed goat.

Khunkayan grew up on his family's durian orchard, but he's always had a close connection with animals like Thong, who he bottle-nursed after his mother rejected him. Khunkayan came to Samui a decade ago to expand the fruit business and, when that didn't pan out, started working at the Conrad as a bellman. When the resort's former GM decided to establish an on-site farm in 2019, Khunkayan was the natural fit to run it.

In five years, Iris Farm has grown significantly, enriching both the land and the guest experience. Khunkayan sees it as integral to Conrad's overall wellness proposition. Being in nature and interacting with the animals benefits mental health, while the ingredients produced there benefit physical health. The latter appear not only at the resort's excellent restaurants — Iris supplies about 70 percent of all ingredients consumed on property — but also at the immaculate spa, where I arrived at a workshop on herbal compresses to find a Thai still life of stippled makrut limes and leaves, galangal, ginger, tamarind leaves, lemongrass, and turmeric.

I pounded them into an aromatic mash that I gathered in muslin and tied with twine. After the workshop, I presented this lopsided compress to my therapist for her to use during my massage. Smiling politely, she set it aside and began scrubbing my heels with green pandan-leaf salt. Next, she looped a threadlike bracelet around my wrist, murmured a Thai blessing, then in English told me to make a wish and cut the bracelet off in three days. Go away, Lisa.

November 17, 2010: Hey Lisa, I feel like all my emails to you are titled "Thailand" :-) How are things? I'm just checking in.

After untangling my abdominal meridian lines through pressure-point manipulation, Thitivorada "Pop" Terananont placed rolled washcloths on my stomach in a ring, smeared the inside with a golden paste of turmeric, galangal, and other pungent rhizomes, draped a wet washcloth over it, then doused the rag with a 70 percent alcohol solution. "Are you ready?" she asked, less to me than to the cherry-red lighter gun she held up. It answered with a definitive click and she set the towel on fire.

Lanna samunphrai ron, the Thai name for this abdominal brûlée, is an ancient prescription to improve digestion and lower back pain and is part of a program at the renowned wellness retreat Kamalaya Koh Samui . The fire hovering over the patient, safely separated from the skin by the protective buffer of damp towels, warms the therapeutic pesto beneath. This stimulates the body's wind element, which Terananont said would rebalance my energies and reboot my gut. "How are your stools, typically?" she asked.

By the time I descended from my treatment hut, one of 50 scattered along a vertiginous hillside, late afternoon had draped a cool veil over the island. Doors opened into dark steam chambers, and small round soaking pools glowed like moonstones on my way down to dinner, where Charlotte and I reunited at Soma, the peaceful open-air restaurant. A fellow guest chatted with us at the host stand. "You just missed us at the communal dinner table," she said. (About 60 percent of Kamalaya's guests come solo, so the restaurant holds a table for social singles to swap biometrics over lobster salad with smoked mango.) "I just had acupuncture and am so. Blissed. Out," she added.

"That's what you're here for," Charlotte replied, clueless that our fellow guest was Parker Posey, who'd been in Thailand filming the third season of The White Lotus.

"That's what I'm here for," Posey echoed.

Ignoring Kamalaya's no-phones-in-the-restaurants rule, I furiously transcribed the conversation into my Notes app.

February 1, 2011: Hey Lisa, Happy New Year! Just checking in as I know there have been some changes at [redacted]. Any idea if/when it's running? Thanks!

You probably won't be surprised to learn that Lisa never published my Thailand story. Kate Upton, my empathetic Kamalaya naturopath, was surprised, but to be fair, she was expecting a consultation regarding my sleep schedule and BMI, not Lisa's last words to me: "If you ever want to write for us again, I would not recommend pushing the issue."

I don't know when Lisa left or was made to leave [redacted]; last I heard she was teaching screenwriting workshops, bless her heart. I did write for [redacted] again, a decade later, under a different editor, one of the many excellent people I'm lucky to work with at many excellent publications. Me at 23 would be thrilled to know where me at 40 is. I've won. "So," Upton said, "what does this bring up?" Why can't I let Lisa go?

There is a concept in Buddhism called upadana, or clinging, where we attach ourselves to material objects or intractable beliefs. Like the idea that maybe the story I wrote for Lisa sucked. Like the idea that this Thailand story is a karmic do-over.

The first step to eliminating clinging is to recognize these unhealthy attachments; then you release them through meditation. Kamalaya has just the space for that: Arjan Cave, a sacred hollow once inhabited by monks. I found Charlotte there, seated in the lotus position, facing a candlelit altar. Amber light reflected off her face. Incense twisted toward the granite ceiling. She didn't need to tell me she was saying a prayer for her dad, who died in 2022.

How does a professional disappointment compare to the death of a loved one? Trauma is all relative, but nonetheless, that moment made Lisa seem small, and banished her back to the basement like the Babadook.

If only it could have done the same for my compulsion to record. I slid my phone out of my robe and took a photo, which was, in retrospect, a violation of this holy place. But I wasn't thinking about that. I was thinking about the job I was in Samui to do, about the precise shade of blue of Banyan's vitality pool, about my chance encounter with Parker Posey, about all the details that would breathe life into this story — which is to say, thinking about myself. I didn't need a photo of Arjan Cave. I wanted it.

I'm working on not wanting so much.

Weeks later, I pulled up the photo and noticed three green orbs hovering above Charlotte's head. Was it something? Was it nothing? Like wellness, it was whatever we wanted it to be.

June 21, 2024: Dear Lisa, I don't know if you remember me...

Would she apologize? Would she tell me to GTFO? Would she even remember me?

Severing my Conrad prayer bracelet was like severing a psychic connection to Lisa. I've let her out in little doses to write this, and she's not bothering me anymore. I think I've thought her to death. But a final email.... That could be good. That could be closure. Narratively, that could be the perfect button on this story.

I never sent the email, because you know what, this story is good the way it is. So am I.