Marking halfway through the T.I.C.D.

Come hell or high water, this 100% human-generated mega-tour of Thailand's islands and shorelines will be completed.

Thank you for reading Thai Island Quest, written with love (of the islands).

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It started with a list.

In mid 2019, I sat down in Bangkok and began compiling several years’ worth of Thai island research into a list. At first, it only included islands that I had visited. Then I added islands that I’d laid eyes on or could recall off the top of my head. From there — and yes, there is a definite “took on a life of its own” theme brewing here — the list kept expanding as I catalogued and visited more and more islands.

In late 2022 I announced, without much forethought, that this project was going public and that I would add mainland coastal areas along with the islands, in what is now called the Thai Island & Coastal Directory. That widened things to include Thailand’s nearly 3,000 km of seacoast, as well as notable inland reaches, such as river towns and jungle areas located near the coasts.

All of that, on top of an island tally that I believe, even back in 2019, was more complete than anything beyond the internal resources used by governmental agencies devoted to things like surveying and marine research. My list has more than 500 islands that are not found in Wikipedia’s accounting, including many that are also not — or at least not (correctly) identified — on Google Maps either.

So yeah, this is a big project.

A wee slice of an early draft of the project that eventually became the Thai Island & Coastal Directory, or T.I.C.D.

Transforming it from a mere list into something that is both useful and readable demanded the creation of considerable prose to introduce, more deeply inform, add myriad details, and explain how all of it fits into various contexts, such as provinces and districts, national parks and archipelagos, conservation programs and tourism popularity. The goal: to enrich your travels and knowledge about a wonderful part of the world that I’ve been lucky to have explored and researched obsessively, both on my own and as a Travelfish staff writer from 2012-19.

And I’m doing this 100% independently, with no sponsors or publishers or even affiliate links aimed at combing cash out of readers via the booking sites. This project is funded entirely through reader subscriptions and what I can earn from freelance writing and delivery driving on the side. If you were wondering why I’ve been posting all T.I.C.D. sections in the second half of the month, it’s because I need to do enough other work during the first half to keep this ship sailing.

I believe that a project like this, especially given the bootstrapping way I’m doing it, is extra valuable in a time when media content churned out by dodgy generative-AI and plagiarism mills is not only being enabled, but often favored by search-engine and social-media empires. Things are looking mighty worrying as the work of countless writers, journalists, researchers, translators, photographers and artists is increasingly being pillaged and regurgitated for raw monetization.

There is a reason why I only use hand-drawn maps for each chapter intro, and it is definitely not that I’m good at drawing (lol). It’s simply a way to show you that the T.I.C.D is the work of a passionate human, doing inherently human things like talking to locals, reading up for background, and actually going to places (as many as I can!) rather than repackaging whatever info was already on the web.

Trang. Not an AI-driven tuk tuk.

So it is with human excitement that I mark the rough halfway point of the T.I.C.D., with 30 sections finished and about 30 more to go. We’ve already covered 379 islands, and that figure is about to skyrocket as we enter the Central Andaman, the most island-rich of all seven of the coastal zones that I’ve laid out for the purposes of this project. We’ve also covered 145 mainland coastal areas, rattling off many obscure beaches to consider between all of those islands.

Getting this far has been a slog at times. I wildly underestimated how long it would take to complete the project at the outset — a bad habit of mine. Writing a chapter intro, for example, firstly entails creating the hand-drawn map and winnowing down photo selections out of thousands. That alone takes days, before all of the writing, selecting, editing and fact-checking even begins.

But this is a labor of love, the antithesis of AI-generated drivel. I hope you’re enjoying it, or at least finding it useful or interesting. Many thanks to paying subscribers; I really appreciate the support. Subscription renewals are coming up for some of my earliest subscribers (from the Thai Island Times days) and I do hope you stick around. The T.I.C.D. would not be possible without you.

And if you’re a free subscriber who is perhaps on the fence about upgrading, I would love to have you aboard. It’s only $5 USD per month (or $50 annually), and, in addition to granting you access to the motherlode of Thai islands (and mainland coastal areas!) via the T.I.C.D., it makes you a crucial part of this genuinely unique and independent endeavor in travel writing. It also bags you access to dozens of in-depth articles that are not part of the T.I.C.D. project; you can always browse and access all of them over on the Thai Island Quest welcome page.

Now would be a terrific time to upgrade, with some of Thailand’s most glorious islands and coastal areas set to hit inboxes over the next couple of months, after which I’m planning to return to the kingdom permanently and keep on writing. Why? For the love of the islands, of course.

Cheers,

David Luekens

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Thank you for reading Thai Island Quest, an independent e-newsletter sharing the beauty, challenges and distinctive identities of Thailand’s islands and shorelines.