Now that we're over 1,000 islands...

A word about the process of writing a mega-guide to coastal Thailand.

We’ve topped 1,000 islands in the Thai Island & Coastal Directory (TICD). To be precise, the latest section on the Chumphon coast brought us to 1,020 total islands (or 816 if not including estuary islands) to go with 326 notable coastal areas. With that last section finishing off the Mid Southern Gulf, I’m about to dive into the final chapter of the book, on the Northern Andaman.

Heavy lifting in Nakhon Phanom.

Finally seeing emerald light at the end of the cave, I thought this would be a good time to look at the course of this project, talk a little about the process and explain, as best I can, why it’s taken so long to reach this point.

I would also like to apologize to paying subscribers for taking this long, and for my poor communication about that along the way.

When first announcing that I was undertaking this project, I had a bare-bones list of around 800 islands that I thought could be turned into a useful reference guide in relatively short order. I initially told subscribers that I could get the whole thing out in a few months — this was a big mistake considering that I hadn’t adequately planned the project out at that point. I know that some subscribers are annoyed by how the TICD has dragged on. I know that other are simply bored of it, and would like to see a return to the livelier types of writing that this newsletter was founded on.

But I really do appreciate those of you who have stuck it out, as well as those who have subscribed along the way. If it helps to make up for the extended timeline, I do still intend to give free copies of the ebook version of the TICD to all paying subscribers once it’s finished. (The ebook will take some additional work after the online version is done in the next couple of months).

Keep in mind that I am doing something which no one had ever done before: writing a truly comprehensive guide to ALL of coastal Thailand including every saltwater Thai island in existence (at least as far as I’m aware of after many years of researching and traveling all of coastal Thailand). Not to mention the hundreds of mainland coastal areas. My fateful decision to include those has been the biggest factor behind why this project has taken the better part of two years to finish.

With a few exceptions (hello Phang Nga Bay!), sections focusing mainly on islands — like the recent ones covering Mu Ko Chumphon and Mu Ko Ang Thong — are relatively straightforward to write. Because roughly half of the book covers mainland coastal areas, I reckon that keeping this project only (or primarily) to the islands would have resulted in a six to ten month turnaround. Longer than I’d expected at the beginning, but not nearly as long as this project has actually taken.

The most recent page of my original TICD ticker. After finishing a section I count up all the islands here before relaying the updated numbers to you.

It’s not only that sections on mainland coastal areas doubled the size of the book, but also that they take a lot more time to put together. In addition to presenting much larger landmasses than the islands, boiling down the mainland parts of all 24 coastal provinces has required an awful lot of thought and micro decisions about exactly what to include, and how to best arrange and compile it. With the islands, I know from the start of each section that every one of them will be included, but arranging mainland coastal areas into digestible entries and sections has been a far more tedious task — indeed one that I underestimated.

For example, do I place Hat Thung Wua Laen in the same entry as Ao Bo Mao, or put it together with Pak Nam Chumphon, or present it as a stand-alone entry? Do I cover an entire district — or multiple districts — as a stand-alone entry, as I’ve done for Don Sak and the Sathing Phra Isthmus? Or do I divvy districts up into several different entries, as Pathio was sliced down into separate entries for Ao Thung Maha, Map Ammarit and others? And for areas set away from the coasts, like Khao Luang, how selective should I be when deciding which ones to include?

I’m a tad embarrassed to admit how much time and thought I’ve put into deciding what to do about these types of distinctions when writing sections on the mainland coastal areas. But look, the goal has always been to break down all of coastal Thailand in ways that are very comprehensive while also making intuitive sense so that the content is useful to travelers on the ground.

I promised the most complete guide to Thailand’s islands and coastal areas ever written in English, and without question, an enormous amount of thought, consideration and trial-and-error have gone into this project. All of that comes on top of the actual writing, photo selecting, map drawing, researching, fact checking and typically a few rounds of editing per section. Every place that I’d ever want to consider visiting anywhere in coastal Thailand is in the book.

The average word count of the 57 sections published so far is 2,150, but the particular format of the TICD makes a 2,000-word section take much longer to produce than a regular 2,000-word travel article. (And regardless, 2,000 words is on the long side for any article or post.) Completing a section can take me a few days of solid work, and the mainland sections tend to leave me more drained afterwards than any other types of writing I’ve ever done, other than dense academic papers.

And this is the ‘back page’ of the TICD ticker where I tally all the mainland coastal areas as they’re published. Covering these in the same format as the islands is a big part of why this project is taking so long to finish.

With all of that said, I cannot deny that procrastination has also been a factor. After finishing some of the more demanding parts of the book, such as the three sections devoted to the Songkhla Lake region, I hit a wall and took more time than I should have before returning to the writing process. There is always a distraction, be it Twitter (and now Bluesky!), or my beloved Celtics winning an NBA championship, or a high-stakes presidential election, or anxiously watching A.I. slop replace real human writing. Not to mention, those poor dugongs!

But the more time-consuming distractions are ones I could not have avoided. The bulk of my income over the past few years has come from delivery driving in Western Massachusetts between stints of time in Thailand — that’s the sacrifice I’ve made in order to see the TICD through and still make ends meet. I’ve also done some freelance writing and consulting while trying to keep up with frequent requests from people I know (or not) for unpaid trip planning assistance.

I also help out my wife Chin, whose Chili Paste Tour company is busy again. Earlier this year, after a decade of living in a small condo on Bangkok’s western fringe, the two of us poured loads of time and effort into fixing up and moving into a 100-year-old wooden house that we’re renting west of the Chao Phraya. I’ve also had some illnesses, a minor surgery, a new job undertaking that didn’t work out as planned. You know, all of those unexpected things that life throws at us.

In sum, although I feel really bad about initially making promises that I couldn’t keep regarding the timeline of this project and the volume of sections per month, I’m happy with how the finished product is shaping up. I do hope you find value in it. I’ve been bootstrapping this from the start, failing at some points but also persevering enough to get this huge project within a chapter of completion. Regardless of how it has played out, finishing it will be a big accomplishment for me.

And once we finally make it to the end of the TICD, I will keep building out Thai Island Quest into a comprehensive, independent, A.I.-free resource to hopefully help inspire your own journeys into this wonderful part of the world.

Thank you so much for being here, and happy island hopping.

Dave