| UntilThe
year 1950, Koh Samui was without any road and cars. The Island lived in
its own pace with almost no contact to the outside world . Getting from
Maenam to Lamai Beach for example meant walking through the mountain jungles
for hours and hours, a trip that was impossible to make to and back in
one day. Tourism was unknown, there was simply no convenient way for anybody
to come to Koh Samui.
The
only way to reach the island from the mainland was by a daily boat (10
hours from Suratthani harbor to Nathon). At arrival here one had to count
on another cople of hours or more to reach ones final destination. Early
plans of a road construction were laid down because of the mountainous
area and the impossibility to get heavy construction machines to the island.
Khun Dilok Suthiklom,
the
headman (1965-1970)
In the
year 1969, Khun Dilok Suthiklom, the headman of the island decided that
something had to be done for development and contacted the government for
help. First start of construction consisted of manual labor by hundreds
of people cleaning a way around the island. Rocks and trees has to be cleared
out of the way and the result after long hard handwork was a kine of dirt
track that lead almost all the way around. Two major obstacles were the
high mountains between Naton and Maenam and the long mountain stretch between
Lamai and Chaweng. The former had to be lowered by dynamite to allow the
road to climb up in an acceptable angle; even so, in the first couple of
years before laying out concrete it meant usually that everybody except
the driver had to get off the car and help pushing it up. The area between
Lamai and Chaweng is the rockiest cliff landscape on Lamai and road had
to be more or less carved out of the mountains on a length of 3 km, an
impossible task without dynamite and heavy construction machinery. So these
machines were slipped over from the mainland and in lack of a deep water
pier had to be brought to land on beaches that were steep enough to allow
the large carrying vessele to anchor at land. In-between there were further
delays due to prolonged rainy seasons, the heavy monsoon rains making it
virtually impossible to work at all, not to mention laying out concrete.
Finally
in the year 1973, order came from Bangkok to finish the Samui ring road
project and concrete strarted to run to complete a 52 km. long, 12 meter
wide road all around the island that now seems indispensable to us and
most people cannot even imagine anymore there was time when the only way
to get from one place to other on Koh Samui was on foot or by boat. |
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