Meeting People on Koh Samui When You Do Not Know Anyone

Koh Samui is set up for two-week holidays. If that is what you are doing, you will not read this, because you will be busy and then you will leave.

If you are here for a month, a season, or indefinitely, you will run into something the brochures do not mention. Samui is a hard island to make friends on, and it is hard for structural reasons rather than social ones.

Why it is harder than it looks

The island is big and the geography works against you. Samui is a ring, roughly fifty kilometres around, and the places people live are scattered along it. Bangrak, Bophut, Chaweng, Lamai, Maenam and Nathon are genuinely separate. A friend in Lamai when you are in Bangrak is a forty-minute ride each way, which is enough friction to quietly kill a plan.

Almost everyone is leaving. The turnover is enormous. You will meet someone excellent on a Tuesday and they will fly out on Sunday. This is not personal and it is not avoidable, but after the fourth time it wears on people.

There is no default gathering point. Chiang Mai has a nomad scene with obvious entry points. Bangkok has a hundred. Samui's version of this is much thinner, and the places most people end up are bars, which sort strongly for one kind of evening.

The seasons empty it out. In October and November a lot of the transient population goes elsewhere. The island gets quieter in a way that is lovely if you already know people and isolating if you do not.

What actually works

The pattern that works here is the same one that works in any small place: turn up to the same thing every week.

One-off events are enjoyable and produce almost nothing lasting. Recurring events produce everything, because the second and third time you see someone is when a conversation becomes a friendship. Anything with a fixed day and a fixed place is worth more than something better that happens once.

Concretely, the categories that exist on Samui:

Sport with a schedule. Running clubs, Muay Thai gyms, football, dive groups, yoga with a regular class rather than drop-in. Gyms in particular work well here because the commitment is external and the same faces appear.

Skill-based classes. Cooking, Thai language, art. The structure does the social work for you, which matters if you find open-ended socialising hard.

Games nights. Board games, quizzes, cards. These are unusually effective because they give you something to do with your hands and a reason to talk to a stranger that is not "so where are you from."

Volunteering. Beach cleans and animal rescue both have regular presences on the island and both attract people who intend to stay.

Facebook groups. Unfashionable, and still the primary way the expat and long-stay population on Samui organises. This is where you will find out what is on.

The advice nobody gives

Pick one area and go deep. The instinct is to spread out across the island. Do the opposite. Choose the part you live in and become a regular in three places in it. Familiarity beats variety here, and the geography means anything else costs you an hour of travel per attempt.

Go alone. You are more approachable and you are more likely to approach. This is uncomfortable and it is the single highest-return thing on this list.

Say yes early. The window between meeting someone and them leaving is often shorter than you think.

Do not build your social life around bars unless that is genuinely what you want. It is the path of least resistance here and it is not the same thing as knowing people.

What we run

We are a licensed medical cannabis dispensary in Bangrak with a cafe and lounge attached, and a large part of why we built the room the way we did is the thing described above. We wanted somewhere people came back to rather than visited.

Two things run every week.

Paint Night, every Wednesday from six. Materials provided, no skill required, and the point is not the painting. It is that having something in front of you makes talking to the person next to you easy. It is the least intimidating room in the building.

Catan Night, every Friday from seven. Settlers of Catan, and whatever else people bring. Games run about ninety minutes, tables form and re-form, and by the third week you know everyone's opening strategy and probably their name.

Both are free to turn up to. You do not need to know anyone, and most people arrive not knowing anyone.

We also run occasional one-off evenings. Details are on our events page.

The short version

Samui is an easy island to be alone on. The people who build a life here do it by turning up to the same thing every week until the faces are familiar, and by staying in one part of the island rather than trying to cover all of it.

It takes about a month. It is worth doing early rather than at the point where you have noticed you need it.