Koh Samui, Samui Cuisine, Thailand — August 2026
Some weeks in Mr Paparazzi’s World involve first-class lounges, ridiculous hotels, exotic cities, parties, celebrities and the occasional moment when I wonder how the hell this became my life.
This was not one of those weeks.
This week involved builders, lawyers, paperwork, electricity boards, filtered-water systems, staff interviews, power cuts, sore legs, several massages and an alarming amount of getting my shit together.
And somehow, I bloody loved it.
Because after all these months in Koh Samui, perhaps this was the week when I finally stopped feeling like a visitor.
I wasn’t holidaying here. I wasn’t simply passing through or filming another beautiful island for the world to see.
I was living.
And there’s something rather wonderful about that.
WHERE THE BLOODY HELL DID AUGUST GO?
Darryn Lyons reflecting on his August 2026 birthday week in Koh Samui
My birthday was on August 19. Then I looked at the calendar and August had almost disappeared.
What happened?
I genuinely don’t know.
Time seems to be travelling at an increasingly ridiculous speed. This week vanished particularly quickly because so much of it was occupied by the things that never make Instagram: administration, builders, lawyers, documents, meetings, changing services into company names, organising staff, sorting the house and preparing for travel.
All incredibly unsexy.
All incredibly necessary.
Perhaps time flies fastest when you’re not watching it because you’re too busy living it.
Not every memorable week needs to be glamorous. Sometimes getting your life in order is the adventure.
LITTLE JAPAN IS BECOMING HOME
Kitchen and lounge installation progress at Little Japan, Darryn Lyons’ house build in Koh Samui
Little Japan featured heavily again this week, although not through enormous architectural revelations or dramatic transformations.
This time, it was about the hundreds of tiny decisions that eventually determine whether a house actually feels right.
Saturday afternoon was spent with the builders solving details around the kitchen and lounge installation. They might appear minor to somebody else, but they seriously needed addressing.
And now they’re done.
Building something has taught me that the grand vision is often the easiest part. The difficult part is the centimetres: where something sits, how it opens, what material belongs where and whether the idea that looked fantastic on a drawing makes any bloody sense once you’re standing in front of it.
I am pedantic. No revelation there.
But every one of those decisions is making Little Japan feel less like something I have built and more like something that belongs to me.
It is becoming home.
That probably explains another major part of the week: preparing my Samui life to function without me.
A new assistant has been organised. A maid has been organised. Responsibilities are beginning to fall into place.
Lily starts on September 2, and I’m genuinely looking forward to working with her. She was excellent throughout the interview process, and I hope she becomes an important part of making this increasingly complicated little Samui world function while Mr Paparazzi is somewhere on the other side of the planet.
Because that is the strange thing about building a life somewhere: eventually, you must make that life capable of continuing when you are not standing in the middle of it.
Perhaps that was the real work of this week.
WHY KOH SAMUI IS MY HAPPY PLACE
Koh Samui, the island Darryn Lyons calls his happy place
Somewhere among all the practical jobs, I found myself thinking about the expression “happy place.”
Everyone says they have one. I’m not sure everyone truly does.
Mine in Australia was Absolute Newell Beach, about 15 minutes north of Port Douglas. I also had a house in Noosa. I loved the house but hated Noosa.
Newell was different. It was where I could disappear, cocoon myself and escape the human race.
Koh Samui is different again.
Here, I’m not cocooned from people. I’m cocooned by them.
By kindness, friendship, empathy and generosity. By that genuine sense of, “What can I do for you? How can I help?”
I nearly invented a word for it this week: genuality.
Perhaps I created it because I couldn’t find an existing word that adequately described what I feel here.
There are beautiful islands all over the world, but they are not all populated by beautiful people. And by beautiful, I don’t mean physically beautiful.
I mean beautiful in spirit.
That, more than the beaches, weather or palm trees, is why I love Koh Samui.
THE ONE THING I WOULD CHANGE
Everyday life in Koh Samui, where Darryn Lyons wishes he spoke fluent Thai
If I could change one thing about my life here, I would speak the language.
Not restaurant Thai. Not taxi Thai. Not a handful of polite words accompanied by frantic Google Translate.
I mean Thai. Properly.
Language is the final door.
You can live somewhere, eat the food, know the roads, make friends and begin to understand the culture. But until you understand the jokes, subtleties, emotions and little throwaway conversations, there is still a pane of glass between you and the people around you.
That led me to one of my favourite thoughts of the week:
If I could have one superpower, it would be to know every language in the world.
Forget flying. Forget invisibility.
Give me languages.
Imagine travelling the planet, sitting beside absolutely anybody and simply saying, “Tell me your story,” then understanding every word.
That would be a genuine superpower.
THE THINGS THAT MAKE A PLACE FEEL LIKE HOME
I also discovered this week that I really miss cooking.
Really miss it.
Living with a little hot plate and a pan has made me realise that cooking isn’t simply about feeding myself. It is ritual, creativity and home.
Sometimes you don’t realise what makes somewhere feel like home until you’re living somewhere you can’t do it.
With all the travelling ahead, perhaps I’ll begin asking hotels if I can use their kitchens.
“Good afternoon, Mr Lyons. Your suite is ready.”
“Lovely. Now where’s the wok?”
Could be interesting.
Cooking on a hot plate and pan, Darryn Lyons’ temporary kitchen setup in Koh Samui
My legs also became something of a weekly restoration project. There was massage after massage, attempting to deal with old gym legs apparently containing several decades of unresolved diplomatic disputes.
At one stage I described the treatment as “blissfully painful.”
That was bullshit.
It was just painful.
Slowly, however, things began freeing up. By the end of the week, I was deliberately asking for something gentle rather than having another Thai human being attempt to separate my muscles from the bone.
Progress.
THE MOST ACCURATE WEATHER APP IN SAMUI
Cloudy skies over Koh Samui with rain that never quite arrives
Meanwhile, Koh Samui’s weather continued its rather casual relationship with meteorological accuracy.
Clouds gathered. Wind arrived. Storms threatened. Rain appeared imminent.
And then…nothing.
On Sunday morning, I was informed there was a 65 per cent chance of rain. They say something similar most days.
It rarely bloody rains.
The most accurate weather app in Koh Samui remains opening the bloody door.
WHEN A QUIET ISLAND ISN’T GOOD NEWS
A quiet night on Chaweng, Koh Samui during the 2026 low season
Saturday night brought a different kind of surprise.
Chaweng was extraordinarily quiet.
I’ve experienced low season in Koh Samui before, but this felt different. I spoke with restaurateurs, sellers and shopkeepers, and their stories were remarkably consistent: about a week earlier, things had simply seemed to stop.
For me personally, there is something lovely about an emptier Samui. But that is an incredibly selfish perspective.
An empty restaurant isn’t romantic when it is your livelihood. An empty shop isn’t peaceful when it feeds your family.
A quiet island can be paradise for the tourist and frightening for the person trying to make a living on it.
So I spend locally. I tip. I try to support people.
Not because I’m saving anybody, but because this island has given me an enormous amount. Communities only survive when people participate in them.
Travellers often talk about discovering the “real” Thailand. Well, supporting the people who make a place special is part of that reality.
FIVE-STAR SERVICE WITHOUT FIVE STARS AT SAMUI CUISINE
After watching the football — the Cats now have Carlton in the elimination final, so prayers have officially commenced — I headed to one of my favourite places on Chaweng’s main drag: Samui Cuisine.
This isn’t Michelin-star dining.
It isn’t trying to be.
It is simply bloody good, proper food served by beautiful people, accompanied by possibly the largest menu ever produced by mankind.
I swear it is about 4,500 pages long. Pictures, diagrams and every conceivable dish. You could begin reading it at breakfast and order dinner sometime around Thursday.
Fortunately, I already knew what I wanted: garlic and black peppercorn lobster.
Garlic and black peppercorn lobster with crinkle-cut chips at Samui Cuisine, Chaweng
About a kilo of lobster arrived, beautifully cooked, with magnificent crinkle-cut chips, which I’ve suddenly become evangelical about.
Why has the world abandoned the crinkle cut?
Everyone serves French fries, shoestring fries, steak fries, ordinary chips or truffle bloody fries. A properly cooked crinkle-cut chip almost melts in your mouth.
Alongside it came what may be the most Darryn Lyons salad ever assembled: mango, tomato, lettuce, onion and olives.
Does that make culinary sense?
Who cares? Neither do I half the time.
Add a passion-fruit virgin mojito, followed by complimentary mango and watermelon, and the entire bill came to 1,100 baht — around AUD $46.
A kilo of lobster, chips, salad, a drink, fruit and extraordinary service. In Australia, I would expect to pay at least five times that amount.
But there is another side to inexpensive food that travellers sometimes forget.
When I know I am paying dramatically less than I would elsewhere in the world, I tip extremely well.
I have a particular waitress at Samui Cuisine, and the moment I walk through the door, I receive that wonderful welcome. She smiles. She knows me. I know her. I’m looked after beautifully every time, and I look after them in return.
When you know you’re paying very little for extraordinary generosity, don’t take advantage of it. Give some of that generosity back.
Sometimes the greatest luxury isn’t white tablecloths, silver service or Michelin stars. It is walking into a simple restaurant where somebody genuinely looks happy to see you.
Five-star service doesn’t require five stars.
Sometimes it only requires somebody who gives a damn.
TALKING TO THE MOON
The moon breaking through dark clouds over Koh Samui at night
Then something happened on the walk back to the car.
Nothing happened, really.
And perhaps that is why it mattered.
I looked up and saw the moon surrounded by enormous, deep-black clouds, its light reflecting through and around them. The entire sky looked like a scene from an extraordinarily beautiful horror film.
Except horror never entered my mind.
Quite the opposite.
I felt peace, beauty and tranquillity.
I leaned against the car and stared at it for ten minutes, doing absolutely nothing. Bruno Mars’s Talking to the Moon immediately came into my head, and there I was, essentially doing exactly that.
Talking to the bloody moon.
Perhaps I was slightly hallucinating. Or perhaps I was simply completely present.
There are moments in Koh Samui when nature seems to demand your attention. The sunrises do it. The sunsets do it. The storms do it, even when they threaten all afternoon and then can’t be bothered actually arriving.
That night, the moon did it.
Sometimes nature doesn’t ask you to understand anything. It simply asks you to shut up and look.
So I did.
For ten minutes, I forgot the builders, Little Japan, travelling, business, football, emails, schedules and everything else rattling around inside my head.
It was just me, an almost empty Chaweng, black clouds and that extraordinary moon.
I thought I was talking to the moon. Perhaps, for ten minutes, the moon was telling me to stop talking.
There is something extraordinarily powerful about the natural world here. You can travel to some of the most spectacular places on Earth and spend fortunes searching for unforgettable experiences.
Then occasionally, the greatest experience of the week costs absolutely nothing.
You just have to notice it.
FROM THE MOON TO CHINESE TELEVISION
Eventually, I drove home, and the cultural sophistication of the evening immediately deteriorated.
I watched another couple of episodes of Kill Me Love Me on Netflix.
It is a Chinese historical drama filled with beautiful costumes, political intrigue, sword fighting, deep love stories and people secretly plotting to murder one another.
There are enormous quantities of killing, yet somehow no negativity.
That’s what I love about these Chinese series. Nobody seems to swear, nothing feels particularly grisly, and there might be fourteen assassination attempts before dinner, but ultimately we’re all here for love.
Everyone is also extraordinarily bloody attractive.
Particularly Liu Xueyi.
Now, I’m a raving heterosexual, but I appear to have developed something of a man crush on Liu Xueyi.
The bloke is ridiculous. He is so bloody beautiful he could make an incredibly beautiful woman. I don’t know what that says about him, me or Chinese television — but there it is.
He is one seriously good-looking cat.
Apparently, that’s another thing we learned about Mr Paparazzi this week.
Moving swiftly along.
THE ORDINARY WEEKS SOMETIMES MAKE THE BEST STORIES
Sunday morning coffee and cloudy skies over Koh Samui
So here I am on Sunday morning.
Coffee beside me. Cloudy skies above Koh Samui. A breeze moving through the island. Fishermen coming in and small patches of blue beginning to appear.
The weather people still insist there is a 65 per cent chance of rain.
Of course there bloody is.
Maybe I’ll go to Health Lab this afternoon. Maybe I won’t.
Right now, I’m perfectly content sitting here.
Looking back, perhaps this week was considerably better than I first thought. There wasn’t one enormous event, but there didn’t need to be.
It was a week of putting things in order.
Building a home. Building a team. Looking after a body that has been around the block a few times. Thinking, cooking, eating, laughing, watching football, talking to the moon and watching impossibly beautiful Chinese men murder one another politely.
Most importantly, it was a week of noticing the people around me.
That is life.
Not the edited version. The actual version.
And increasingly, that is what I want Mr Paparazzi’s World to record.
Next week will be different. It is my last full week in Koh Samui before Phuket. Then the bags come out, the passports come out and Mr Paparazzi’s World begins moving again.
Perhaps this quiet, strange, administrative, reflective and slightly bonkers little week arrived at exactly the right time.
One final chance to sit still before the world starts spinning again.
The glamorous weeks make great photographs.
The ordinary weeks sometimes make better stories.
And this one?
It turns out it wasn’t so ordinary after all.
That was the week that was.
Koh Samui, Thailand.
And I wouldn’t have changed a bloody thing.
— Darryn Lyons
Mr Paparazzi’s World 🌍
