The White Lotus effect has landed in Thailand, with a plague of lotus-eaters

I love HBO’s The White Lotus with its compellingly awful characters on vacation in obscenely expensive resorts.

Welcome to Koh Samui: season three of The White Lotus is set in Thailand.Credit: HBO

The show satirises conspicuous consumption and the dark side of tourism, showing how the luxury veneer sits upon an underbelly of entitlement and privilege, neocolonialism, corruption of sexuality and spiritual appropriation. All the guests are of questionable morality, and each island is somewhat corrupted by their presence.

Well, that’s what I think it’s about but I’m not sure others are getting the same message. Because all three series have dramatically increased tourism to the islands where they are set – Maui, Sicily and now Koh Samui. Thailand lobbied to be the setting for series three because of this “White Lotus effect”. There’s even a line of merchandise that cashes in on its cachet, including a cocktail book, beds and a luggage range.

I suppose hypocrisy is the greatest luxury, after all.

I love the show for skewering the filthy rich (as one character says, “most rich people are trashy”), but we are all compromised. The current series explores wellness and spirituality. Before I set out to the spiritual supermarket of India, where I wrote Holy Cow, I came to this part of Thailand as a young backpacker to party on the island Koh Phangan, a boat ride across the water from Koh Samui.

Decades on, I just returned for a reunion. While I’m not a resort person, I admit I probably would have stayed at the Four Seasons Resort where The White Lotus is filmed if I could have afforded it. Instead, I took the boat to Koh Phangan to find a spiritual mecca for travellers on a cheaper budget.

And surprise, surprise, I found the lotus land is struggling with so many lotus eaters.

Koh Phangan is an island of rose quartz – supposedly giving good crystal vibrations and special powers. The full moon parties I enjoyed in my 20s have exploded in size in the south, and the north-west area has become a hotspot for soul travellers whirling in an eddy of actualisation.

Here you can do workshops in breath work, yoga, tantra, meditation, sacred geometry, storytelling, animal movement and ecstatic and orgasmic dance.

You can do therapy sessions in ayurveda and crystal healing. You can work on your kundalini or take part in cacao ceremonies, singing bowl ceremonies and shiva retreats for men and yoni workshops for women.

You can dance on the beach as white men play African drums and fire twirlers flirt with flames at the water’s edge. You can groove ecstatically around an open fire then plunge into an ice bath.

There are even cuddle parties and bitcoin sessions. (Self-love doesn’t come free).

The crowds were growing but manageable until COVID-19 restrictions were lifted and the world’s seekers descended en masse.

On Koh Samui and Koh Phangan, there are Russians escaping the draft who are high on crypto and cannabis; there are Israelis felled low by trauma and there are Germans, Australians, Swiss and French micro-dosing on mushrooms and macro-dosing on self-care.

Sarah embraced the spirit with yoga classes. Credit: SMH

I came out of curiosity but embraced the spirit with yoga classes and breath work. I even had my chakras aligned in a bamboo pyramid on a steep hillside in a jungle with 200 per cent humidity. The healer looked like Pan and sounded at times like Yoda as he cleansed our spiritual blockages with some chanting and guttural gibberish. I laughed, but I also felt enormous and powerful peace as fat mosquitos circled and cicadas screamed.

And why the hell not?

In a world where Trump and his toxic bullies are terrifying, it was remarkably healing to switch off and zone out. When it feels like humanity has ceded control to crazy, maybe it’s sane to get spiritual. When you feel powerless, perhaps empowering yourself is the best thing to do. And when demons are dancing on our spirits, it feels good to dance wild and free.

However, reality came flooding in soon enough. This dry season, Thailand’s southern islands have had three major monsoonal storms. Torrential rain for days took the zen out of things when I evacuated my beach bungalow for higher ground. The crystal sand turned to sticky mud, the roads turned to rivers and some sewage systems struggled. Sheltering in cafes, the hipsters and hippies doubled their dose of ganja as the water got higher.

When a baby python snake sought shelter in the house, I wondered if this was a symbol of paradise lost or perhaps a paradise that needs to find a more sustainable path.

The white lotus flower is a symbol of knowledge, purity, enlightenment and divine perfection. It rises from murky waters. We can’t escape the murkiness of the world right now, but we do have a duty to be awake to the cost of our entitlement to seek sanctuary.

I’m desperate to travel again after years of staying put but I’m aware that our escape hatch has consequences for where we escape to.

The “white lotus” bungalows of Koh Samui can be seen from the planes that fly in and out from early morning to late in the evening, in increasing numbers. Looking down upon their stunning beauty is as close most of us will get to that sort of holiday but the message the show contains is for all of us who seek relief from an ever-maddening world. I returned thankful for the incredibly generous local hospitality and experience. And as Kylie Minogue taught me this week, I can ecstatically dance my chakras open right here at home.

Sarah Macdonald is an author and broadcaster.

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