15/08/2024
What is sustainable hospitality?
Khun Hok is pure Phuket Chinese. His family have been on the island for four generations, his forebears arriving upon one of the many boats filled with Chinese immigrants eager to work the island’s tin boom of the wighteenth century. The family later diversifi and were among the first to plant rubber on i mand and in Phang Nga province. It was al plantations that Khun Hok would get his i job, working the long quiet stands of ruta trees after he had finished his studies at the ire Thai Hua School (now a museum) in Phuket Town.
The peace of farm life has instilled itself in Khun Hok. He is a modest, quiet and, some would say, shy man. But this has not stopped him from forging his own path through life. Now 46 years old, Khun Hok - whose name means Good Luck in Hokkien - is still farming rubber, but at his own 120-hectare plantation near Wat Chalong.
Appreciating the vagaries of world economics and rubber prices, he was not content with resting on a latex laurel and over the years built one of the island’s largest chicken farms at plantation, supplying many of Phuket’s top dels with fresh poultry. When competition m cheaper off-island imports made it difficult compete six years back, he again diversified, wapping chickens for fresh water catfish and adding fruit farming to his repertoire, with durian, pumpkin and sator plants interspersed amid the rubber.
Having gained a degree in Economics from Suankruab University in Banglok, Khun Hok understands how the development of Phuket’s tourism industry has changed the island and the benefits it has given to many of its people.
His chicken farm prospered from it during the early days, and today his fruit and catfish sell to the restaurants that service the growing tourist trade.
But when asked what he misses the most from when he was young, his eyes brighten and his usual introspection is gone. “When I was a boy,” he says, smiling at the memory, “I remember my parents would take us all for picnics on the beach in Patong, We would catch sand crabs and cook them. There was no one else, except the fishermen. Patong was like our own private beach.”
