Am I too old for a beach hut?

I've reached the age where a woman doesn't reveal her age, but last time I visited the Thai island of Koh Samui I was on the Pill and dessert came wrapped in a Rizla. Now I'm on HRT and look forward to a milky drink before bed. But age has not withered my lust for travel, so why not play the middle-aged hippie and get back to barefoot beach-hut living?

Truth is, I've lived a pretty soft life for the past 25 years. I've got used to both hotels and restaurants with the stars on the inside. Was I really up for it? Imagine queuing for the showers with spindly, bronzed gap-years less than half my age, discussing designer drugs? They'd think I was Special Branch, planning a raid at the next Full Moon party.

The idea was to visit parts of Indo-China in relative comfort, then drop through Bangkok, pick up a flight to KS and chill on the cheap for 10 days. When we last visited in the early Eighties there was only one hotel with pool, no girlie bars, no internet caffs and no airport. Now there are 18 flights a day, bringing in shopped-out sun-seekers from the capital. So, places change. There have to be some quiet beaches left.

Being well-seasoned travellers, we scoured the Rough Guide and finally settled on Maenem in the northwest, described as "quietest of the major beaches, and no sign of anything resembling nightlife". Amazingly, "Shangrilah", our first choice, with "smart, well-maintained en suite bungalows", answered the phone. With much shouting, the owner's limping English and our total lack of Thai, we secured a room for three nights at 500 baht (£8.50).

Perfect? Wrong. When we arrived, heat-swollen and brain-numbed by the local bus, there was no room at the inn. Limping English didn't remember us and I threatened to cry. There was no way we could walk back to the main road with our incongruous suitcases. Would you carry a rucksack with arthritis?

We stood our ground and eventually Limping produced her sister from "New Sunrise Village" next door. She had one room left - minimum let three nights - at around £15 a night. This time I did cry. There is no way I would have housed a pet, or even a wanted terrorist, in that dank, squalid cell. The bed was covered in a grimy children's cartoon sheet, the "bathroom" had green slime on the walls and the fan was so greased up it looked like a refugee from a chip shop.

While I blubbed, my partner (I owe him a lot for this) did what anyone would have done. He found the owner and offered him money. Ten minutes after uttering the magic phrase "we can easily pay more", Mr De (think local Mr Big) had whisked us up the beach to Bang Po (still not in the guide books), flogged us a two-bedroom beach house (admittedly not finished) and thrown in a Jeep for about £30 a day.

There was a stick of gimcrack furniture, a double bed and all-important fridge, but no curtains, little bed linen and a leaky, albeit new, loo. Still, after stocking up on beers and turning up Dylan on our sound system, we sat on our dance-floor-sized terrace with an uninterrupted view of Koh Pha Ngan, KS's smaller sibling, toasting the water-melon-pink sunset and grinning with smug self-approval.

Next day it got better. We couldn't believe our luck when we found Bang Po Cafè, just four minutes barefoot on the beach from home. As she delivered freshly squeezed OJ, brown toast and the best-ever coffee, owner Nana Cattani smiled at our cheesy grins and read our thoughts. "Yes," she told us, "this is the only quiet bit of Koh Samui left. No drugs and no bad people."

In 10 days we never saw more than a dozen people at one time on the beach. But we owed it to our past to revisit Chaweng Beach, now a major resort lined with hotels.

It was so sleazy that we rushed back to Bang Po and never left our sweet beach house again. It was bliss, but towards the end we got sick of waking with the dawn (no curtains), leaky plumbing (a water pipe was mended with Elastoplast) and using one towel between us. This recapturing your youth thing is fine, but best not take it too far. On our last night in Bangkok, we booked into the Oriental.

WAY TO GO Jill Hartley flew to Bangkok with British Airways (0845 7733377), which flies daily from Heathrow, returns £498.40 (booked by 1 October for travel during November). She flew on to Koh Samui with Bangkok Airways (01293 596626), £110.90 return. Mr De at New Sunrise Village (00 66 77 247219), Maenem, rents Jeeps and bikes as well as houses, and they expect you to bargain.