How the ‘Three-Water City’ is rewriting the rules of travel

As a group of visitors walks deep into the fruit orchard, they're shown different fruits and vegetables along the way. At one stop, they're offered a taste of look mahatsajan — the "miracle berry" or Synsepalum dulcificum — said to turn any sour flavor sweet. Most take the bait, popping the berry before reaching for a wedge of lime, only to find the promise true.

The path into the orchard doesn't look like much of a tourist route. It's a dirt track cutting between raised-bed orchards, the soil mounded and channeled by hand to work with the freshwater that floods this part of Samut Songkhram every year. Getting there is part of the experience: participants move through the routes by bicycle and sa-leng (sidecar motorcycle), on foot and by boat, switching pace and vantage point as the landscape itself evolves from orchard to canal to open water.

Getting there is part of the experience: participants moved through the routes by bicycle and sa-leng (sidecar motorcycle), and on foot, and by boat.

This is the freshwater route through Bang Sakae, Ban Pramot, and Mueang Mai — one of three journeys a small Thai province is building around the idea that travel can go deeper than a floating market and a nice hotel room. Just an hour from Bangkok, Samut Songkhram sits where three water worlds — freshwater, brackish, and sea — meet, shaping its orchards and fishing villages for generations. Locals call it the "Three-Water City." Now it's pinning its future on regenerative tourism.

"I want local people to know there are tourists who aren't looking for luxury," says Siriwat Kantaros, a native of the province and the project's manager. It's a small sentence carrying a big premise: that a meaningful slice of travellers would trade infinity pools for the chance to understand a place from the inside out. That's what he means by regenerative tourism, he says — not just a lighter footprint, but visitors who leave something behind for the communities they pass through.

Siriwat Kantaros

Sustainable tourism asks how to minimise damage. Regenerative tourism asks a bolder question: can travel leave a place better than it found it? That's the premise behind a province-wide push by the Samut Songkhram Provincial Office of Tourism and Sports to elevate the area into a high-quality tourism destination. The initiative focuses on developing new travel routes, strengthening local capacity and reducing waste and carbon emissions, while supporting broader efforts to enhance the tourism experience. In July 2026, a two-day workshop brought nine communities and tourism stakeholders together to explore how tourism routes could help restore local ecosystems, rather than simply showcase them.

Siriwat is candid about what the project reacts against. The province had already tried gastronomy tourism, but in his view, it didn't go far enough. "We didn't just want to take people to look at the local food," he says. So, his team built three routes instead, each tracing a different set of ingredients back to its source — three water systems, three cuisines, one province.

That orchard walk is just one leg of the project. Two more routes trace the province's other waters, each with its own story to tell.

The brackish-water route connects Phraek Nam Daeng, Plai Phong Phang, and Khlong Khon, where canal-side communities still produce coconut sugar the traditional way. The goal isn't just a sweet souvenir — it's funding the restoration of the canals and orchards that make the sugar, and the way of life around it, possible.

The seawater route runs through Laem Yai, Bang Chakreng, and Bang Kaeo, centered on the mangrove-fringed wetlands of Don Hoi Lot, famous for razor clams and Samut Songkhram mackerel. Visitors dig for shellfish and cook what they find, leaving with a stake in protecting the mudflats that make the catch possible.

Suthee Sertsri

Gastronomy is the connective tissue running through all three journeys. A bite of coconut sugar becomes a lesson in wetland hydrology; a bowl of shrimp paste curry, an introduction to a fishing family's daily rhythm. Food here is less a menu item than a passport into the ecosystem that produced it. Along the way, Suthee Sertsri, a gastronomy researcher and Samut Songkhram native, fills in the histories behind each stop.

The three routes, Siriwat says, come down to who the project wants to reach. "We wanted to create a new kind of tourism, for a new kind of traveller; people who want more than shopping. People who want depth." For years, visitors have funnelled almost exclusively into Amphawa Market or Talad Rom Hup at the Mae Klong Railway Market, chasing comfort and convenience; demand that has pushed orchard owners to abandon their land or sell it off for resort development.

Chutayaves Sindhuphan

Not everyone at the workshop had the same take, and that range of views helped shape the project. Chutayaves Sindhuphan, an architect and creative entrepreneur who joined the freshwater trip, pushed for clarity on who the target traveller really is: someone who wants dirt roads, a slower pace, and fewer amenities as part of the experience, not a downside. He pointed to the orchards as an example of the trade-off — too much foot traffic compacts the soil fruit trees need to stay loose, so the routes have to be planned with that in mind. That balance, giving travellers something real while protecting what makes the land productive, is what makes the project feel regenerative rather than just well-intentioned.

Ambition alone cannot restore a mangrove forest, so the project grounds its vision in measurable action. Communities are trained to assess each route’s environmental impact using national low-carbon tourism guidelines, ensuring that “green” is measured, not merely marketed.

Each community also develops a Living Systems Map of its local resources, alongside plans to turn tourism into tangible outcomes—from reviving farming traditions and protecting wetlands to creating livelihoods that give the next generation a reason to stay.

Samut Songkhram has long been known as “Charming”—floating markets and slow afternoons. This project gives that charm a deeper meaning: water, food, culture, and people working as one connected system. If successful, the three routes could offer a model for turning visitors into allies, with a stake in keeping the province’s mangroves, orchards, and canals thriving long after their visit.

What awaits visitors in the orchard