Khao Lak Travel Guide

Khao Lak is not a town. It is a run of beaches along the Phang Nga coast with a road behind them, national park at both ends, and almost nothing above three storeys anywhere. People who find Phuket too much and Krabi too far end up here, and most of them come back.

What it is, and what it is not

The name covers about thirty kilometres and half a dozen beaches. Nang Thong is the main one, with the greatest concentration of restaurants and dive shops and the shortest walk to anything. Bang Niang immediately north is quieter and has the weekly market. Khuk Khak and Bang Sak further north are emptier again and are where the larger resorts sit on their own stretches of sand.

What Khao Lak does not have is nightlife, a centre, or much to do in the evening beyond dinner. That is the entire point of it for the people who choose it and the entire problem for anyone expecting Patong.

The Similans decide the year

Khao Lak is the mainland gateway to the Similan Islands, sixty kilometres offshore and the best diving in Thailand. The national park is open roughly from mid-October to mid-May and closed the rest of the year, and the town follows it: dive shops shut, hotels drop their rates, and a lot of the place simply stops.

If diving is why you are coming, the season is not a preference, it is a gate. The Similans in detail

The weather, measured

Khao Lak sits on the same coast as Phuket and keeps the same calendar: dry from December to March, wettest in September and October, and in the southwest monsoon from May onwards. What differs is the sea. Four years of marine reanalysis put Nang Thong beach between 0.29 and 0.93 metres of wave height across the year, against 0.47 to 1.34 on Phuket’s west coast.

Khao Lak is meaningfully calmer than Phuket in every month, because it sits further north and inside the curve of the coast. The measurement, beach by beach

The 2004 tsunami

Khao Lak was the worst-hit place in Thailand. Several thousand people died here, the resorts along the front were destroyed, and the town that exists now was rebuilt afterwards. A police boat carried two kilometres inland by the wave has been left where it stopped, near Bang Niang, and there is a small museum beside it.

It is treated here as history rather than as an attraction, and it is worth an hour and a quiet one.

Getting there

Phuket airport is about eighty kilometres south and the transfer takes an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half. That is closer than it sounds, because the airport is at the northern end of Phuket, so you never enter the island’s traffic. Book the car from the airport rather than from a hotel further south.

Fares and times

How long to give it

Four to seven nights. It is a place to stop rather than a place to work through, and its list of things to do is short by design: the Similans or a day boat, the market, one temple, and a lot of beach. Pair it with Phuket or Krabi if you want a fortnight with more in it.