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. Two things about it are not the same as Phuket, and both are measurable.

It is wetter. Khao Lak takes more rain than Phuket in ten months of the twelve, and in September it is 400mm against 293mm. That is the wettest single month of any Andaman destination this site measures, though not the wettest anywhere on it: Koh Chang, on the far eastern seaboard, takes 566mm in July.

And it is calmer. Four years of marine reanalysis put Nang Thong between 0.29 and 0.93 metres of wave height across the year, against 0.47 to 1.34 off Kata on Phuket’s west coast, and Khao Lak is the lower figure in all twelve months. More rain, better sea, one hour apart. The full year, month by month.

Thirty kilometres, and where to sleep on them

Khao Lak is a string of beaches rather than a place, and the accommodation question here is really the beach question. Nang Thong and Bang Niang at the southern end are the two you can walk from; north of them the resorts sit in their own grounds with a kilometre between neighbours and a fast main road behind. The sea gets calmer as you go north, by about fifteen per cent between Nang Thong and Bang Sak, and that matters less than whether you can walk to dinner.

The five stretches compared, and what there is to do once you have chosen.

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, and read the Andaman Coast guide to see how the three compare before you book a base.