Koh Kood Travel Guide

Koh Kood, or Ko Kut, is the fourth-largest island in Thailand and one of the least developed. It sits at the far eastern end of the country, a short way from Cambodian water, with a population of roughly two thousand, a handful of villages, no nightlife and no town.

It is a coconut island that has been left largely alone, and it is the quietest place with good beaches that this site covers. It is also the wettest.

The wettest place this site measures

Thirty years of reanalysis put July at 624mm across thirty rain days. For scale: Koh Chang, forty kilometres north in the same province, takes 566mm in the same month and is the second wettest place here. Khao Lak, whose own page calls its year severe, takes 400mm at its peak on the Andaman coast.

May to September runs 407, 528, 624, 526 and 544. The annual total is 3,242mm, the highest figure on this site.

This is regional, not local. Koh Kood and Koh Chang are the two wettest places we measure and they are neighbours, and the further southeast you go towards Cambodia the more pronounced it becomes. It is not a quirk of one island.

And then it is genuinely dry

The other half of the year is the surprise. December takes 21mm across four rain days, January 30, February 32. Those are drier than the same months on Koh Samui, drier than Phuket, drier than most of the country.

So Koh Kood has the sharpest year on this site in both directions: a factor of thirty between its driest month and its wettest. The planning rule is correspondingly simple. Come between December and March. Outside it, a great many places on the island close.

The beaches

Almost everything is on the west coast, and the three main beaches run north to south with progressively less on them.

Klong Chao is the main one and the only one with a choice: a long shallow curve with a river mouth at its northern end, most of the island’s places to stay, and a few places to eat that are not attached to a resort. The river is the reason to bring a kayak or hire one, because you can paddle up it to a waterfall.

Ao Tapao, just south, is the same water with fewer people and no village.

Ao Phrao, further south again, is long, almost empty, and a drive from anything that serves dinner.

The measured sea runs from 0.27 metres to 0.99 across the year on the west coast. All three beaches sit in one five-kilometre cell and share a single series, so the model cannot separate them: what differs between them is the number of people and the distance to a restaurant, and no wave figure measures that.

The interior

Most of Koh Kood is forest. Khlong Chao is the accessible waterfall, reachable by kayak up the river from the beach of the same name or on foot, and Khlong Yai Ki is the smaller one nearer the road. There is also a coconut and rubber landscape rather than a wild one across much of the island, which is what most of it was before anyone came.

The same awkwardness applies here as on Koh Chang: the waterfalls are at their best in the months the beaches are not.

Getting there

Boats run from Laem Sok pier near Trat: speedboats in about an hour, ferries in ninety minutes or so, and the schedule thins considerably out of season. Trat is five to six hours from Bangkok by road, or an hour by air to Trat airport and then half an hour to the pier.

In season there are also boats from Koh Chang and from Koh Mak, which is how a good number of people arrive: the three make an obvious chain down the coast.

Who it suits, and who it does not

Koh Kood for a quiet week, for couples, for anyone who has found the rest of Thailand’s islands too busy, and for people who intend to read. It is also the most expensive of the three eastern islands per night, because what exists is largely resorts rather than guesthouses.

Not Koh Kood for a first trip to Thailand, for anyone who wants a choice of restaurants, or for anyone travelling outside the dry season, when the boats reduce and the rain is the heaviest in the country.

Where it sits against every other island here, month by month, is on the islands overview.