Koh Lipe Travel Guide

Koh Lipe is about two kilometres across, sits at the very bottom of Thailand in Satun province, and is closer to Langkawi in Malaysia than to Krabi. It is inside the Tarutao marine park, it has three beaches, one walking street, no cars and no deep-water pier: you transfer to a long-tail and wade the last few metres.

The water is generally reckoned the clearest in Thailand, and everything difficult about the island comes from where it is.

The three beaches

Lipe has three, they face three different directions, and the island is small enough that all three are a walk apart. You will use all of them, and which one you sleep on is the only real accommodation decision here.

Pattaya Beach, on the south

The arrivals beach and the busiest of the three. Speedboats from Pak Bara and the ferry from Langkawi both come in here, immigration sets up a temporary post on the sand when the Malaysian boat is running, and the Walking Street starts at the back of it and cuts across the island.

It is a broad white crescent and it is genuinely good sand, but it is working beach as much as swimming beach: long-tails come and go all day, and there is a strip of moored boats between you and open water for much of it. Best for a short stay, a late arrival, or anyone who wants to be able to walk to twenty restaurants. Not for a quiet morning.

Sunrise Beach, on the east

The longest of the three and, for most people, the one to stay on. It runs up the east side facing Koh Adang across a narrow channel, so the view is a forested mountain rather than open sea, and the water is shallow and clear a long way out.

It is quieter than Pattaya without being cut off: the Walking Street is a five-minute cross-island walk. The reef comes close enough in at the northern end to snorkel straight off the beach, which is the single best argument for Lipe over anywhere else in this price bracket.

Best for most visitors, snorkelling from the sand, and being able to see the sun come up over the channel. The caution is the tide: at low water the shallow shelf goes a long way out and swimming becomes wading.

Sunset Beach, on the west

The smallest and least developed: a short strip on the western tip with a handful of places to stay, reached by a path over the low hill from either of the other two in ten or fifteen minutes.

It has the fewest people, the fewest boats and the sunset, and it is the only one of the three where you are not within earshot of anything. The trade is that everything else is a walk, and the walk is unlit after dark.

Best for couples, second visits, and anyone whose reason for coming to the bottom of Thailand was to be left alone. Not for a first stay with an early boat to catch.

Which one, in one line

Sunrise if you are not sure. Pattaya if you want to walk to dinner and a bar. Sunset if you have been to Lipe before or have no intention of leaving your beach.

We publish no sea ranking between them, and no page honestly can. Lipe is about two kilometres across and the marine model’s grid is about five, so all three beaches fall in one cell and return an identical figure to two decimal places. Ordering them by wave height would be ordering an artefact of the grid. What the measurement does support is the island as a whole: between 0.39 metres in April and 1.02 metres in September, which makes Lipe the roughest of the three small Andaman islands this site covers, ahead of Phi Phi at 0.89 and Lanta’s northern beaches at 0.66.

What does differ between them is aspect, and that is read off the map rather than modelled: Pattaya faces south, Sunrise east and Sunset west. In the southwest monsoon the west-facing one takes the weather first.

The Walking Street

Everything on Lipe that is not a beach is on this lane: restaurants, dive shops, minimarts, massage places, laundry, the ATMs. It runs a few hundred metres from Pattaya Beach across the island towards Sunrise, and you can walk its length in about five minutes.

It is not a boulevard and photographs of Lipe rarely show it, which is why it is here. There are also motorbikes on it despite the island having no cars, and sidecar taxis run the paths for anyone with luggage or a hill to get up.

It has its own monsoon

This is the part that surprises people, and it is why Lipe has its own record on this site rather than borrowing Krabi’s.

Lipe is roughly four hundred kilometres south of Krabi, far enough that the monsoon reaches it differently. In the middle of the southwest monsoon it is noticeably drier than the main Andaman coast: 165mm in June and 179mm in July against Phuket’s 240mm and 223mm. But at the tail of the year it is wetter: 275mm in November against Phuket’s 231mm.

So the shape of the Lipe year is shifted rather than shorter. November to April remains the season, and within it the reliable end is January to April rather than the Andaman’s usual November start.

None of which is the real seasonal constraint, because the constraint is the boats.

Getting there is most of the decision

There is no airport, and no route in that does not involve a boat of at least ninety minutes.

From Pak Bara, the pier in Satun, is the standard way: about ninety minutes by speedboat. Pak Bara is itself around two hours from Hat Yai airport, which has flights from Bangkok. That is the whole route and it is a full day from Bangkok.

From Langkawi, in Malaysia, there is a direct ferry of about ninety minutes in season, and for a great many people it is the shortest way in. Immigration is done at a temporary post on the beach, which is exactly as informal as it sounds. It runs seasonally and stops in the monsoon.

From Phuket or Krabi it is a long day by boat down the coast, hopping via Koh Lanta and Koh Ngai in season. The Phuket route page has what we have checked.

The low season closes the island more completely than most. From around June to September the scheduled boats reduce heavily or stop altogether, and a large share of the accommodation shuts with them. Lipe is not somewhere to turn up in July and improvise.

What there is to do

Snorkelling, and then more snorkelling. The reef comes straight off the sand at Sunrise and Sunset, and the standard day out is a long-tail trip around the neighbouring islands of the Tarutao park: Koh Adang directly opposite, with a steep viewpoint climb and a waterfall, and the smaller islands and rock stacks around it.

Beyond that the island is a walking street, a few dive shops and three beaches. That is the entire list, and people who like Lipe like it for exactly that reason.

Lipe against Lanta and Phi Phi

These are the Andaman’s three small-island choices and the trade is clean.

Lanta is the easiest: two hours from Krabi airport, twenty-seven kilometres of beach, and somewhere to eat every night. Phi Phi is the most spectacular and the least peaceful. Lipe has the best water of the three and costs you the most to reach, which is precisely why it still feels like it does.

If it is a first trip to Thailand with a fortnight, Lipe is probably one leg too far. If it is a second trip, or the water is the whole point, it is the one people talk about afterwards. All three sit against the Gulf islands, month by month, on the islands overview.

Why this guide has no sub-pages

Of about 11,350 searches a month in Britain, roughly 8,900 are the island’s name and about 1,700 are how to reach it, which this page answers in full because the journey is the decision here rather than a detail of it. Weather is 300 and hotels 250.

A page each for the three beaches was the obvious next move and the numbers say no. Across every keyword export we hold for Thailand, nearly ten thousand of them, the phrase “koh lipe thailand beach” draws 200 a month and Sunrise, Sunset and Pattaya draw nothing measurable at all. Three pages would split 200 searches three ways, and each would carry the same sea figure as the other two, because the island is smaller than the grid the sea is measured on. They would be three thin pages saying one thing. So the beaches got the space here instead, which is the same content without the dilution.