Koh Mak Travel Guide

Koh Mak sits between Koh Chang and Koh Kood, and it is the flat one. About thirty square kilometres of coconut and rubber plantation with a low profile, two main bays and very little traffic, most of it owned for generations by a handful of families.

It is the least dramatic of the three Trat islands and the easiest to move around. It is also, by our measurements, the wettest place in this guide.

The wettest place we measure

675mm in July, across thirty rain days. That is more than Koh Kood’s 624 and Koh Chang’s 566, and well over the 400mm that makes Khao Lak the wettest place on the Andaman coast. The annual total is 3,397mm.

⛔ Worth stating because it is tempting to draw a line: this is not a north-to-south gradient. Koh Mak lies between the other two and is wetter than either. The three Trat islands are the three wettest places on this site and they sit within forty kilometres of each other, so whatever is happening is happening to the archipelago rather than sliding evenly along it.

The other half is as sharp. December takes 20mm and January 31. The planning rule for all three of these islands is the same and it is not a preference: come in the dry season, which here runs from about December to March.

The two beaches

Ao Kao on the southwest side is the main one: a long shallow curve with most of the island’s rooms behind it and the sunset at the end of it. Ao Suan Yai on the northwest is wider and emptier, and looks across the water to Koh Chang.

Both sit in one five-kilometre cell of the marine model, which returns 0.28 to 0.93 metres across the year for the island as a whole and cannot tell one bay from the other. On an island this small that is the honest state of the measurement rather than a limitation worth apologising for.

Getting around, which is the actual difference

Koh Mak is flat. That sounds trivial and it is the thing that separates it from its neighbours: Koh Chang’s west-coast road has two steep sections with a bad reputation, and Koh Kood is hilly enough that a scooter is effectively required. Here a bicycle is genuinely enough, and the plantation tracks make a good afternoon.

Where it fits

Koh Mak is a middle island in every sense. It is the one you stop at between the other two, and it works best as two or three nights inside a longer eastern trip rather than as a destination in itself.

Koh Chang if you want a mountain, a road and somewhere to go out. Koh Kood if you want the prettiest water and the fewest people. Koh Mak if you want to cycle, and if the phrase “not much happens” reads as a recommendation.

Why this page exists at all

Honestly: because the other two mention it and it earned a page by completing them rather than by demand. Koh Mak returns no measurable search volume in any keyword export this site holds, which is unusual for somewhere with hotels on it, and is the clearest evidence available of how few people are looking.

That is not an argument against going. It is the reason the island is like this, and it is worth knowing that you will be somewhere most people planning a Thai beach holiday have never heard of. The three islands together are on the islands overview.