Chaweng Beach, Koh Samui

Chaweng is seven kilometres of east-facing sand on Koh Samui’s busiest coast, and it is where most people who come to the island stay. It has the best sand on Samui, the most places to eat, effectively all of the nightlife, and the highest concentration of jet skis in the Gulf.

It is also long enough that “Chaweng is too busy” and “Chaweng is quiet” can both be true, depending which kilometre you booked.

Which part of seven kilometres

North Chaweng, above the lake, has the widest sand and the fewest people, and it is far enough from the centre that you will walk or take a taxi to dinner. It is where the bigger resorts sit.

Central Chaweng is the strip: the hotels, the bars, the tailors, the pharmacies and the noise. Everything you might want is within a few hundred metres and so is everything you might not.

Chaweng Noi, over the headland at the southern end, is a separate and much smaller bay. It is quieter, prettier in a conventional way, and about ten minutes from the strip. It is what second visits tend to choose.

The thing about the sea here

This is the fact worth planning around, and it is not what anyone expects from a tropical island.

The calmest month at Chaweng is October, at 0.24 metres. October is also Koh Samui’s second-wettest month, at 270mm. The roughest are December at 0.64 and January at 0.58, which are two of the driest months of the Samui year.

The reason is the northeast monsoon. It brings the Gulf’s weather from November into January and Chaweng faces east, straight into it, so the dry, bright, high-season weeks are also the weeks with a shore break and flags on the sand. Meanwhile the southwest monsoon that ruins the Andaman coast from May to September barely touches this side: it arrives across the peninsula, and the sea here goes flat.

So the best month by both measures is June, at 85mm and 0.29 metres, with April and May close. That run is the northern summer, when Phuket and Krabi are at their worst, and it is the entire argument for the Gulf.

A caveat about that number

Chaweng’s wave figure is not measured at Chaweng alone. The marine grid is about five kilometres and Chaweng shares its cell with Bophut, Maenam, Choeng Mon and Silver Beach, so all five return the same series. It describes this corner of the island’s sea, not this beach’s shore break.

Of Samui’s eight measured beaches, only Lamai sits in a cell of its own. Its numbers run two to five hundredths of a metre above Chaweng’s in every month, which is a real difference in the model and smaller than the grid can honestly resolve. Treat the two as the same sea.

Swimming, and the flags

Chaweng shelves gently and is easy swimming for most of the year. In the December-to-February run it develops a genuine shore break, and the red flags that go up along it mean what they say. It is the reverse of the Andaman coast, where the flags fly in the summer, and it catches out people who booked the dry season expecting flat water.

The jet skis are the other hazard, and the scam that goes with them is well documented: damage claimed on return that was there before. Photograph the machine before you take it out, or do not take it out.

Where Chaweng sits among the rest

The eight beaches compared against each other, with the tide caveat that catches people out on the north coast, are on Koh Samui’s beaches. Where to base yourself on the island as a whole is on where to stay, and the month-by-month picture for the island is on the weather page.