Silver Beach, Koh Samui

Silver Beach, or Thong Ta Khian in Thai, is about two hundred metres of sand in the headland between Chaweng and Lamai. It is closed at both ends by granite, it is the clearest water within reach of Samui’s two main beaches, and you can drive past the turning without knowing it is there.

Why the water is clearer than its neighbours’

It is a question of scale rather than of luck. Chaweng is seven kilometres of open beach with a current running along it, and that movement keeps fine sand in suspension. Silver Beach is two hundred metres held between two granite headlands, so there is very little along-shore movement and the sand settles.

The same rocks are the reason to bring a mask. There are fish at both ends in water shallow enough to see them from the surface, which is not true of the long beaches either side.

The beach this site measures worst

Every beach page here carries a caveat about the marine grid. This is the beach where the caveat is larger than the measurement.

The model works in cells of about five kilometres. Silver Beach is two hundred metres long. It shares its cell with Chaweng, Bophut, Maenam and Choeng Mon, so the wave series below is one figure covering twenty-five square kilometres of sea and five beaches of entirely different shapes.

What that number describes is the open water off this coast. What it cannot describe is a pocket cove behind two headlands, which is calmer than the open water by an amount nothing available to us can quantify. Read the series for the season and not for this beach.

The season it does describe is the one that matters on this coast, and it is counter-intuitive: the calmest month is October, which is Samui’s second-wettest at 270mm, and the roughest are December and January, two of the driest. June, at 85mm, is the one month where the rain and the sea are both near their best.

Getting there, and when to go

It is signposted off the ring road between Chaweng and Lamai, down a short steep track. There is parking at the top for a small fee and a walk down. Taxis know it.

Go early or late. Two hundred metres does not need many people on it to feel busy, and in high season the middle of the day is when the day-trippers from both neighbouring beaches arrive. The first hours and the last two are when it is what the photographs promise.

Staying here, or not

There are a handful of places on the cove and they trade on the view, which is fair because the view is the product. What there is not is a strip: no row of restaurants, no shops, no walking anywhere for dinner.

For most people Silver Beach is an afternoon from Chaweng or Lamai rather than a week. The eight beaches compared against each other are on Koh Samui’s beaches.