Things to Do on Koh Samui, and the Ones to Think Twice About

Koh Samui is a beach island with a ring road around it, and being honest about that is the fastest way to plan a week here. You can drive the whole circumference in an afternoon. The list of things to do on the island itself is short, it is genuinely good, and it will not fill seven days. What fills the rest is the water, and the water has a calendar.

On the island

The Big Buddha, at Wat Phra Yai on the northeast corner, is twelve metres of gilded seated Buddha at the top of a naga staircase, on a small island joined to Samui by a causeway. It is the island’s landmark and it takes half an hour. Shoulders and knees covered, as at any working temple.

Hin Ta and Hin Yai, the Grandfather and Grandmother rocks, sit on the shore at the southern end of Lamai. They are a granite formation of a very particular shape, the Thai name says so without embarrassment, and the walk down to them takes ten minutes through a gauntlet of stalls. Go for the coastline as much as the joke: the rocks sit on a good stretch of rough shore with the Lamai headland behind.

The waterfalls. Na Muang 1 is beside the road and takes five minutes to reach; Na Muang 2 is a thirty minute climb and is the better one. Both are seasonal in the way every Thai waterfall is seasonal, which means they are worth the trip in and just after the wet months and can be a trickle in February and March. Judge them by the rainfall of the preceding weeks rather than by the photograph on the sign.

The markets. Fisherman’s Village at Bophut holds a Friday night walking street along a lane of old wooden shophouses, and Lamai has a Sunday one. These are the best evenings on the island and they cost nothing.

Wellness. Samui’s spa and retreat scene is unusually developed and is a real reason people come here rather than a line in a brochure. It ranges from an hour of massage on the sand to residential programmes of a week or more.

On the water

Ang Thong marine park is the day trip to keep. Forty-odd limestone islands scattered across a marine national park to the west, about ninety minutes out, with a viewpoint climb, an inland saltwater lake and kayaking between the stacks. It is the most weather-dependent thing on this page, because the crossing is open water: the sea off this coast averages 0.24 metres in October and 0.64 in December, and the difference is the difference between a boat trip and an ordeal.

Koh Pha Ngan is half an hour away by ferry and is much quieter than its Full Moon reputation suggests on any of the other twenty-nine nights. The north of that island, Thong Nai Pan in particular, is a different world from Haad Rin.

Koh Tao is another hour beyond it and is one of the cheapest places in the world to learn to dive. It works as a long day trip and works far better as two or three nights.

The practical routes and timings between the three are on our route pages, and the season that governs all of them is on the weather page.

The two we will not recommend without saying something first

Pig Island. Koh Madsum, south of Samui, is a small beach with pigs on it, and it appears on almost every list of things to do here because a photograph of a pig in the sea performs well. What it is, in practice, is a population of animals kept on a hot island so that boatloads of visitors can feed and handle them all day. We are not going to pretend that is a highlight. If you go as part of a wider snorkelling trip, do not feed them, and do not pull one into the water for a picture.

The elephant venues. Several operations on Samui use the word sanctuary, which is not a regulated term in Thailand. Riding is out and most people now know that. Bathing with elephants is also out, and considerably fewer people know it, because it is the activity that has replaced riding in the marketing without solving the underlying problem. Our guide to telling a sanctuary from a camp lists the questions to ask before you book, and they work anywhere in the country.

What the month decides

Almost everything on the water. From April to September the sea here is flat, generally under 0.35 metres, and the boat trips run reliably. From November to February the northeast monsoon puts the same crossings at 0.53 to 0.64 metres, and Ang Thong and the Koh Tao runs are the first things cancelled.

The land attractions are the other way round. The waterfalls are best when there has been rain, which means the months the boats are least reliable are the months the inland half of the island is at its best. That is a genuinely useful trade to know about if your dates are fixed: a wet week on Samui is a week to hire a car, not a week to book boats.

How long the island holds

Four nights is a comfortable minimum: a beach, one boat day and one afternoon on the ring road. A week is right if you add Pha Ngan or Tao. Ten days on Samui alone is longer than the island can carry unless the point is a resort and a book, which for a lot of people here it legitimately is.