Trang & Satun Life

Tarutao National Marine Park: the Big Wild Island, Its Prison Years and Ao Son Every island group needs one island that refuses to be tamed, and in the far south of Thailand that island is Tarutao. It is the largest island in its archipelago — about 26 kilometres long and 11 wide, rising over 700 metres at its highest point, and still mostly forest. It gives its name to Thailand's first marine national park, declared in 1974, a protected sea of some 51 islands spread over roughly 1,490 square kilometres of the Strait of Malacca, within sight — on a clear day, almost within shouting distance — of Malaysia's Langkawi. Koh Lipe, in the same park, gets the fame. Tarutao gets the silence. We run a small family condo business over in Patong, Phuket, and Patong is a place where the beach has a soundtrack. Tarutao's beaches have weather. This guide is for travellers who like their islands big, green and a little demanding: what the park actually is, the extraordinary and sobering...

Satun Town and Pak Bara Pier: the Honest Gateway to Koh Lipe Almost everybody who comes to Satun province is on their way to somewhere else — specifically, to a small island about 60 kilometres offshore whose name is spoken all over the backpacking world: Koh Lipe. Satun is treated as the corridor and Lipe as the destination, and that is a shame twice over. It undersells a gentle, largely Muslim, Malay-flavoured provincial town with one of the prettiest museum buildings in the south. And it leaves travellers unprepared for the one piece of logistics their whole island trip depends on: Pak Bara pier, how its boats actually work, and how completely the seasons rule them. We run a small family condo business over in Patong, Phuket, and we have watched Phuket's piers turn into small airports. Pak Bara is not that, and this guide treats it honestly: what Satun town offers if you give it a night, how to work the pier without stress, what the crossing to Koh Lipe is really like, and wha...

Trang Town: Dim-Sum Breakfasts, Roast Pork, Trang Cake and the Old Shophouses There are towns in Thailand you visit for a temple, towns you visit for a beach, and exactly one town you visit, above all else, for breakfast. Trang, the small southern provincial capital a short drive from the Andaman coast, has turned the first meal of the day into a civic institution: steaming bamboo baskets of dim sum carried to your table by the tray, whole roast pork with skin that crackles like thin glass, strong old-style coffee poured in shops that have barely changed in half a century, and a ring-shaped sponge cake so beloved that travellers carry it home by the box, the bag and occasionally the suitcase. We run a small family condo business over in Patong, Phuket, and Phuket knows how to eat — but Phuket eats at night. Trang eats at dawn. Locals will tell you, with complete seriousness, that a proper Trang morning involves more dishes than most people eat all day, and that skipping breakfast her...