Thailand: Koh Lipe – Thailand’s Southernmost Island Paradise

There are plentiful opportunities for diving and snorkelling tours departing from Koh Lipe, operating out of the numerous shops that line Walking Street and the beaches. We are not divers — never have been — so we booked ourselves onto a full day of snorkelling instead, which suited us perfectly well. We chatted to a number of operators before settling on one whose explanation of the day’s itinerary was the most coherent and enthusiastic, always a good sign.

Our instructions for the morning were to meet our boat on the beach beside the Sita Beach Resort at nine-thirty. We scuttled down for breakfast with all our gear and walked the few yards to the beach, feeling rather organised about the whole thing. What we found was the tide fully out and a number of long-tail boats high and dry on the sand like beached whales, with no obvious indication of which one was ours. We were not the only people waiting. As time passed, more boats began to arrive and various groups of tourists paired themselves off with various captains in a process that seemed to be governed by some system entirely invisible to us. Karen rang the man we had booked with, who cheerfully informed us that the boat was on its way and was — his exact words — “coming over the hill.” This was, we noted, a curious thing to say about a boat. We waited. And waited. Until we were quite literally the last people standing on that beach, staring out to sea with increasing anxiety and the dawning suspicion that we had been had. And then, finally, our boat arrived. And who should already be aboard but Art and Corine, an older couple from Vancouver, British Columbia, whom we had met the previous day, along with a couple from China who had apparently been waiting elsewhere entirely. So that was all fine then.

Our captain set off for the first snorkelling spot. Koh Lipe is part of the Satun Islands — formally the Mu Ko Tarutao National Marine Park — which has been protected as a national park since 1974 specifically because of its extraordinary marine biodiversity. The reef systems here are some of the least damaged in the whole of the Andaman Sea, partly because of the park’s protected status and partly because the remoteness of the area kept mass tourism away for longer than elsewhere. After about twenty minutes crossing some rather choppy open water — the sort that makes you grateful for breakfast but wish you’d had less of it — we pulled up on a beach on Koh Adang. Koh Adang is an uninhabited island that sits just north of Koh Lipe, significantly larger and covered in dense forest that comes right down to the waterline. We clambered off the boat, pulled on our snorkelling gear and launched ourselves into the sea.

The reef began only a few feet from the shore, and we were almost immediately swimming over some of the most spectacular coral I had ever seen in my life — and we had done a fair bit of snorkelling by that point. The variety on display was extraordinary: massive brain corals, branching staghorn formations, soft corals swaying in the current, all in remarkably good condition considering how popular the area has become. Among the coral were giant clams — proper, enormous, Tridacna gigas-sized giants — with the most extraordinary coloured mantles. Some were brilliant turquoise, some vivid green, and one in particular was a deep, rich midnight blue that stopped me dead in the water to stare at it. Swimming in and out of the coral was a remarkable variety of fish: parrotfish of several species, butterfly fish with their distinctive yellow-and-black patterning, and — my personal favourites — the emperor angelfish, with their bold blue-and-yellow adult colouring that makes them look as though they’ve been designed by someone showing off. We spent about forty-five minutes in that reef before climbing back onto the boat, absolutely delighted with ourselves.

We then headed to Koh Yang for lunch, which was where all the tour boats seemed to congregate. There were picnic tables set up on the beach and our company provided a very decent rice and vegetable lunch, which we ate in the shade while drying off and chatting to Art and Corine about Vancouver and whether it actually rains there as much as everyone claims. It does, apparently.

After a comfortable break, we headed out again to our next snorkelling spot: Koh Hing Ngam, a small rocky island about twenty minutes away. This time, rather than beaching, the captain anchored about four hundred metres offshore and we slipped into the water from the boat. The conditions here were noticeably different — the water was deeper, the visibility somewhat reduced by cloud cover and what appeared to be a mass of small particles floating near the surface. The fish were certainly interested in these particles, rising to feed near the top of the water, which made for spectacular close-up encounters. However, we later compared notes with the other passengers and concluded that these particles were almost certainly small marine organisms that had a tendency to bite, as everyone said they felt intermittently stung throughout this section of the swim. Not so nice.

I had my GoPro and became, as I am prone to doing, completely absorbed in filming. I had one eye on the coral and one eye on the viewfinder and precisely zero eyes on where I was in relation to the boat. When I eventually surfaced and looked around, I discovered to my considerable alarm that we had drifted approximately three hundred metres from the vessel. In water that, I now noticed, had a very strong current running through it. Karen and I started swimming back as hard as we could. Karen, sensible woman that she is, found a patch of water with less current and made it back to the boat. I did not. I swam. I really swam. I gave it everything I had. And I went precisely nowhere fast. Karen leaned over the side of the boat and called out to ask if I was all right. I said no, because I was not. I was genuinely exhausted and the boat was still a long way away. Another boat had arrived nearby, and one of its passengers — an absolutely splendid human being whose name I never got — handed me his life jacket. Our captain brought the boat closer and threw in the lifebuoy, and eventually I was hauled back aboard, somewhat undignified but entirely alive and very grateful for both those things.

After my near-death experience — which Karen has since referred to as merely “the incident” in the measured way of someone determined not to give me the satisfaction of it sounding dramatic — the captain took us around the corner of the island to a beach covered in huge, dark, smooth pebbles. These are metamorphic stones that have been worn smooth over millennia by the action of the sea, and they are genuinely beautiful — polished to a shine, ranging in colour from deep grey to near-black, and warm to the touch in the afternoon sun. The local belief is that the island has a guardian spirit, known as Chao Pho Tarutao, who will curse anyone who removes stones from the beach. There are signs making this clear. Art, our new friend from Vancouver, appeared not to have read them, as he quietly pocketed some smaller pebbles. We watched this with a mixture of amusement and mild concern for his wellbeing on the journey home. There are also signs on the beach advising visitors not to build stone towers, but apparently the legends hold that anyone who can successfully stack twelve stones will have their wishes granted. I managed five, which given I had only recently been pulled half-drowned out of the sea, I thought was rather respectable. On the way back to Koh Lipe, the captain decided to skip the final snorkelling point as conditions were poor and the area was already crowded with other boats, and instead gave us a gentle tour around the far side of the island, which was a perfectly lovely way to end the afternoon.