Longtail at Low Tide

On the Andaman Coast of southern Thailand, the sea keeps its own timetable, and the best days are planned around it. Twice a day the water draws back from the limestone islands and reveals what it hides at high tide: sandbars that join one island to the next, hidden lagoons inside hollow cliffs, beaches that exist for three hours and then vanish again.

Most visitors see this coast from the deck of a crowded speedboat at the busiest hour. We prefer a slower approach, by longtail, in the company of someone who grew up reading these tides.

The boatman and the tide chart

The boatman we work with has fished the waters between Krabi and the islands of Phang Nga Bay since he was a boy. He does not consult a tide table. He looks at the water lapping a particular rock near the pier, considers the moon, and tells you what time to be ready.

His boat is a traditional longtail, narrow and elegant, its prow wrapped in coloured ribbons and garlands left as offerings for a safe passage. The engine is loud for the first few minutes, then you stop noticing it. The coast slides by: mangroves, fishing villages on stilts, karst towers rising sheer out of the water and draped in green.

Into the hong

Some of the islands here are hollow. Over thousands of years, rain and sea have dissolved their limestone cores, leaving enclosed lagoons open to the sky and reachable only through low sea caves. The Thai word for them is hong, meaning room.

The trick is to arrive at exactly the right moment, when the tide is low enough to slip beneath the cave mouth but high enough to float. You transfer to a small kayak, lie back as the guide paddles you through a tunnel of dripping rock, and emerge into a hidden world: a circular lagoon walled by cliffs a hundred metres high, ferns and wild orchids clinging to the stone, the water perfectly still and green as jade.

Arrive early and you may have the room to yourself. A kingfisher. A troop of long-tailed macaques picking their way along the rim. The faint sound of the sea outside, muffled, as though in another building.

A beach for an afternoon

As the tide drops further, the boatman steers toward a pair of small islands joined, for now, by a curving spit of white sand. Wade ashore. The sand is fine and cool. On one side the water is glassy and shallow; on the other, small waves fold gently onto the beach.

Lunch is set up in the shade of the cliff. A low table on the sand, cushions, a parasol of woven palm. The boat’s cook has brought green curry of fish caught that morning, a salad of pomelo and toasted coconut, sticky rice, and slices of mango so ripe they need no knife. There is a cool box of coconuts, already opened.

Swim. Sleep. Walk to the end of the sandbar and back. Watch the water start to creep in from both sides, quietly reclaiming the path you walked an hour ago.

The villa on the headland

Return in the late afternoon to a villa perched on a forested headland above the sea, its pavilions linked by stone paths through frangipani and wild jasmine. Your private pool runs to the edge of the terrace and seems to spill into the bay below.

The house is designed to dissolve the line between inside and out. Teak floors, sliding screens, a bed that faces the water. In the evening the staff light candles along the paths and lower the bamboo blinds against the breeze. A Thai massage pavilion sits a little way down the hill, open on three sides to the sound of the sea.

Sunset from the water

If you have one evening, spend it back on the longtail. The boatman will take you out past the nearest islands as the sun goes down behind the karsts, the sky turning peach, then violet, then a deep, luminous blue.

In the darker months, when the moon is new, the water around the mangroves sometimes glows with bioluminescent plankton. Trail your hand over the side and watch it light up with small blue sparks. The boatman will laugh at your delight. He has seen it a thousand times, and he still says it is his favourite thing about home.

When to come

November to April brings calm seas, clear skies and the gentlest conditions for exploring the islands. The shoulder weeks of November and April are quieter still. The monsoon months have their own moody beauty, but many of the hongs become unreachable, and the boatman, wisely, stays home.