Trat Thailand Guide

Most visitors pass Trat at speed, racing for the Koh Chang ferry. Slow down for one village on the way: Ban Nam Chieo (also spelled Ban Nam Chiao), a fishing and mangrove community in Laem Ngop district, a few minutes from the ferry piers. Its landmark is impossible to miss — a concrete bridge so steep it looks like a roller-coaster hump, built high so fishing boats can pass underneath. Its real treasure is quieter: a protected mangrove forest, a canal-side village where Muslim and Buddhist neighbours have fished together for generations, and some of Trat's best seafood snacks. The Steep Bridge and the Canal The Nam Chieo bridge arches sharply over the canal that is the village's main street. Fishing boats, longtails and small trawlers line both banks, and the view from the top of the bridge — canal, boats, mangrove green in every direction — is the classic Ban Nam Chieo photograph. Walk it carefully; it is steep, and local motorbikes take it at speed. Below, the canal lead...

Snorkelling Koh Rang and the Southern Islands: Trat's Clearest Water, From Bang Bao by Boat Ask anyone who has spent a week on Koh Chang where the clearest water was, and the answer is rarely the beach in front of their hotel. It is a boat ride away, to the south, where a scatter of small uninhabited islands rises out of deep blue water: Koh Rang and its neighbours. This is the snorkelling heart of Trat province, inside Mu Ko Chang National Park, and it works completely differently from the west-coast beaches most visitors know. There is no road, no resort row and no village on Koh Rang. There is a ranger station, a small shrine beach, mooring buoys for the dive and snorkel boats, and around the rocks and headlands, the healthiest coral reefs left in this part of the Gulf of Thailand. This guide explains how a Koh Rang snorkelling day actually works, in plain practical order: where the boats leave from, which islands the trips stop at, what you are likely to see underwater, wha...

Koh Kham and Koh Kradat: Koh Mak's Two Small Neighbours — Sandbar, Black Rocks and the Deer Island Most people who reach Koh Mak, the flat and quiet island in Trat province between Koh Chang and Koh Kood, settle into its slow rhythm within a day: bicycles on empty lanes, coconut groves, long shallow beaches and early nights. What many visitors only notice on their second or third day is that Koh Mak is not travelling alone. Scattered around it, close enough to see clearly from its beaches, are smaller islands that make perfect half-day and day trips — and two of them could hardly be more different from each other. Koh Kham is a tiny jewel of white sand, black volcanic rock and glass-clear shallows, famous for a sandbar that walks out into the sea at low tide. Koh Kradat is a flat, coconut-covered island roamed by a herd of free-wandering deer, visited by tractor cart and remembered by almost everyone as the strangest and sweetest boat trip in this corner of Trat. This guide cov...