Na Muang Waterfalls

The road to Na Muang starts at the southern ring road and climbs into the island’s interior, and within five minutes the coastal resort world dissolves completely. Rubber trees replace the hotels. The road narrows to a single lane with grass growing up the centre stripe. You pass a school, a small shrine with fresh offerings, a woman on a bicycle carrying more than seems geometrically possible. By the time you reach the parking area for the lower waterfall you feel, absurdly, like you have left the island and arrived somewhere that has nothing to do with beaches.

The first waterfall — Na Muang 1 — drops about twenty metres over a broad shelf of volcanic rock whose colour is a surprising purple-violet, stained by mineral deposits over time. There is a pool at the base where you can swim, and it is deep enough to jump into from a ledge to the left. On weekends Thai families come here with folding tables and coolers of food, and the social atmosphere is entirely about the water rather than the scenery — kids shrieking, adults calling to each other from either bank, the occasional person floating on their back in the current looking upward at the canopy. I swam here twice and both times felt the trail-dust and heat rinse off in a way that felt dramatically disproportionate to how far I’d come.

The second waterfall, Na Muang 2, requires a forty-minute walk on a trail that goes up rather than along — a genuine climb in some sections, using rope handholds where the path steepens. You will sweat. You will step over roots and through mud if it has rained recently. You will encounter no vendors, no tour guides, no signs promising a three-star experience. The trail passes through secondary jungle that is doing its own thing entirely — large-leafed plants whose names I don’t know pressing in from both sides, small lizards disappearing into the undergrowth, birdsong that is constant and unidentifiable and beautiful for being so.

The upper waterfall is taller — thirty metres — and narrower, and falls into a smaller pool with less room for swimming but more for standing under. I arrived to find one other person there: a young Thai man eating a packet of instant noodles cold, straight from the bag, sitting on a flat rock beside the pool with his sandals off and his phone face-down beside him. He nodded at me. I nodded back. We both looked at the waterfall for a while. It seemed like exactly the right amount of human interaction for the situation.

The descent is faster and wetter, because by the time you come back down your shoes are already compromised. I stopped at a small shack at the trailhead on the way out where a woman sold fresh mango with chilli-lime powder and cold coconut water from a styrofoam box. I ate sitting on a wooden bench and looked back up toward the trees and thought about how the entire island had been like this before the hotels arrived, which is not an original thought but sometimes you need to have the unoriginal ones.

When to go: The dry season from December through April is the most accessible — the trail to the upper fall becomes genuinely difficult after heavy rain. That said, the waterfalls are at their most powerful in the wet season if you can manage the mud. Go early in the morning to beat the heat on the climb to Na Muang 2; the lower fall gets busy by eleven on weekends.