Koh Lanta is what happens when an island resists the urge to become a party destination. Long Beach and Klong Dao in the north have the restaurants and the guesthouses, but drive south on the single coast road and the beaches grow progressively wilder — Kantiang Bay is a crescent of perfection, and Bamboo Bay at the southern tip feels like the edge of the world. The old town on the east coast, a collection of stilted wooden houses over the water, is where the original character lives. I checked into a bungalow at Kantiang Bay for three nights and ended up staying a week, which is apparently what Koh Lanta does to people.
The rhythm here is dictated by the tides and the sun, and trying to impose a schedule on it is a losing proposition. Mornings start with coffee from a beachside shack where the owner, a Thai woman named Noi who moved here from Bangkok fifteen years ago, roasts her own beans and serves them with a view of the Andaman Sea that no city cafe can compete with. The afternoons are for swimming, reading, or renting a scooter and exploring the interior — rubber plantations, Muslim fishing villages, and a network of red dirt roads that lead to viewpoints nobody seems to visit.
The snorkelling at Koh Rok, a two-island marine park an hour south by speedboat, is among the best in Thailand — visibility that stretches thirty metres and coral gardens that justify the early start. I floated above staghorn coral so dense and colourful it looked like an underwater city, and a blacktip reef shark passed beneath me with the indifference of a commuter. On the island itself, the pace is deliberately slow. Yoga studios sit beside Thai massage shops. Restaurants close when they feel like it. The national park at the southern tip offers a lighthouse, a rocky beach, and views across to the distant islands of the Trang archipelago that make you understand why people build lighthouses in the first place.
The old town — Lanta Old Town — deserves an afternoon. The stilted shophouses were built by Chinese and Thai-Muslim traders generations ago, and the community here has a character that the beach resorts on the west coast cannot replicate. There is a small gallery run by a Swedish painter who settled here decades ago, a handful of seafood restaurants where the catch was swimming that morning, and a view across the channel to Koh Bubu that turns gold at sunset.
When to go: November to April when the island is fully open and the seas are calm. Many resorts close entirely during the May to October monsoon season. February and March offer the best diving visibility.