Most people who visit Phang Nga Bay see the same three things. They see James Bond Island — yes, it’s spectacular, worth seeing, absolutely on the list. They see Koh Panyi, the floating village on stilts. And they see the inside of a boat for two hours each way while a guide reads from a laminated script.
That’s fine. Those are genuinely good things. But Phang Nga Bay is enormous — 400 square kilometres of water, islands, sea caves, hidden lagoons, mangrove forests, and wildlife — and the standard tour covers maybe two per cent of it.
I’ve been navigating these waters for nearly 20 years. I know where the crowds don’t go. I know which sea caves have bioluminescent plankton and which ones have bats hanging from the ceiling like living stalactites. I know the beach that nobody visits because it takes an extra 20 minutes to get there and the big boats can’t be bothered. And I know the particular hour of the afternoon when the light on the karst cliffs turns everything golden and the bay looks like the beginning of the world.
Let me show you some of it.
“Hong” means room in Thai. In Phang Nga Bay, it refers to a specific kind of place — a completely enclosed lagoon hidden inside a hollow limestone island, accessible only through a sea cave that floods at high tide. You can only get in by canoe, lying flat in the boat as it slides through the narrow passage. And when you come out the other side, you’re inside.
Inside a hong, the walls rise vertically around you — hundreds of metres of limestone covered in ferns, orchids, and mangrove roots — and the only sky you can see is a rough oval of blue directly above. The water is still and dark. Kingfishers nest in the cracks in the rock. Sometimes a monitor lizard slides off a ledge into the water with barely a splash. And the light, at the right time of day, falls straight down into the lagoon in a single column and turns the water a colour you won’t have seen before.
The big tour boats know the hongs exist. They can’t reach them. Their boats are too large for the sea caves, and their itineraries don’t allow for the time it takes to properly explore one. On our trips, the hong is the centrepiece — not the James Bond photo stop.
Koh Phanak is, in my opinion, the finest island in Phang Nga Bay for exploration. It has multiple hongs, a complex network of sea caves, and beaches that are so rarely visited they still have the kind of stillness that reminds you what silence actually sounds like.
The caves on Phanak range from wide, light-filled chambers where you can paddle upright and look at the formations overhead, to narrow passages where you have to lie flat on your back in the canoe and pull yourself through with your fingertips on the rock above. Not for everyone, that last bit — but for the people who do it, it’s the kind of thing they talk about for years.
We spend more time here than any other operator on the bay. Not because I’m trying to be different, but because once you’ve been, it’s obvious that this is the good stuff.
Phang Nga Bay is one of the last strongholds of the Irrawaddy dolphin in Thailand. Spotting them isn’t guaranteed — nothing with wildlife ever is — but we know the areas where they’re most likely to be and we take routes that give us the best chance. When you do see them, they tend to be in small groups, close to the boat, curious rather than shy.
The dugong is rarer still — a large, gentle marine mammal that grazes on seagrass in the shallower parts of the bay. I’ve seen them on trips perhaps a dozen times in twenty years. But I know the areas, and we always look.
More reliably: the eagles. White-bellied sea eagles nest in the karst cliffs throughout the bay and are genuinely impressive in the air — big, slow-moving, utterly unconcerned by boats. Brahminy kites too, smaller and more acrobatic, often seen diving for fish near the mangrove edges. Monkeys in the mangroves — crab-eating macaques, usually, bold enough to come quite close if you’re quiet.
And of course, after dark — the bioluminescent plankton in the sea caves. This is the thing that people find hardest to believe until they’ve seen it. Run your hand through the water in a dark cave and it glows. Every time.
I’m going to be slightly cagey about this one, not because I want to be mysterious, but because the whole point of a secret beach is that it stays relatively quiet. What I’ll say is this: on our Phang Nga Bay trips, we include a stop at a beach that the big tour boats don’t visit. It has white sand, completely calm water in a sheltered bay, and on a good day you can have it entirely to yourselves. We serve lunch here.
If that sounds like something you want, book the trip. I’ll take you there.
During the day, James Bond Island is busy. It’s still worth seeing — the rock formation is genuinely extraordinary and there’s a reason it made it into a Bond film — but it’s crowded, and crowded is not the experience that does justice to the place.
On our James Bond Sunset Experience, we arrive in the late afternoon when the day-trippers have gone and the light is doing something remarkable. The warm orange light falls on the limestone and it glows. The bay is quiet. You can take a photo without thirty other tourists in the frame. Then the sun sets, dinner on the boat, and back into the caves for the bioluminescence.
That’s the version worth doing. Not the mid-morning rush.
If you want to know more about the official highlights of Phang Nga Bay before you decide on a trip, our guide to the must-visit places in Phang Nga Bay is a good place to start. But come out on the water with us, and I’ll show you the bits that didn’t make the guide.
— Captain Mark
Exceptional, uncrowded island day trips from Phuket. Family-owned and operated since 2004.
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