Mu Ko Lanta National Park

Mu Ko Lanta National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Ko Lanta is the long, easy-going island in the south of Krabi province, reached by car ferry and bridge from the mainland or by boat from Krabi, Phuket and Phi Phi, and its national park has two parts that are visited quite differently. The part on the island itself is the southern tip of Ko Lanta Yai, at the end of the west-coast road, where the tarmac grows steep and winding past the last beaches: here the entrance fee is paid at the gate, 200 baht for foreign adults at the time of writing, and visitors find the park headquarters, a white lighthouse on a rocky cape between two bays, a nature trail of about two kilometres through the forest, and a great many macaques. Most people simply ride there on a rented scooter or hire a tuk-tuk for the half-day;

the guided island tours combine it with Lanta Old Town, the teak stilt-house port on the east coast, and often a kayak trip. The rest of the park is islands and sea, and is sold as boat trips from the west-coast beaches and the piers at Saladan and Old Town: the four-islands tour by longtail or speedboat to Ko Ngai, Ko Chueak, Ko Ma and the Emerald Cave on Ko Mook, which belong to the neighbouring Hat Chao Mai park; the snorkelling trips to Ko Rok, the park's jewel; and the dive boats to Hin Daeng and Hin Muang. The mangrove kayaking tours at Thung Yee Pheng and around Ko Talabeng, the ATV rides on Lanta Noi and the elephant walks are private businesses outside the park, the last of doubtful value.

Visiting Mu Ko Lanta National Park: what you will see

The park was established in 1990 as Thailand's sixty-second and covers 134 square kilometres, more than four fifths of it sea, taking in the southern end of Ko Lanta Yai and some fifteen outlying islands. At the tip of Lanta Yai, the lighthouse on Laem Tanod looks over a sandy bay on one side and a bay of smooth stones on the other, with the hills of the island's forested spine behind; the nature trail climbs through rainforest with big dipterocarps, monitor lizards, hornbills, sea eagles overhead and the long-tailed macaques, which are bold thieves of anything in a plastic bag and should not be fed. The islands are the park's real wealth. Ko Rok Nok and Ko Rok Nai, twin islands thirty kilometres to the south, face each other across a channel of astonishingly clear water over coral, with beaches of powder-white sand, large monitor lizards patrolling the picnic area, and a park campsite;

many hold them to be the best snorkelling on Thailand's Andaman coast outside the Similans and Surin. Beyond them, the submerged pinnacles of Hin Daeng and Hin Muang, the red rock and the purple rock, named for their soft corals, drop to sixty metres, the deepest wall in Thai waters, and are visited by manta rays and whale sharks. Ko Ha, five limestone stacks closer to Lanta, has caverns and a lagoon beloved of divers, and Ko Talabeng's sea caves and mangroves are explored by kayak. In Sang Kha U village on the south-east coast live the Urak Lawoi, the island's first inhabitants, sea people who twice a year, on the full moons of the sixth and eleventh lunar months, launch a model boat to carry misfortune out to sea. Lanta Old Town, once a port of call for Chinese and Arab traders between Penang and Phuket, keeps its wooden shophouses on stilts over the water.

Mu Ko Lanta National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The headquarters area is open daily from about 8 am to 5 pm. The dry season from November to April is the time to come, with calm seas and clear water, and with the peak crowds and prices from Christmas to February; the offshore islands, Ko Rok, Ko Ha, Hin Daeng and Hin Muang, are closed to visitors during the south-west monsoon, from mid-May to mid-October, when the sea is rough, many Lanta businesses shut, and the island is green, cheap and very quiet.

The road to the lighthouse is steep, and inexperienced scooter riders come to grief on it. Allow a half-day for the lighthouse, a full day for Ko Rok. Krabi and Railay are two hours north, Ko Phi Phi an hour by ferry, and the Trang islands lie to the south.