Quiet Koh Mook

Chancing the reliability of speedboats again, we purchased tickets to take us from Koh Lipe to Koh Mook, another bead on the Trang Islands necklace. Upon checking in, we and our bags were unceremoniously tagged with blue "Mook" stickers and herded onto a fleet of long tail boats with numerous other blue, orange, pink and green stickered people. Looking like heads of partially roasted livestock about to be shipped, we were offloaded onto a floating platform in the middle of the bay, before being categorised, counted and loaded onto the appropriate speedboat heading north.


Koh Mook was a relatively quiet island with a village population that, in addition to catering for tourists, also had a healthy fishing industry and working rubber tree plantations. We stayed on the mangrove side, where long tails regularly beach themselves as the tide moves in and out a few hundred metres at a time. A tour around the island took us to several snorkelling sites as well as Emerald Cave, involving a fascinating swim through a pitch black cave tunnel that opened up to a beautiful sand beach completely surrounded by lush greenery and sheer cliffs. Our guide managed to time our arrival so as to avoid the shiploads of visitors to this cave, ensuring that we had the peaceful little sanctuary to ourselves for a whole 5 minutes before the next wave arrived.