In search of paradise in Thailand's western isles

The Khao Sok National Park is thought to be older than the Amazon

(Image credit: Pakin Songmor / Getty Images)

I have fond and ever-more nostalgic memories of my first backpacking trip around Thailand aeons ago: my "dog-eared" copy of the Lonely Planet guide, the nights I spent in bamboo shacks on castaway beaches, the fresh taste of coconuts just plucked from the tree. In the country's coastal regions that place has rather vanished, said Chris Schalkx in Condé Nast Traveller, as "marble-heavy resorts" and "sleek, foreign-owned restaurants" have grown up "along every other shore".

But there are still some unspoiled spots to be found – and to reach a couple of the best, you might base yourself in Khao Lak, beside the Andaman Sea, some 60 miles north of Phuket. With its co-working cafés and "surfy concept shops", Khao Lak is the kind of "Shoreditch-inflected surf town" you might find in Bali or southern Sri Lanka. A Starbucks, "ever the harbinger of insipidity", opened a week before my most recent visit, but the place still has a "freewheeling vibe", and some beautiful, laid-back resorts such as Devasom. It's close to the mountainous Khao Sok National Park, where you might spot gibbons, langurs and other wildlife in a rainforest said to be older than the Amazon.

And it is also well placed for trips to the Surin Islands, a far-flung archipelago home to the Moken people, sea nomads of whom only about 800 still live in Thailand. The Moken are astonishingly good divers, and I visited their islands with Suntan Soul, a free-diving outfit run by a Moken boat captain and two instructors from the mainland. The seas here are "almost comically turquoise", the reefs dazzling, and the spectacular beaches are deserted after the last daytrippers have gone.