Southern Thailand
Discover Southern Thailand
Introduction
Southern Thailand is the long isthmus and peninsula running down to the Malaysian border, with an Andaman Sea coast on the west and the Gulf of Thailand on the east. The two sides have opposite weather, which is the single most useful thing to know about the region: when one is being rained on, the other usually is not.
The Andaman side is the dramatic one — limestone karst towers rising straight out of the water around Phang Nga Bay and Krabi, the beaches and diving of Phuket and the Similan Islands, and long-tail boats running between them. Its best months are roughly November to April. The Gulf side, with Koh Samui, Koh Phangan and the diving school island of Koh Tao, runs on a different monsoon and is generally at its best from February to September.
Inland the peninsula is mountainous and forested, with Khao Sok holding rainforest older than the Amazon around a reservoir of drowned karst. The deep south — Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat — is culturally Malay and Muslim rather than Thai and Buddhist, with its own language, and has had a long-running separatist insurgency; most governments advise against travel to those three provinces specifically.