Look, packing for this trip is not complicated, and I nearly didn’t bother writing it down, because how much can there really be to say about a half-day boat ride to a beach. Then last year I watched a guy on Thong Krut pier trying to revive his phone in a bag of rice, rice he’d bought from a stall right there at the pier, which I’m now fairly sure exists for exactly that reason, and I figured maybe there’s a touch more to it than people assume. So here’s what’s worth bringing out to Koh Madsum, what you can leave behind, and the couple of things the standard packing lists either get wrong or skip over entirely.
The thing that trips people up isn’t the gear at all. It’s that they badly underestimate how wet they’re going to get. You’re not standing on a dry deck admiring pigs from a polite distance. The boat comes in shallow, the pigs paddle out to meet it, and at some point you’re stepping off into water that’s anywhere between your ankles and your knees depending on the tide and wherever the driver decides to stop. Once you’ve accepted that, most of the rest of the packing question sorts itself out on its own.
What actually needs to be in the bag
Swimwear is the obvious one, but the real advice is to put it on under your clothes before you leave the hotel, because there’s nowhere especially good to change once the boat’s moving and you’ll want to be ready when the first stop arrives. I’ve watched people turn up in jeans, presumably planning to stay dry and dignified, and they end up spending the whole morning either skipping the good parts or sitting around in soaked denim, which in this heat is its own particular kind of suffering. If you’re someone who burns easily, and the sun here from late morning through early afternoon is genuinely brutal, a rash guard will do more for you in the water than sunscreen that’s already sliding off your shoulders.
Which brings me to the sunscreen, and this is the one item I’ll actually push you on. Get yourself a reef-safe one before you go. The ordinary chemical stuff, anything listing oxybenzone or octinoxate on the back, does real damage to coral, and the reef at the Koh Tan snorkel stop that features on basically every version of this tour is in better shape than a lot of what’s left around the area, so it would be a genuine shame to bleach it on your way past. The mineral sunscreens built on zinc or titanium dioxide work perfectly well and don’t do that. They go on a little chalky and leave you looking faintly pale for a while, which is more noticeable on darker skin, and I won’t pretend that isn’t mildly irritating, but it rinses off by the afternoon and the coral gets to carry on existing. Boots in Chaweng keeps them in stock, so do most of the pharmacies, and you’ll want to put it on back at the hotel instead of on the boat, where roughly half of it ends up smeared across the seat next to you.
A dry bag is the item people leave behind and then quietly regret. Nothing fancy is needed here, just a small roll-top one, five or ten litres, a couple of hundred baht at any of the gear stalls in town. That’s where your phone lives for the day, along with your cash and a photo copy of your passport, all together in one waterproof spot, because the speedboats throw up a surprising amount of spray and your ordinary backpack is not going to forgive you for the experience. A handful of the operators do have a covered dry corner on board where you can stash things, but I wouldn’t bank on it, and I wouldn’t go asking the question with my unprotected phone already sitting in my hand.
Bring cash, and bring a bit more than the arithmetic suggests you’ll need. There’s a small fee to actually set foot on the island, somewhere around 100 baht a head the last time I paid it, though that’s precisely the sort of figure that drifts upward without any announcement, so treat it as a ballpark and check with whoever you book through whether it’s already wrapped into the price. The larger point is that Koh Madsum runs entirely on cash. There’s no ATM, the drink and snack vendors won’t look at a card, and even the approved food for the pigs has to be paid for in baht. I tend to carry five hundred to a thousand each beyond the tour price, and a good bit more if there are kids along who are going to want every coconut and every bag of pig snacks the moment they spot them.
On the subject of water, most tours hand you a bottle or two and sometimes there’s lunch, but throw an extra one in your bag regardless. What gets you is that the sun and the boat motion and the swimming all dry you out faster than you’d ever notice, and the first sign tends to be a headache somewhere in the back half of the trip rather than any honest feeling of being thirsty. Filling a bottle at the hotel before you leave costs you nothing, whereas the same bottle bought on the island runs a fair bit more than it would at the 7-Eleven by the pier, which is a small markup that’s entirely reasonable and also entirely skippable.
Photos, and keeping your phone alive
The whole reason most people sign up is to come home with a picture of a pig swimming towards them, so the camera question carries more weight than it would on an ordinary beach day, and at heart it’s a question of how attached you are to your phone making it home in one piece.
An action camera is the cleanest answer if you happen to own one. A GoPro or any of the cheaper imitations goes straight into the water with the pigs, comes down to the reef at the snorkel stop, and you never have to think about it once. If you don’t own one and you really do want those shots, a couple of the dive shops and camera places over in Chaweng and Lamai will rent you one by the day, which works out a lot better than buying a whole camera for a single morning of pig photography you may well never repeat.
For most people though it’s the phone, and if that’s you, spend the 100 or 200 baht on a waterproof pouch at a market stall before you set off. The zip-seal sleeves are fine for standing in the shallows getting your pig pictures. I wouldn’t take one snorkelling to any real depth, but for wading about they hold up perfectly well. The newer phones all advertise some level of water resistance and I’m sure they mostly mean it, but saltwater is a different animal from a quick freshwater splash. It doesn’t necessarily kill the phone on the day. It corrodes things slowly and then your charging port packs in about three weeks later, back home, long after you’ve stopped thinking about pigs. The pouch is cheap insurance against a story you’d rather not have.
If you’ve gone to the effort of bringing a proper camera, a mirrorless or a DSLR, you can absolutely come away with lovely shots, you just have to be strict with yourself about leaving it in the dry bag until you’re standing on dry sand. There’s no reason to take it anywhere near the water. The pigs wander right up the beach and stand around looking photogenic for free, so you can get everything you’re after from solid ground and keep the expensive thing well clear of the sea. And if the photos really are the priority for you, push for an early departure, since most boats leave between eight and ten, the morning light is much softer than the bleaching midday glare, and you’ll get a little of the beach before the other boats start arriving.
The smaller stuff, and the things to leave behind
A few extras earn their space without being strictly essential. Something on your feet for the wading helps, and water shoes have the edge over flip flops if the landing spot turns out rocky, though flip flops are perfectly fine provided you keep half an eye on them, because boat floors have a real talent for hiding loose sandals. A dry t-shirt and shorts for the ride home take up almost no room and feel far better than they have any right to once you’re salty and damp and ready to be finished. A small microfibre towel is worth tucking in as well, since whether or not the tour provides one is genuinely a coin toss. And if you’re at all prone to seasickness, take the tablet before you board rather than after the queasiness has already set in, especially in the choppier months from around November through February when the crossing can get lively, because those things only really do their job when you’ve taken them ahead of time.
As for what stays at the hotel, the chemical sunscreen is top of the list, which I’ve already lectured you about and won’t repeat. Anything genuinely valuable belongs there too, so that means your passport, any real jewellery, more cash than the day actually calls for, none of which has a safe home on the island and all of which is easy to lose on a crowded boat or somewhere in the water. A photo of your passport on your phone covers everything you’ll need for a day trip. The big bag can stay behind as well, since this is a matter of hours and not an overnight, and a full suitcase is just one more thing to wrestle onto a small boat and drag back and forth across the sand for no good reason.
The one that genuinely catches people off guard is the food for the pigs. It feels like the kind thing to do, rolling up with snacks for them, except random human food isn’t actually good for the animals, so your leftover breakfast pastry and your crisps from the 7-Eleven really ought to stay in your bag. The island sells fruit and corn that’s meant for them, and that’s the stuff to hand over. These pigs are in no danger whatsoever of going hungry. I’d put money on them eating better than half the backpackers on Samui.
One last thing, and it isn’t something you pack
Here’s the honest bit that the tour listings tend to leave out. A morning on Pig Island is a good time. Watching a pig swim out towards a boat is funny in a way that somehow doesn’t wear off, the beach is lovely, the snorkel stop is a nice bonus on top. What it isn’t is a wildlife encounter, and the people who come home faintly let down are almost always the ones who’d quietly been expecting one. These are domesticated pigs on a beach that’s run as a daily operation, fed and looked after by people who do this exact trip every day of the week, and the whole thing sits a great deal closer to a very scenic petting farm than to anything wild or rare.
And if I’m being straight with you, on a short Samui trip where you’re choosing between this and a full day out at Ang Thong Marine Park, I wouldn’t pick the pigs. It’s a charming add-on rather than the thing you build the week around. Go in understanding exactly that and you’ll have a genuinely good morning with some friendly animals on a nice beach, which is all it ever set out to be in the first place. The disappointment only ever shows up when somebody’s sold it to you as something bigger.
That’s more or less everything. It really isn’t a difficult trip to pack for once you’ve made your peace with getting wet, kept your phone away from the saltwater, and brought along cash for an island that takes nothing else, and the people who end up having a slightly rough morning are nearly always the ones who got one of those wrong. Now you won’t.
If you haven’t actually booked yet and you’re still weighing up whether it’s worth a morning, the simplest way to decide is to look at what’s involved before you commit, so go and have a read about how to travel to Pig Island and you’ll get the full picture of how a tour runs from the pier to the beach and back.
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