People ask me which is better, Pig Island or Ang Thong, like there’s a clean answer sitting at the end of the question, and for years I didn’t have a tidy one, because I’d done the two of them ages apart and in completely different frames of mind. Then a couple of summers back an old friend from my Bangkok teaching days came out for a week with his partner, hit the exact wall everyone hits, and rather than pick one we just did both. Pig Island on the Tuesday, Ang Thong on the Friday, with a lazy day in between to recover from neither of them in particular. That week is the closest I’ve come to a fair, side-by-side read on the pair, so instead of handing you a spec sheet, let me just tell you how the two days actually went, because the differences that count showed up in the doing rather than on paper.
A bit of context first, because it turns out to matter. Neither of them had been to the Gulf before. He’s an outdoorsy sort who physically cannot sit still on a beach for more than about twenty minutes before he’s looking for something to climb. She’d flown out for precisely the opposite reason, a week of doing as close to nothing as a human can manage, and she’d said as much on the drive in from the airport. Hold those two people in your head, because by the end of the week they’d split clean down the middle on which day they loved, neither of them swayed an inch by the other’s verdict, and that split is basically the entire answer to the question.
The Tuesday: Pig Island
We did the pigs first, partly because it’s only a half-day and a gentle way to ease in, and partly because I had a hunch it would win her over before the bigger day asked anything of her. We got collected mid-morning, ran down to Thong Krut on the south coast, and were on a shared speedboat by about nine. It’s a half-hour skip out to Koh Madsum with no real open water to speak of, and she didn’t go green once, which I’ll admit I’d been quietly braced for.
The pigs are exactly as daft as advertised. They come trotting down to the waterline the moment the boat noses in, because they’ve long since worked out that an arriving boat means food, and they’re a good deal bigger up close than the photos prepare you for. One of the larger ones leaned its entire weight against her leg going after the bit of fruit you get handed to feed them, and that, honestly, was the moment the whole trip clicked for her. She’d come to do nothing and ended up spending forty minutes howling with laughter at pigs in the shallows. There was a family on our boat whose two kids hit the same state inside about thirty seconds flat, and that’s the thing about Pig Island, it works on more or less everyone at once with no warm-up needed. The snorkel afterwards at Koh Tan next door was a calm, shallow affair, perfectly manageable for someone who hadn’t put a mask on since a school trip, and there was time to just sit on the sand for a while before the run back. We were on Samui again by early afternoon with the rest of the day untouched, which she spent, entirely in character, horizontal by the pool.
Worth flagging the money here if that’s part of how you’re weighing it up. That whole morning, the shared boat, the snorkel kit, the small island fee of around 100 baht, came to somewhere in the region of 1,000 to 2,000 baht a head. For what it is, a genuinely novel few hours with animals you can’t go and meet just anywhere, it’s very hard to argue with the value. My friend enjoyed it too. But he called it fun rather than memorable, and by the time we were back he was already asking what the Friday had lined up. The pigs are a brilliant morning, they just don’t ask a single thing of you, and he’s the type who wants a day that does.
In between the two trips we did the un-boat things, a slow day pottering around the island, a long evening eating our way through Fisherman’s Village, the sort of nothing-much that’s honestly half the point of a week down here. But the Friday was the one he’d had circled since before he landed, and I’ll admit I was curious to watch how the pair of them took a day pitched at almost the exact opposite kind of traveller from the one the pigs are built for.
The Friday: Ang Thong
Ang Thong is a different animal, and the day starts saying so before the sun’s properly up. The pickup was just before seven, the boat went from the Nathon side of the island, and the crossing out to the park is a proper stretch of open water, forty-odd limestone islands scattered maybe thirty kilometres northwest of Samui. This is where the seasickness question genuinely bites, incidentally. It was a flat, kind morning so we were fine, but I’ve done that same crossing when it wasn’t, and the long bouncy version can knock the shine off the scenery well before you’ve arrived, which is worth knowing if your stomach’s delicate and you’re out here in the rougher back half of the year.
The scenery, once you reach it, more than earns the brutal alarm. The karsts come straight up out of the water, the lagoons really are the colour the brochures promise and then a bit more, and the headline of the whole place, the Emerald Lake tucked inside Koh Mae Koh, is one of those views that shuts a boatful of people up for a second when they first see it. The catch, the thing the listings quietly skate over, is that you climb to it. A steep run of steps in full heat to look down on the lake, and then a second, harder haul up to the panoramic viewpoint where the entire scatter of islands opens out below you at once.
And this is where the week’s split actually happened. My friend was in his absolute element, up both climbs without breaking stride, into a kayak through the sea caves, swimming off every stop, lit up by the lot of it. His partner got up the first climb, took one honest look at the second, and sensibly tapped out to wait on the beach. She was completely cheerful about it, but the fact remains she’d paid for the centrepiece of the day and then sat a fair chunk of it out, and you could watch her quietly working out whether the dawn start and the long haul had really been worth it for her in particular. He’d call it the best day of the entire trip without a moment’s hesitation. She, fairly enough, came home feeling she’d surrendered an early morning and a very long day mostly to watch other people climb things, and that’s a real outcome worth being honest about if there’s someone like her in your party.
The middle of the day, the stretch between the two climbs, was the part that sealed it for him. There’s kayaking through the sea caves, weaving in under the limestone with the water shifting from blue to a strange dark green the moment you’re in the shadow of the rock, and then a lunch stop on a quiet beach that sees a tiny fraction of the foot traffic anything on Samui gets. He skipped most of the actual lunch to snorkel instead, came up grinning about a parrotfish the size of his forearm, and was first back into a kayak the second we were allowed. That’s the rhythm of the whole Ang Thong day really, long runs of boat broken up by these bursts of doing something, and whether that reads to you as a great day or an exhausting one tells you most of what you need to know about which camp you fall into.
The Friday was also the pricier day by a clear stretch. The tour itself ran well north of what the pigs had cost, and then the national park fee lands on top, around 300 baht a head for adults, and once you tot that up across a group it climbs in a hurry. We’d deliberately booked a mid-range operator rather than the cheapest one going, which I’d push anyone to do at Ang Thong, because the spread in quality out there is wider than on nearly any other trip I’d point you toward. The cheap boats pack forty people on and march them through each stop on the clock, whereas ours had maybe twenty and left everyone room to breathe at each one, and on a day that runs ten or eleven hours end to end, that’s most of the difference between a day you rave about for years and one you simply get through.
We rolled back to the hotel as the light was going, all three of us salted and sunburnt and quiet in the good way you only land on after a genuinely full day. He was already scrolling for which dive trip to do next. She had her shoes off before we’d crossed the lobby and flatly announced she would not be boarding another boat for the remainder of the holiday. Both of them entirely sincere, and both, in their own way, the day having worked precisely as it should for the person actually living it.
What that week actually taught me
By the time they flew home, the verdict had sorted itself out without anyone needing to argue it. She’d take the pigs every time, and not grudgingly either; it was the morning she still brought up in messages months later, the one that fit the holiday she’d actually come for. He’d take Ang Thong and call it no contest, because it handed him the exact thing he travels for, a big physical day in genuinely special landscape with something to climb at the end of it. Same week, same two trips, and they ended up in opposite corners, which is precisely why “which one’s better” is the wrong question to be asking in the first place.
So if you’re stuck choosing, stop weighing the islands against each other and work out which of those two people you are, or who’s coming with you. If there’s anyone in the group like her, someone who came to switch off and would rather not climb steps in the heat, or who’s keeping half an eye on the spend, or who only wants to give up half a day, then it’s Pig Island, and it isn’t close. If you’re cut more like him, restless and fit and out here for the scenery, with a whole free day to give and the budget to do it properly, Ang Thong will give you something the pigs can’t get near. And if your group’s a mix of the two, which most groups are, then the honest answer is the one we backed into by accident that week. Do both. Leave a clear day between them so nobody’s on a boat two days running, and let each person have the day that’s genuinely theirs.
If you want to firm up the timings and exactly what each day includes before you commit to anything, you can read more about how to travel to Pig Island for the gentle half-day, or how to travel to Ang Thong Marine Park for the big one, and build whichever suits you into the rest of your week.
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