Day 125 — Surin Islands - Tom and Marilee Retire to the Road

January 5, 2026

Day 125 — Surin Islands

As Marilee mentioned in the last post, this was a day off the bikes to take a trip to the Surin Islands for some snorkelling and sightseeing. The Surin Islands are supposed to be spectacular and have some of the best snorkelling in Thailand. Our guest house arranged snorkelling day trips, so we plunked down a bunch of Baht for a day of snorkelling.

Our pickup from the hotel was at 8 am, and as we waited we made the acquaintance of a fellow Canadian — a fellow from northern Quebec who produced maple syrup after having had a career as a forester. It doesn’t get more Canadian than that. He was on his way to the Surin Islands as well. He spends a couple months there camping, has done for several years, going snorkelling in the morning and chilling in the afternoon. In his opinion Surin had the best snorkelling in Thailand, so we were happy to get some validation of our choice of day trip.

We were taken by pickup to a facility closer to the pier, where we were fed breakfast and then along with other tourists, piled into vans and pickups down to the pier, where we were all plunked into large speedboats. It was a pretty slick operation. Then came a fast but long speedboat ride, for which we were all issued barf bags.

Also along were the German extended family that were in our hotel, who seemed to have a whole bunch of gear with them to stay for a while. It seemed to me like a long ways to come on vacation particularly with infants and toddlers. Germany to Phuket, Phuket to Kura Buri, Kura Buri to Surin. Now relax!

If your day starts with a ride in the back of a pickup truck, you know it’s going to be fun

Anyway, the ride to Surin was maybe an hour. The arrival into the bay with the central pier / tourist sorting area was breathtaking. Bright turquoise water, sandy beaches, undeveloped forest lands that were lush and green. The classic tropical paradise.

When we arrived at the pier, the passengers were triaged at the dock into the different tours they were doing. Again, a pretty efficient operation. We were the only day trippers / snorkellers from our boat, it looked like, everyone else was staying or just going to the beach as a day trip. Whatever mild regret we might have had in not spending an extra day or two camping there (our gear is slowly heading surface mail to Taiwan anyway) was dispelled when we saw how many tourists were at the main pier.

We ended up with our own private long tail boat to go visit the local traditional village, which was part of the day trip package for us as well as many many other tourists. Here we could see and learn about the villagers’ traditional lifestyle, as well as being provided the opportunity to buy souvenirs. It sounds a bit cheesy but was actually quite good. The villagers did indeed live in a traditional way, in houses built on platforms over the sandy beaches. However they did have running water and solar generated electricity, and their village was inundated by dozens and dozens of tourists every day in winter. This did provide some income from selling bracelets and carvings and stuff like that. There was signage from the Thai government providing information about the people and their lives there, including information on the impact of the 2004 tsunami. Apparently when the ocean receded in advance of the tsunami waves, elders basically said “there is a legend about this, this is not good, we need to go inland”. They did, and though the village was wiped out, no one was killed.

Longtail boat coming back from the village

We had to alight into the water, like a tourist D-day invasion

Strolling through the village, avoiding souvenir sellers

Totem, apparently shamanistic traditions still survive

During the day many folks were hanging out in the shade created their stilt houses

Once our alotted time at the village was up, we had an hour to do some snorkelling before lunch. Our crew anchored us off a shallow coral reef, and in we went. It was absolutely amazing! Coral of different shapes and colours, so many fish! Some of them unworried enough to swim right up to you. Some were amazingly coloured as well — dayglo turquoise and violet, bright red, there were even the “Nemo” fish, which our guide was intent on pointing out to us, clearly a tourist favourite.

After this introductory hour, were returned to the main pier to have lunch. This was an enormous buffet of spaghetti bolognese, stir fried chicken and assorted fried vegetables and rice. It wasn’t terrible, but given the numbers of tourists served and how organized it was, it felt a little like a tourist refugee camp. It was actually really well organized and managed the tourist pressure quite well. But again, whatever mild regret we might have had for not spending more time there was gone — a day trip seemed ideal actually.

We were also lucky enough to see flying lemurs in the trees, which signs informed us neither were they lemurs nor did they fly. (The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire, discuss). A neat bonus.

After lunch we got taken to two more snorkelling spots for lengthy swims among the coral. We’re not exactly snorkelling vets, but we could see why people sang the praises of the Surin Islands as providing top notch snorkelling. It was great.

Eventually it was time to go, and we gathered up a full complement into a speedboat to head back. It had been a fantastic and thoroughly enjoyable day.

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