January 2, 2026
Day 122 — Ko Phayam to Ranong
Marilee here.
Koh Phayam woke up us early with bird chatter in the trees around our bungalow. We got up, expecting to have a walk along the road to find a breakfast place, only to find that our little resort of thatched roof bungalows had tables set out by a lily-covered pond where they were serving coffees and breakfast. Well, no need to look further afield — we settled down for a leisurely morning meal in the warm sunshine.
Our plan for the day was to spend the morning on the beach and head back to the pier in time to catch the 3pm ferry to Ranong. While we’d originally hoped to stay a day or so longer on Ko Phayam, it turned out that wasn’t going to be possible. Speedboats run back and forth between the island and Ranong all day long, but they can’t accommodate our bikes, which leaves the slower once-a-day ferry as our only transport option — and the ferry schedule didn’t line up with our cycling plans for the next few days. We’re on a deadline, heading for Phuket by January 8 to meet our kids for a couple weeks of off-bike family fun. So our beach lounging on Phayam had to be abbreviated.
Still, we wanted to make the most of the time we had, so after breakfast we sauntered back to the beach just down the road from our bungalow.
It was high tide when we arrived at the beach, and the strip of white sand was smaller than it had been the night before at sunset, but we found a lovely spot under the shade of some big trees and set up our little chairs, ready for some serious relaxation.
The water was just as warm and clear as it had been the previous day — turns out we hadn’t imagined it! The Andaman Sea is a very, very different body of water from the North Pacific: in temperature (obviously!) but also salinity — here the water is so salty we can hardly stay submerged, our feet are popping up above the water as we float.
Well, we splashed around, and lounged, and splashed some more, and soon enough it was time to head back to our cabin and pack up. We had time before the ferry arrived to grab lunch at a beachside cafe in the busy central island area by the pier. We’d picked a popular spot for lunch, its tables filled by westerners who seemed to be longterm island residents, all greeting one another like old friends and joining each others tables for a good gossip.
There was an interesting mix of people on Ko Phayam. It’s an island that takes some effort to get to, as the only ferries run out of Ranong — not exactly a tourist hotspot, so we arrived curious about who else we’d find there. There were, as could be expected, a lot of young backpackers, but also a number of families with young kids, and a sizeable contingent of what can only be described as old European hippies. The crowd at our lunch spot was mostly from this last group — extremely thin, deeply bronzed older Italian women with long frizzy hair and bare feet, in batik sundresses and beads, shaggy grey haired German men with faded tshirts and flip flops. We passed one man a few times on the road, riding a scooter with his long grey dreads blowing in the wind, a grey braided beard reaching to about mid-chest, wearing a shirt that declared in large lettering “RASTA” and pants that quietly backed up the T-shirt, saying (in smaller lettering) “Rasta, Rasta, Rasta”. (OK, we get it, you’re a Rasta!) Clearly some of these people had been coming to the island for years.
After lunch and a long session of people-watching and speculating about what brought them here, we still had time before the ferry was due to leave so we shifted locales and sat on the pier for a while observing the long unloading of the ferry and then the very quick loading for the trip back to Ranong. The ferry brings all the supplies for the island’s many restaurants and guesthouses — and by the evidence we observed on the dock, tourists eat a lot of eggs and drink vast amounts of beer. Everything was unloaded by hand from the ferry, piled onto trailers pulled by little tractors, and dispatched off to the appropriate restaurant— a complex operation when all the cargo was so similar.
The only things going back to Ranong were people, their motorcycles, and many, many empty propane tanks. And two bicycles.
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2 weeks ago
The ferry fought a stiff headwind all the way back to Ranong, so we were later than expected arriving. It was getting towards evening as we started biking back into town, which is when the streets start to come to life, as the temperature drops and people emerge again from wherever they’ve been sheltering during the long hot afternoon. In the ramshackle streets surrounding the port there were kids playing playing soccer with homemade balls, a group of men playing hackysack, people buzzing everywhere on scooters and surprisingly quite a number of folks on bikes — something we haven’t seen elsewhere. It was a fun ride into town with all the early evening energy around us, lots of people saying hi, kids waving. A truck parked by the roadside was selling durians out the back and there were almost collisions, so many people were pulling over to get themselves a stinky treat. Ranong seems like a fun town.
Soon we were back in the tourist district, hunting for our hotel. The bungalows we’d stayed in on our first night here were booked up, so we were in a nearby hotel where once again we were allowed to lean our bikes up against the wall in the lobby overnight. And our room came with a giant private west-facing deck, where we relaxed and watched the sunset before heading out for dinner.
Today's ride: 10 km (6 miles)
Total: 5,425 km (3,369 miles)
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