Phang Nga Bay & James Bond Island
The hongs of Phang Nga Bay are roofless caves inside the karsts, open only by kayak and only at the right tide. We go at first light, ahead of the fleet.
Where
Phang Nga
Best time
November to April for the calmest water; always the first boat out.
The bay reads as a single photograph — a limestone needle standing in flat green water — and that photograph has hung in every travel agency in Thailand since 1974. What it does not show is the interior. Several of these karsts are hollow. Rainwater has worked down through the limestone for millennia until the roof of a chamber gave way, leaving a lagoon open to the sky with a jungle rim and a tunnel at sea level for a door.
The Thai word for them is hong, meaning room, and they are the reason to be here. A hong is not a viewpoint you walk to. It is a place you are paddled into, lying flat in the bow while the guide reads the clearance overhead, and then the tunnel opens and the noise of the bay stops.
The rest is mangrove: channels running back into the forest of Ao Phang Nga, sea eagles overhead, and the stilt village of Koh Panyee under its cliff.
Why the hongs only open at slack tide
The tunnels into the hongs are sea-level caves, so the tide decides everything. At high water the entrances are drowned and there is no clearance for a kayak; at low water some of them ground out on rock and mud. The usable window is the hour or so either side of the turn, and it moves forward by roughly fifty minutes a day.
This is why the shape of a Phang Nga morning cannot be fixed in advance the way a temple visit can. We set the day against the tide table first and the clock second, which occasionally means a five o'clock start and occasionally means a leisurely one. A boat that arrives at a hong an hour late has arrived at a wall.
What the film left out of Khao Phing Kan
Khao Phing Kan took its second name from The Man with the Golden Gun in 1974, and the slim stack standing offshore — Ko Ta Pu, the nail island — is what everyone photographs. The island itself is small, has a short beach and a line of stalls, and by nine it carries several hundred people. Seen at seven it is a different proposition entirely: a leaning pair of cliffs, a sandbar, and the stack alone in the water.
We treat it as ten minutes inside a longer morning rather than the morning's purpose. The bay's better hours are spent in the channels north of it, where the day boats do not go because there is nothing to photograph from a deck.
Koh Panyee, and what a stilt village actually is
Koh Panyee is a Muslim fishing settlement built on piles against the base of a limestone cliff, founded by Javanese fishermen and now several generations into its lease on that patch of water. It has a mosque, a school, a football pitch that floats, and a long row of restaurants that exists because the tour fleet arrives at midday. Both things are true at once.
Arriving outside those hours means walking the back lanes rather than the restaurant frontage — nets being repaired, boats under the houses, the cliff overhead. We ask before we photograph, which on Panyee is not a formality.
How We Visit
Our way in
We charter privately — a longtail with a captain from the bay, or a speedboat where the run from your hotel demands it — and leave before the Phuket fleet has finished boarding. The order of the day is built around the tide table rather than a route card, so the hongs come at the hour they are open and the famous stack comes while it is quiet. Kayaks travel with us and a paddler takes the stern, so you are free to look up rather than steer. We are usually turning for home as the first big boats arrive.
Questions
What travellers ask
Is James Bond Island worth visiting?
Yes, if you arrive before the day boats and treat it as one stop among several. Khao Phing Kan is genuinely striking at seven in the morning and genuinely crowded by nine. The wider bay — the hongs, the mangrove channels, the stilt village at Koh Panyee — is the real reason to spend a day here, and it is where a private boat earns its keep.
What is a hong in Phang Nga Bay?
A hong is a collapsed cave chamber inside a limestone island, open to the sky and reached through a tunnel at sea level. The word is Thai for room. Because the tunnels drown at high tide and ground out at low, a hong can only be entered by kayak during a short window either side of the turn, which is why the day's timing is set by the tide table rather than by the clock.
When is the best time to visit Phang Nga Bay?
November to April, when the Andaman is settled and the bay stays flat. Whatever the month, the hour matters more than the season: the first boat out has the water to itself, and by ten the anchorages off the main islands are busy. Green-season rain here tends to arrive in bursts rather than all day, and the bay is often glassy between them.
Journeys That Include This
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