Day Trip to Racha Island and Coral Island

The other day we took a boat trip to Racha Island and Coral Island, which are two of the many small islands off Phuket.

Racha is to the south of Phuket and takes about 30 minutes by speedboat. Our speedboat driver decided to race his friend there so it was quite interesting especially as the sea was quite choppy! Racha is home to the high end Racha Hotel ( www.theracha.com ), which is on the main beach. The Racha is situated on a fantastic little beach with some of the finest sand any of us have seen anywhere. The view is spoilt somewhat by the number of speedboats and dive boats that all come to this beach. There is another much quieter beach on the other side of the island which I have walked to on a previous occasion by going up the path next to the hotel. It is about a 10 minute walk to get across the island to it.

On arriving at Racha we went to do some snorkelling but because of the sea conditions, all the tourist boats had gone to the same sheltered spot so most of the fish had taken fright. When I have been there previously, there were masses of fish to see.

We had lunch at the end of the beach in a Thai place and they have a few monitor lizards as inhabitants (see photos) which are a couple of meters in length along with a number of birds.

We stopped at Coral Island on the way back to Phuket and it has a fairly deserted beach for those who want to get away from it all. Coral Island is to the east of Phuket.