Two River Islands, Ninety Minutes From Bangkok, and Almost Nobody on Them
Koh Kret makes pottery. Koh Sichang has the best sea view in the Eastern Gulf. Neither is on a package tour, and both are an afternoon from the BTS.
The plan was to go to Koh Sichang for the sea view. I got on the wrong boat, ended up on a pottery island, spent four hours watching a woman throw a bowl while her grandson rescued my sandals from the Chao Phraya, and went to Koh Sichang the next day anyway.
Both are good. Only one of them is a place you can eat lunch on a Tuesday without a crowd.
Last verified 1 August 2026.
Koh Kret, the pottery island
An artificial island in the middle of the Chao Phraya, built by Mon communities over generations, and still mostly inhabited by them. The Mon have been in Thailand for a very long time, and Koh Kret is the one place outside the far west where you can walk through a Mon village without it being staged for anybody.
The pottery is real and it is everywhere. This is the island's actual industry, not a tourist demonstration, and the Mon ceramic tradition is genuinely different from the Chinese-influenced ceramics most of Thailand uses. The pieces are hand-thrown, unglazed, and heavy, and a bowl costs a few hundred baht rather than the prices the same thing costs in Chiang Mai or Bangkok.
You can watch it being made, and you can watch it being fired, in an open kiln that has not changed in living memory. Buying directly from the person who made it is the correct transaction and the whole supply chain collapses to nothing.
There is also food that exists nowhere else, because the Mon eat what they grow. The famous item is a steamed coconut dessert, sold by the dozen along the pier, and there is a Mon fermented soybean dish and a curry that is nothing like a Thai curry. Walk the ring road, eat what the queue is eating, and do not ask for the tourist version because there isn't one.
And there are almost no vehicles. Everyone walks, or rides a bicycle, or hires one for the day. The silence is the first thing you notice.
How to get there
Boat from Khlong Toei, which is a short walk from the BTS Sukhumvit station, and the whole point of this island is that this is true. You are fifteen minutes from a Bangkok skyscraper and then you are on a boat.
Services are frequent during the day and much less frequent in the evening. Check the return schedule before you go, and do not be the person stranded on the far side of the river with a pottery purchase and no way back.
It is also reachable by road, and you should not do that. The bridge traffic is worse than the river, and arriving by road means you have skipped the ten minutes on the water that is the best part.
Bicycles are available on the island and cheap, and a ring road of this size takes about forty minutes, which is the right amount of cycling.
Koh Sichang, the one with the view
Forty-five minutes by ferry from Pak Khlong Talat, near Saphan Taksin, and it is a different island in every other respect: hilly, a bit run down in places, with a genuinely wild coastline and no particular reason to be developed.
The reason to go is one specific view. From the west side you look across the narrowest point of the Eastern Gulf at the sort of traffic you would normally only see from an aircraft: container ships stacked four high, queued in a channel so tight they appear to be stationary. The Rama IX bridge sweeps across it.
Bring a drink and sit on the sea wall and watch the ships, which is the entire activity and does not get old.
There are also windmills on a headland, a small temple up a steep set of steps, sea turtles in the shallows offshore in a protected area, and a beach that is genuinely empty most days of the year.
Why these beat a beach
Because you go there and come back, which means a day rather than a commitment, which means you can do both in one weekend without it becoming a project.
Because the boat is the best part of the journey, and a day trip with a transit that is worth taking is a different experience from a day trip with a minibus.
And because neither island sells you anything about Thailand that is a construction. You are on a Mon island with a potter, or on a hill island with container ships. Both are true. Neither is a theme park.
Practicalities
Cash. Both islands skew towards cash and the smaller transactions are small. Bring small notes and coins from a Bangkok ATM.
Weekends are busier, and on Koh Kret specifically there is a market that appears on weekends, which is worth seeing once and is the reason to come on a weekday if you have the choice.
Sunscreen and a hat, because you will spend the middle of the day on an island with very little shade and the equatorial sun does not negotiate.
And check the last boat. Not the first one out, which is easy to find, but the last one back, which is the one that strands people.
