Noppharat Thara Beach, Krabi

Noppharat Thara is the long, gentle counterweight to Ao Nang, lying just the other side of a small headland yet feeling a world quieter. This is national park shore, a broad ribbon of pale sand stretching for kilometres beneath casuarina pines, dotted with little islands offshore and used as much by local families on a weekend picnic as by visitors. Where Ao Nang hums with boats and bars, Noppharat Thara murmurs, the shade is real, the food stalls are simple and Thai, and the sunset settles over the sand with hardly anyone to share it. For a couple who want a long barefoot walk and a soft golden hour rather than a scene, it is a lovely, underrated escape.

The honest read is that this is a beach to walk, not to swim. It is very shallow and the tide is dramatic here, so at low water the sea retreats far across wide flats, a sandbar emerges, and you can stroll out toward the islands on what was seabed an hour before, which is a small delight in itself. But that same shallowness means swimming is a high tide affair at best, and where the beach meets the canal at its eastern end the water can run brown and uninviting. Anyone arriving expecting clear deep turquoise off the sand has misread the place. Read it right and the low tide walk becomes the highlight rather than a disappointment.

So take Noppharat Thara for what it is, the long quiet shaded beach for a stroll, a picnic and a sunset, and let Ao Nang next door handle the swimming, the snorkelling trips and the nightlife. The two pair perfectly, a five minute hop apart, and the pier at the eastern end is where many of the island boats depart, so you may well pass through here on your way to the Hong Islands or Phi Phi anyway. Loved for its calm and its length rather than its swimming, Noppharat Thara is one of the most restful stretches of sand in the whole of Krabi.