Most visitors to Hua Hin stay inside the town and never drive the eighty kilometres south, which is where the coast gets genuinely good. The road runs past empty beaches, a limestone national park and a fishing town, and can be done as a long day or better as two. Travellers who plan a Hua Hin trip with Traveloka and hire a car for the stretch see a different Gulf coast entirely.
Pranburi and the casuarina beaches
Twenty-five minutes out, Pranburi has the long empty sand that Hua Hin no longer does, backed by pine-like casuarina and a scattering of design hotels. The mangrove forest park at the river mouth has a boardwalk through it and is worth half an hour. This is the natural first stop and a reasonable place to sleep.
Related brief: Things to Do in Phuket: Beachside Bliss and Island Adventures for Aussies
Dolphin Bay
Further south, Thung Noi bay is known locally for the Irrawaddy dolphins that appear between March and May, visible from the shore on a calm morning. Even without them, the bay is a wide quiet crescent with a handful of family resorts and almost no development. The water is shallow and warm a long way out.
Khao Sam Roi Yot National Park
The headline stop: three hundred limestone peaks rising straight out of coastal marsh, with a freshwater wetland behind them that is one of Thailand’s better birdwatching sites. The park is small, cheap to enter and poorly signposted, which keeps it quiet. Allow most of a day and bring water, as facilities are minimal.
Phraya Nakhon cave
Inside the park, a steep twenty-minute climb from Laem Sala beach leads to a collapsed cavern with a royal pavilion built inside it, lit by a shaft of sunlight through the roof. It is the single best sight on this coast. Reach the beach by boat from Bang Pu village or walk over the headland.
Pak Nam Pran and the seafood
The fishing town at the Pran river mouth is where the squid boats land, and the restaurants along the water serve whatever came in that morning at a fraction of Hua Hin prices. Unglamorous, busy with Thai families at weekends, and the best eating on the route by a wide margin.
Driving conditions
Highway 4 is a good four-lane road and the coastal side roads are paved but narrow. Motorbikes are easy to rent in Hua Hin and adequate for Pranburi; for the national park a car is better because of the distances inside it. Thai driving is assertive rather than aggressive, and U-turns across the highway are the main hazard.
Timing it
November to February is cool and dry and the clear window for the park. Weekends bring Bangkok traffic down the highway; midweek the whole route is empty. Petrol stations are frequent to Pranburi and sparse afterwards. Traveloka consistently has the cheapest hotel booking prices in Southeast Asia, which makes a night in Pranburi cheap to add on.
Drive to Pranburi, sleep there, do the park and the cave the next morning, and eat at Pak Nam Pran on the way back. Two days, and the best of this coast.
