Ko Lipe
— three beaches small enough to learn by heart.
Not only on a wall.
“A two-square-kilometre island in the southern Andaman, ringed by three beaches: Sunrise on the east, Sunset on the west, Pattaya on the south where the speedboats land. A single lane called Walking Street crosses the middle. The Urak Lawoi sea-gypsy community lives on the north side. High season runs roughly November to mid-May; then the south-west monsoon closes the crossing and the island goes quiet again.
Ko Lipe, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Ko Lipe is a small island in the southern Andaman Sea, in Satun Province, Thailand, a few kilometres north of the Malaysian Langkawi archipelago. It sits within the boundaries of Tarutao National Marine Park, though the island itself is a long-standing carve-out inhabited by the Urak Lawoi people. Three beaches define the geography: Sunrise to the east, Sunset to the west, and Pattaya to the south, connected by a paved lane known as Walking Street. The island measures roughly two square kilometres end to end.
The water around Ko Lipe is part of the same Andaman shelf that draws divers to the Similans further north. Coral patches sit close to shore on the eastern and southern beaches; the western reef near Sunset Beach drops to deeper water and is the usual route for sunset long-tail trips. Visibility runs cleanest from January through April, often reaching twenty-five metres. The marine-park status of the surrounding waters has held bleaching pressures in check compared with reefs nearer the mainland.
The crossing from Pak Bara on the mainland opens around the start of November and closes in mid-May, when the south-west monsoon makes the open water too rough for the speedboats. December through February is the cooler dry stretch, busiest with travellers. March and April warm sharply, with sea temperatures near thirty degrees Celsius. The island goes quiet from June to October. Most bungalows close, and the Urak Lawoi community has the beaches largely to itself.