Travel
Island Daytripper: Koh Kret
No it does not have sandy beaches and no you don’t have to fly to get there. Koh Kret is but a stone’s throw from Nichada and you can cycle or drive to the foot ferry on the nearby Chao Phraya River at Wat Klangkret. The island is car and golf cart free, and if Nichada feels like a quiet oasis away from the city, then this place even more so. Despite having lived in Nichada for three years, though we knew of it, had seen it from the air, as well as from across the other side of the river, where my wife and I regularly bike on weekends, my family had never visited Koh Kret until this past August when friends visited from Washington D.C. Koh Kret sits in one of the many natural ox bow bends of the Chao Phraya and is humanmade, created when a canal was dug some 300 years ago to form an island. To this day a long established community of Mon people, a tribe that flourished in the 6th-10th century AD in Central Thailand, live here. While I am 38
sure many of them and others on the island work on the “mainland”, the economy of the island is also driven by a traditional pottery industry, local cultural sites, family run orchards and flower farms, small educational centers, several wats, a busy weekend market, and a micro brewery. Driving barely 15 minutes on a weekend morning to the Wat Klangkret pier, we parked on the road at the junction of Phumvej and Sukhaprachasan roads. There is plenty of space as Phumvej is a dual carriageway that dead ends at the pier. Then ambling over to the river to pay our ferry fee at a tiny shop, we waited a few minutes for the next boat. Crossing over we followed the locals and found a bike rental place within 100 metres of the ferry. From there we pedaled off and began our self-guided exploration, heading west and then north (to the left with the river behind you then right). The island is only 1x2 km so it’s hard to get lost as there is only one main route, but the local residents
T h a n i Ta l k
November 2017