There’s so much for travelers to do that Europeans typically stay here for three weeks or more, hopping on boats and taking day trips from their base resort to explore Phuket’s wonders.
This is a land of exotic creatures: elephants, baboons, cobras and water buffalo can be found in special preserves and safari sites. It’s a place with fascinating natural beauty: limestone caves and cliffs that are every bit equal to those in Palawan.
And now – thanks to the tsunami, biologists say – the beaches are even cleaner and the waters bluer than ever.
Thai Airways and the Tourism Authority of Thailand flew me along with a group of journalists and travel agents to enjoy a weekend in the resort paradise of Phuket. Here’s what I found.
Over 5,300 perished when waves swept over this island and surrounding resort locales such as Phi Phi Island. One-third of the victims were foreigners, the rest local residents, hotel employees and fisherfolk. The economic effects are even more long lasting, since this region relies so heavily on tourism.
So the organizers of this event – called "Recovery Andaman" after the group of six islands and provinces making up Southern Thailand – had a simple request: tell people it’s okay to come back.
And our hosts did everything possible to show us why they should.
First of all, despite the wire stories you may have read, Phuket is not a ghostly place. It does not give off an eerie Sixth Sense vibe. It’s a lot like the Philippines, in fact, with rural, coastal villages that rely on fishing and tourism. A lot of foreigners are interwoven into this population, owning bars and restaurants, just like in the Philippines. You don’t hear the locals peddling too many ghost stories. What you do hear about a lot are acts of bravery – like the staff at The Meridian Hotel who correctly guessed what was up when the first retreating wave washed the tide out so far, and quickly hustled all the guests to safer ground. No one died there, though the tsunami made a direct hit on the beach facing the hotel.
Or you hear about a local Buddhist monk who had to decide whether to save two women who were drowning, or observe the Buddhist prohibition against any female contact. He decided life was more important, and offered his scarf to drag them from the waters; now they visit his temple every day to pray.
Another woman was saved from drowning by a concrete utility pole; believe it or not, she now visits that pole on a near-daily basis to offer her prayers.
Driving north through Karon Beach, then Patong, you sense a kind of randomness to the damage – some places are still standing and operating while next door lies a pile of rubble. Most businesses are in the process of reconstructing, often with signs saying "WE TRY HARD OPEN SOON" to assure the returning trickle of tourists that it’s business as usual.
Tourism, which normally brings in $4 billion in annual revenues to Thailand, definitely took a big blow after Dec. 26. The hotels, even those that escaped direct damage, suffered a huge drop in occupancy during peak season – from 90 percent full in December down to 10 percent in January. Now it’s back up to about 40 percent: not bad, but still far from normal.
And while Thailand normally gets 4 million visitors per year (Phuket provides 40 percent of this traffic), so far only 33,000 visitors have arrived since Jan. and Feb. of 2005. That’s a long way to go.
We set out from Phang-Nga in a long boat, exploring towering limestone cliffs on our way to James Bond Island – so called because the striking locale was used as the villain’s lair in both The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) and Tomorrow Never Dies (2003). A slender beach overcrowded with Muslim vendors, it offers a brief trail hike to a promontory overlooking the sea, proving that Andaman’s geography is every bit equal to Palawan’s.
We had lunch at Pan-Yi Village, a collection of houses built on stilts with a nearby Mosque, where the local Muslims (known as "Sea Gypsies") run three 100-seat restaurants for boatloads of passing tourists. The only trouble is, there aren’t as many tourists these days so few seats were occupied. It’s a livelihood project set in motion with government assistance, so we hope the Muslim villagers get their customers back.
Genuine Thailand cuisine is a real treat. Of course, we’d had Phad Thai, Green Curry Chicken and Tom Yam soup before; but here, the temperature and the taste were turned way up high. After our first meal at Aonang Villa Resort in Krabi, our tour guide Klang Aryupong, noticed our extreme reactions. "Do Filipinos like spicy food?" she asked with a sly smile. We did, but after witnessing our bouts of coughing and runny noses, she discreetly told the Muslims at Pan-Yi to tone it down a bit.
Our boat circled back to Phang-Nga, and from there we took a coach bus to Phuket, where we stayed at Kata Beach Resort, one of the older and more famous beachfront hotels here. Built in the early ‘90s when Phuket began to really take off as a tourist destination (it was a high-profile write-up in Lonely Planet that originally put Phuket on the map, bringing the backpackers and then the upscale Europeans), Kata Beach Resort was spared by the tsunami. It was more northern beaches – like Karon, Patong, and especially Surin Kamala, which we were not allowed to tour – that suffered the most devastation. Nearby Phi-Phi island, where they filmed most of the breathtaking locations for The Beach, has gone from being an environmentalists’ battleground to ground zero: it suffered massive destruction, and though some resorts and hotels are still operating, Thailand’s tourism effort is steering people away from it for now.
Elephants are big business here, as are trained cobras and other exotic animals. Thailand still has about one-eighth of the world’s 45,000 living elephants. Here, the baby elephants are taught from infancy to use their trunks to a) paint pictures which are sold to tourists for 200 baht, b) knock around golf balls, c) play the harmonica, d) parade around in a "fashion show" and e) wave "bye-bye" to the guests. It’s either very industrious or quite unfortunate, depending on your viewpoint, the way locals train elephants to perform in shows instead of letting them run free in a nature preserve.
Earlier, we had visited Phuket Fanta Sea, a 140-acre theme park near Kamala Beach devoted to Thailand culture – or at least, a theme park version of that culture.
At the 3,000-seat Palace of the Elephants, we attended a cultural performance called "Kamala: Fantasy of a Kingdom" that presented old Siam’s glorious mythical past amid the glitzy colors and aerobatics usually associated with Las Vegas and Cirque de Soleil. Earlier, before the elephants tromped out on stage for the grand finale, we learned that, for Thais, the world was once a perfect creation – until the arrival of Evil on the scene (in the shape of a large, billowing serpent). I’ve never really cared for the Manichean worldview: it doesn’t account for all the small and petty acts of evil that everyone is capable of. It doesn’t tell us, for instance, whether earthquakes, typhoons and tsunamis are inherently evil, or just part of nature.
One of the more un-PC moments of the show came during the "Sanuk," which is described in the program as "the irrepressible, fun-loving essence of the Thai people." Onstage, actors portraying Chang and Eng, the original conjoined twins of Siam, were presented as diabolical clowns serving up a magic act, joined onstage by "a colorful troupe of mischievous Ta Khon ghosts." Part of the bit involved selecting and tormenting audience members, including a third guest (presumably a plant) who was dragged back onstage several times, where she was stretched, sawn in half, then thrown into a fire-lit pot before being released back into the crowd. It’s not much of a leap to think of Chang and Eng – and their sadistic pranks – as cruel, unpredictable acts of nature. And then we’re back to thinking about the tsunami again.
On the last night of our tour, we attended a beach festival on Patong Beach called "Loving Andaman." It was part of a larger PR effort by Thai Airways and local tourism agencies to make Phuket attractive to the young once again. Videotaped interviews with happy beachgoers were assembled for broadcast on CNN, while famous pop stars like F4 and Linkin Park have been invited to shoot their next videos in Phuket. Near the beach, local vendors merrily hawked their wares, while on a large beachfront stage, promoters offered a moment of prayer for tsunami victims before opening the program of jazz, pop and DJ performances. Unfortunately, a few hours after we left, the beach was hit with thunderstorms and lashing rains that knocked down the stage and left people running for cover yet again. On the opposite, eastern, side of Phuket, more tragedy struck as a ferry was overturned in the storm, leaving 10 or more people dead. Unfortunately, recovery doesn’t always follow a strict schedule.
I spent my final morning in Phuket on Kata Beach, enjoying a well-deserved swim. I was the only one floating in the water at 9 a.m., and I couldn’t help noticing how clear and emerald-blue the ocean was, and how clean and white the sand. It was a wonderful feeling to surrender to the waters, which can seem so benevolent at times. We often think of nature as transitory, coming and going. But Phuket is a reminder that this – all the resorts, the hotels and shops, the developed beachfronts – this is what is transitory. We are transitory. Nature will always have its way.