Phuket delights on holiday isle, By Paul Osborne, April 09, 2008

(Credit: The Daily Telegraph Article from: The Courier Mail)

THE death and destruction that scarred Thailand's main holiday island of Phuket after the Boxing Day tsunami three years ago may have been erased, but many Thai people remain wary of the sea.

The tourists are back, perhaps not quite in the numbers before that horror day in 2004 when a wall of water spawned by a massive earthquake below the Andaman Sea carried all before it, killing about 230,000 people in 12 Indian Ocean nations, from Indonesia to Sri Lanka.

In Thailand, it's estimated as many as 2000 holidaymakers, many from Europe, died as the giant waves smashed into luxury hotels along the coast, at Kamala, Karon and Kata, and at Khao Lak, 100km north of Phuket, which bore the brunt of the carnage.

The United Nations has confirmed the deaths of 5395 people in Thailand, with official estimates, including the missing, putting the toll at 8212 dead after a giant wave and three further waves hit Thailand's southern coastline about breakfast time on that Boxing Day morning.

While the toll was far greater elsewhere in the region, it was the chaotic scenes of destruction in Thailand – and at Patong Beach on Phuket, in particular – beamed into Australian lounge rooms that brought home the almost unimaginable scope of this human catastrophe.

Phuket on the mend

Today, the resorts, shops and restaurants have been rebuilt and their recovery rides on the return of the tourist hordes. The Australians are pouring back, and the big-spending Europeans – whose compatriots bore the brunt of the foreign death toll – are trickling back, but not in the numbers before the tsunami changed everything.

But the signs are there for a new wave of tourist-led prosperity.

Tour operators say the waters around Phuket island have never been clearer, bringing into focus the chaotic mess of smashed, bone-white coral littering the seabed in some of the coastal paradises for which southwestern Thailand is famous.

Coral reefs will take years to recover, if at all – one dive at Monkey Beach east of the holiday isle showed the dead, pulverised coral formations scattered like a carpet of bones across the sea floor.

Forget the movie, see the beach

But not all is lost. Many pockets of wonder remain around the island of Phuket and some areas were and are completely untouched but for the hills of everyday rubbish often piled behind picture postcard foreshore. Such was the miserable sight that met this traveller at Maya Bay on Phi Phi Leh, the idyllic island that juts out of the sea about a 45-minute speedboat ride east from Phuket and made famous by Leonardo Di Caprio in the 2000 film, The Beach. A film Thais say almost destroyed the fragile environment after film crews bulldozed dunes and flora, and imported hundreds of palm trees for its heavy-handed Hollywood touch.

Paradoxically, the tsunami is credited with dramatically improving the once magical bay, with the high waves cleaning up Maya beach and washing away the Hollywood handiwork. Alas, not the rubbish just out of camera range. But Phi Phi Leh is still well worth the visit, with its inviting, shallow blue-green waters washing the base of towering cliffs and lazily lapping on to its horseshoe-shaped white beach. Forget the movie, see the beach. And, along the way, take in the (almost) rebuilt resort area of neighbouring Phi Phi Don.

You also can hit the deckchairs on the pocket paradise of Khai Nai island, brave the "ancestors" at Monkey Beach, go birdnest-spotting at Vikis that make up the Phi Phi island group.

But for more bang fong Cave and go snorkelling, sea-kayaking or simply take in the grandeur of Loh Sama Bay and the other coves, inlets and islandr your buck, it's hard to go past the James Bond island tour, a spell-binding day of speedboats, sea kayaks, swimming, snorkelling and sightseeing in Phang Nga Bay centred on Khao Phingkan – a slender sugarloaf island with amazingly sheer cliffs that rise so steeply from the ocean it's like an eruption of coral and limestone frozen in time and space.

It must have been as mesmerising an attraction to the makers of the Roger Moore Bond movie Man With the Golden Gun in 1974 as it is today to a new wave of tourists.

This tour was a non-stop day of fun activities: a wide-eyed exploration of Panak island and the nearby bat cave, kayaking at the eerie limestone arch at Tham Lod Noi, lunch at the floating Muslim gypsy village jutting out from Panyee island, Hong island, swimming and snorkelling at Naka island.

The holiday heart of Phuket is Patong beach and its resort strip. Officially, about 250 people there lost their lives to the tsunami, but few you talk to haven't lost a loved one, a relative or a friend.

Lucky to be alive

There "Charlie" Chuchai revealed a thick black texta line and the scrawled legend 26/12/2004 beside it three-quarters of the way up the fading turquoise toilet wall in his jewellery shop opposite the Holiday Inn Resort and across the road from Patong beach.

The texta scrawls marked the height the tide of mud and disaster reached as it smashed through Charlie's store and everything else in its path that dreadful day. Charlie, a Buddhist, lost friends in the tsunami, but is a changed man not so much over lives lost but lives saved – of his and his family. Boxing Day 2004 was the first day he had closed his shop in 20 years, in anticipation of a dreamed-of holiday in the faraway village of his birth.

And, later, when the jeweller numbly climbed, waded and crawled over the wreckage of his business to salvage what he could, there was treasure in the sodden rubble. His entire inventory of gold, gems and jewellery lay submerged but intact in a safe on the floor.

That's all part of today's Phuket tourist experience: go shopping, buy a meal or take a tour and they'll throw in an inspirational story of loss and hope.

Party nightly at Patong beach

At night, Patong puts on its party face and tourists, tuk-tuks and taxis head for Bangla Rd and its restaurants and girlie bars. There, a visual feast of sights and frights swirls around you: Singha beer-fuelled, dressed-down tourists, dressed-up locals, barely dressed bar girls, impossibly pretty "lady boys" outside mostly seedy-looking nightclubs.

While Bangla Rd at night is a free-spirited, adults-only assault on the senses, the rest of the Patong area is dripping in family fare, from its neon-lighted smorgasbord of international and Thai restaurants – even TV gourmet chef Keith Floyd has a five-star eatery here – to outdoor cabaret performances, the shop-'til-you-drop stalls and markets.

The best family entertainment near Patong is Fantasea, a jumbo-sized, Vegas-style show set among a 56-hectare sideshow-style theme park where each night a herd of elephants and a tribe of enthusiastic young Thais take centre stage for a spell-binding performance of man and beast on what must be one of the biggest stages in the world.

If you like your elephant experience a little more au naturale, Phuket can oblige. A handful of elephant camps in the surrounding foothills provide half-hour to half-day treks atop these former giants of the Thai logging industry that progress has almost put out of business.

For me this walk on the wild side was a surreal ride through a boulder-strewn valley on the jungle's edge astride a magnificent animal with a dry and cracked baggy grey skin that seemed two or three sizes too big for its owner.

And that pretty much sums up Phuket – and Patong. Big and bold and pretty loose around the edges. It can be a giant experience, a frenetic tsunami of activities, sights, tastes and sounds or it can be as laid back as you want to make it – a languid tide of lazy delights.