Phuket’s Beaches

Our first stop on our tour of the west coast of Phuket was Kata Beach. This is a fairly family friendly area with a relatively toned down night life.

This doesn’t stop the beach being busy and the sunloungers being full by 9am in the morning. The beach is around 1 mile long but pretty much the whole length is full of people and its not brilliant for swimming as the water is fairly shallow.

Fortunately we had booked an Airbnb which was a room in a hotel complex with a big pool surrounded by sunloungers. The perfect place to enjoy the sun and heat while thanking our lucky stars that we were away from the incessant storms battering the UK.

The street that our hotel was on had two night markets on it with a selection of restaurants and street food vendors to visit.

Kata beach hasn’t really got anything interesting for tourists other than the beach although up above the town at the top of a hill is the Big Buddha. This statue is relatively modern having been built in 2004 at a cost of around £1 million. Its 45m high and covered in marble. However it is still only the third tallest statue in Thailand.

We visited Nai Harn Beach which is south of Kata and meant to be one of the best beaches on the island. To be honest though it wasn’t much different from Kata Beach (or Karon beach which is the next beach North from Kata). It was busy with lots of tourists and the water wasn’t very deep but the sand on the beach was lovely.

We had a relaxing time in and around Kata but after a week it was time to move on. We weren’t going far though, just 20 minutes up the coast to the hub of tourism in Phuket, Patong Beach.

If Kata beach is family friendly Patong feels like the opposite. Its loud, brash and bright with a pulsating if seedy feel.

The beach itself is fairly small compared to the others, although stretching a good few kilometres along the coast and it is very busy, with jetskis, parascending, motorboats and plenty of people. Most days there is also a least 1 cruise ship parked in the harbour.

The seafront is packed with restaurants, bars and hotels but it is really back from the seafront where the real Patong lies.

The (in)famous Bangla Walking street leads away from the beach and is 500m of bars, go-go bars, shows, nightclubs and marijuana shops. Its neon, loud and very in your face. After dark it fills up and there are constant crowds moving up and down the street.

The roads surrounding this street are filled with massage shops with women chorusing “massage” as you walk by and some grabbing your arm in their attempts to lure you inside.

Our Airbnb was above a tailors at the end of a dead end street just 100m from the beach. Even this ‘quiet’ road had 5 massage shops, 3 marijuana bars, a karaoke bar, 3 restaurants and a normal bar.

We would probably have appreciated Patong much more if we were 20… well let’s be honest, 30 years younger and unfortunately our Airbnb was pretty grim as well. So we spent most of our time in Patong trying to get out of Patong (not so easy as the traffic is horrendous) by booking tours and hiring a car for a few days. Although of course, we couldn’t come to Patong and not visit its most famous dance show. 

Patong is the home of Simon Cabaret, a vibrant dance show where all the dancers are Ladyboys. The shows sets and costumes were spectacular and we had a fun night out but if you are used to the Westend then be prepared to lower your expectations – a lot. They do have some star performers but the lack of co-ordination and even effort of some of the backing dancers, who would walk around the stage half-heartedly rather than dance, was so bad that it was laugh-out-loud funny. At least we saw the funny side of it. The French couple next to us were less easily amused! 

With the car rental, we explored the South of the island first and tried out a few of the more remote beaches but these were all still busy and the traffic was pretty terrible.

It wasn’t until we headed North to the Sirinat National Park that we discovered a true tropical paradise. The beach of Mai Khao is a perfect 5km long beach which shelves steeply so its perfect for swimming. The beach is largely undeveloped with no sun loungers, no hawkers and only a handful of people and the beach is backed by tropical trees. Finally we had found what we were looking for.

It was so perfect that we actually checked out of our Patong Airbnb early, booked a lastminute deal in a hotel up North on Mai Khao and spent our last few days in Phuket in this lovely paradise.

The beach was so clean we even saw an otter swimming in the shallows up the beach one morning. It is also a turtle nesting site but as ever we were there at the wrong time of year. The wrong time of year for turtles though did mean perfect weather for us!

Before leaving Patong we signed up for an elephant tour. There are many elephant operators in Phuket and these can be split into two types: ethical and exploitative. I really wanted to spend some time with elephants but did not want to do a tour that was in any way cruel or forced the elephants to do anything they did not want to do.

After some research I discovered Elephant Jungle Sanctuary which is an organisation that rescues elephants from riding camps and private ownership where they are being mistreated. There is no riding of the elephants, which is apparently painful for them as they have weak backs. There are around 3000 wild elephants in Thailand and about the same number that are in private hands. They are expensive to keep so must be worked hard to pay for themselves.

The half day tour with EJS was fantastic. It started off by being taken to one of the four camps that EJS have in Phuket. I was taken to camp 3 which was small and had 3 elephants, a 5 year old, 12 year old and 19 year old. The 5 year old was still very much a baby and was the most playful of the three. She had only been with them for 3 months having been given up by her owner who couldn’t afford the medical bills when she fell ill.

The first activity was to feed them their breakfast which consisted of watermelon and bananas. The elephants really like the watermelon and handing it to them meant that they grabbed it from your hands with their trunk and ate it gleefully. They eat around 300kg a day and are fed 5 times a day.  The two older elephants weren’t so keen on the bananas but the baby was very keen and got the lions share of these.

After their fruit breakfast we made up some supplemental breakfast balls from rice, banana, turmeric, papaya and some food pellets. We mixed this all together with our hands and offered it to the elephants. They clearly absolutely loved these because they disappeared very quickly !

Next on the Agenda was a mud bath for the elephants. The mud acts as a moisturiser and as sun protection for them. So we traipsed down to a dirty mud hole and proceeded to cake big handfuls of mud onto the elephants. They seemed to enjoy this ! It was a good excuse to get wet and muddy though.

Fortunately the next part of the agenda was perfect for cleaning off as we moved over to a swimming hole which the elephants clearly liked as they proceeded to sink down into the water splaying their legs to get deeper. We got in the water with them and brushed and scrubbed their skin.

There were no sign of any chains or other forms of securing the elephants. Our guide told us that they were free to roam the camp during the night which is great especially as they only sleep for about 3 hours a night. This had been a lovely experience and a highlight of the trip, being able to spend time with such incredible animals.