Phuket

This is a tshirt I saw at Karon Beach, on the island of Phuket, in Thailand. Patong is the biggest beach on the biggest island in Thailand.

Here's what you really need to know to understand Phuket: The hotel where I stayed in Phuket had a sign advertising a performance by a Thai Elvis impersonator. We didn't see or hear him, so I can't say if Elvis left or even entered the building.

After a few days at Patong I took a short but hugely expensive cab ride to Karon Beach. There I saw, not one, but two Thai Elvis impersonators, performing on the same night -- a Wednesday!-- not a half mile apart.

In the past nine months I have met hundreds of people who have traveled in Thailand. I have never heard one good thing about Phuket.

It lived down to its reputation.

I will say this: The beaches are gorgeous. The other islands I've visited have narrow beaches that disappear completely at high tide. The beaches on Phuket are long and wide. I flew into the island from Ko Samui and from the air it appeared that most of the island's coastline is beach.

I hesitate to use the word 'touristy' as an insult, as so many travelers do. I am a tourist, after all. When I hear travel snobs say that they don't like a place because it's 'too touristy' or 'there are too many tourists there' I will politely point out that they, as travelers in a country not their own, are, by definition, tourists.

It is possible for a place to give itself over to tourism in a good way. The hiking trails in Nepal are a good example. There much has been done to accommodate tourists while equal efforts are made to protect the environment and protect the local population from exploitation.

Phuket is the exact opposite.



The beaches are nice but they are completely overrun with Eurotrash, Russian nouveau riche and sex tourists from everywhere. People wear horribly inappropriate bathing suits that don't begin to cover enough skin, but yet don't bother to wear sunscreen.

So everywhere you see overweight men in Speedos who look like they spent the last hour standing in a blast furnace. The women you'd like to see topless keep their tops on, of course, but the others made me pause to wonder if the Taliban might be onto something with that burqa thing.

Okay, even I thought that was in poor taste. My point is that while Western travelers in Arabic countries know to dress appropriately few travelers in Phuket bother to learn, or simply don't care, that Thais frown on public nudity. Thais swim fully clothed. They know that tourists wear skimpy clothes on the beach (and the young men love it), but at a certain point it becomes disrespectful.

Therein lies the root of the problem with Phuket. It's not a Thai resort. It's a Western resort that happens to be in Thailand. It could be anywhere.

I was in Bangkok last year during the airport strike. A lot of tourists were able to leave Thailand by finding their way to Phuket and flying out of the international airport there. Direct flights to most major hubs in Europe and the Middle East leave daily.

But when I left Phuket I had to fly through Bangkok to get to Saigon. I'm sure there are flights from Phuket to cities in the region, but in general it's easier to get from Phuket to another continent than it is to hop across the Gulf of Thailand to other countries in Southeast Asia.

There are so many Western restaurants that those that serve Thai food will say so on their signs. Imagine, by way of comparison, going to Italy and seeing restaurants advertising that they serve Italian food!

It's a place for people who want to travel to Thailand without feeling like they're actually in Thailand.

Except for the sex tourists, of course. I saw far more prostitutes with their 'dates' than I've seen anywhere in Thailand. Patong makes Bangkok look like a church social.

After Patong I thought I'd try out another beach, to give the island another chance. Karon Beach is even more beautiful than Patong.



There are fewer sex tourists and more more families. But the per capita age on the beach was still about 115. I felt like I'd stumbled into a Scandinavian retirement community.

Note: I don't have anything against Scandinavians. Some of my best travel buddies hail from the northern climes. I merely point out that there were more businesses catering towards Danes, Finns, Swedes and Norwegians than I've seen anywhere else.

I stayed in a guest house that was roughly equidistant from Karon and another beach, Kata. Kata Beach is also gorgeous and attracts a younger crowd. I didn't feel like I'd stumbled onto the set of 'Cocoon'.



On all three beaches food and drink are ridiculously expensive. In Bangkok I loved eating from street vendors. I could eat a full meal of delicious, freshly-cooked food for less than a dollar. To eat at a nice sit-down restaurant in Bangkok costs from $3-5 per plate.

(I hasten to add I have eaten street food in every country I've been to on this trip and I have never gotten sick from it. I caught a stomach bug for the first time in Patong, where I ate almost entirely in Western-style restaurants.)

Phuket prices are not just expensive by Thailand standards, they're just expensive. In Karon I had a terrible pizza and a terrible fruit shake for $12.

(I've become addicted to fruit shakes. There are usually stands everywhere. They cut up fresh fruit -- mango, coconut, banana, strawberry, or, my personal favorite, watermelon -- and blend it with ice and a little water. It's pretty hard to screw up a fruit shake but this place managed to do it.)

I would have eaten food from street vendors but, here's the thing -- there are none! I'm sure there are in back neighborhoods, but I haven't yet been anywhere in Thailand where I had to go looking for street food, and that includes Chiang Mai, which was the most Westernized place I'd been in Thailand until I came to Phuket.

I've been in some dirty, rundown, scary places on this trip. But Phuket is the worst. It's sleazy, expensive and entirely lacking in character. It's inspiring to see how well it has bounced back after getting clobbered by the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004. But I wouldn't come back.

Quick pronunciation guide: The 'Ph' in Thai is pronounced like a P, not an F. (There is actually a difference between the 'hard' P sound and the 'soft' PH sound but to Westerners it's basically the same. And in Thai there is a sound that is somewhere between a G and a K, so the letters can be used interchangeably: gung can be spelled kung, for instance.

So Phuket is pronounced 'poo-GET'. Having been there, I would pronounce it in a more Western manner. The Ph should be an F, the u should be soft, the k should be a k and not a g and should be part of the first syllable and not the second.

Perhaps I'm being too coy, in which case: Phuk-et.