If you’re thinking about a Phuket holiday, you’ll no doubt be wondering why you ought to choose Phuket over some of Thailand’s other island and beach destinations. Given the choice, we’d go for a Phuket holiday over a trip to Koh Samui, Koh Pha-ngan or any of the other nearby islands.
For a start, Phuket is developed enough that it has all the mod cons you could need, should you want them. You can find hidden-away spots, but you know that if you want to go to the mall or you need a hospital or whatever, it’s there for you.
Furthermore, no Phuket holiday would be complete without exploring the beaches and islands, which are, in our opinion, as good as, if not better than, any you would be able to find at Koh Samui, Koh Pha-ngan, Hua Hin, Pattaya and so on. The trick is just in choosing where to go.
Phuket holidays aren’t all that expensive. If you’re shrewd with money, you can have a great holiday and you’ll find that the prices in Phuket are very reasonable.
If you’re into activities, you’ll find them in abundance on your Phuket holiday. Being such a large island, there is access to everything, including bungee jumping, elephant trekking, go karting, kite surfing, wake boarding and so on.
Also, Phuket has links to the rest of Thailand and beyond. Should you wish to venture out somewhere else, trips can be arranged in a matter of minutes, either by bus, boat or plane.
If we haven’t convinced you to have a Phuket holiday yet, check out this video of paragliding in Phuket and the breathtaking Phuket scenery.
White Box is hosting another party this week. The restaurant that becomes a small nightclub after sundown will have four of the island’s top DJs will be spinning house, techno and electro from 10 pm until late tomorrow night. Aha. Sounds like a typical restaurant, right? Or not.
White Box is a restaurant by day that holds parties at night. That’s why we have it filed in our nightlife section and our restaurants section, Saturday July 5 will see DJ Q, DJ Jin, Dreadmongey and DJ Taz tearing it up. These are four of Phuket’s hottest DJs. They play serious club music without compromise, totally different to the same old tunes you hear in places such as Seduction and Banana at Patong Beach.
White Box is a wicked venue and their special events always attract a bubbly crowd of the island’s beautiful people. With Phuket in low season at the moment, parties such as this one at White Box are few and far between, so you have to make the most of these chances.
If you want more information about White Box Phuket you can log onto www.whiteboxrestaurant.com
Visitors to our island are often concerned about prices in Phuket. The cost of visiting Phuket is difficult to lay out because how much one person spends will be radically different to how much another person spends. Another factor to take into account is that different areas carry different prices tags. On a very basic level, the areas most densely populated by tourists are the most overpriced places. Patong in particular is renowned for being overpriced and low quality.
Addressing this issue on a very basic level, what’s most important is the minimum that you can spend and get by on in Phuket. Anything above this is up to the tourist. Food prices in Phuket start at next to nothing. You could eat three decent meals a day and not spend more than about 200 to 300 baht. Of course, you’d be eating from street vendors most of the time, but we all know how great Thai street food is. The more lavish the restaurants you choose to eat at, the higher the prices in Phuket become, up to restaurants in the luxury resorts, such as Rivet Grill at Indigo Pearl.
Accommodation prices in Phuket start from about 150 to 200 baht a night in some of the more basic guesthouses, mostly located in Phuket Town and Patong Beach. The more mod cons you add, the higher the prices. You can get a decent hotel room for about 500 to 1,000 baht. Nights in some of the luxury resorts, such as Villa Zolitude, go for 20,000 baht a night and up.
As for getting around the island, the prices in Phuket vary. You can hire a motorbike for about 200 to 300 baht a day and you can hire a car in Phuket for about 1,000 baht a day. Motorcycle taxis will take you short trips around Phuket Town for about 50 baht. A tuk-tuk from Phuket Town to Patong Beach or Karon Beach will cost at least 400 baht. There are buses and songthaew from Phuket Town to the beaches and in between that cost about 20 baht a ride.
Perhaps most important to some tourists are the alcohol prices in Phuket. Booze is cheap. Bottled beers and alcopops usually go for 50 to 100 baht and spirits from 100 baht a shot. Even in the more upmarket places, regular alcoholic drinks shouldn’t cost more than 200 baht each. Buying from supermarkets and 7-Eleven will, of course, be even cheaper.
You can buy cheap clothes for next to nothing from street sellers and markets. Knockoff DVDs go for about 100 baht each. The prices for brand names aren’t all that cheap, but fakes are everywhere.
If you have any more thoughts on prices in Phuket, feel free to share them.
Phuket weather is one of the topics that seems to come up frequently in Phuket forums. People often hear stories about how much rain falls during the monsoon season and then start to have doubts about how their trip to Phuket will pan out. Having been in Phuket year round, we can safely say that rain shouldn’t ruin any trip to Phuket.
During the wettest months, when it rains, it goes hell for leather, but it’s usually in short, sharp bursts with sun at either end. While it can be pretty miserable when the heavy rain is falling, it’s not as if it rains for 30 days solid. Even during monsoon season, there are bright intermissions and whole days without rain. Phuket weather is never unbearable.
Phuket is hot all year round. During the rainy season, there are occasional “cool” days, but you won’t need a coat or gloves. The hottest periods for Phuket weather are from April to May and then from September to October, when temperatures soar into the thirties.
During September and October, the rains start to fall and Phuket experiences its wettest period in terms of volume. In May, it’s said to rain about 25 days of the month, but this is only a rough estimate. This is Phuket’s longest rainy period. In June and July, the rain comes and goes, with heavy showers lasting anything from 15 minutes to an hour or more.
November to March is the coolest time for Phuket weather. Come March, things start to heat up and the weather becomes scorching.
There is no reason to not visit Phuket during monsoon season. If anything, it’s the best time because there are less people and it’s not too hot. You should expect showers here and there, but you will still be able to get out and about and see the island.
The rainfall is at its lowest in January and February, gradually increasing until about June and spiking in September until gradually trailing off until January again.
The average temperature in Phuket is about 30 degrees Celsius.
There are a number of magazines and websites in Phuket and the Andaman region. Property seems to fuel the media in Phuket, especially when you look at some of the magazines the island produces. Phuket has two newspapers. We’re not going to talk about circulation figures or other mumbo jumbo that is meant solely for advertisers; what people want to know is about the quality of the product.
The first newspaper is the Phuket Post, a relative newcomer on the scene that is halfway between a magazine and a newspaper. The Phuket Post comes out every two weeks and the content deals with Phuket news, lifestyle and general issues. Phuket Post occasionally writes about other cities, such as Kuala Lumpur, which usually confuses readers.
The design work of the Phuket Post is a little clunky with some interesting choices for the layout, but the newspaper can be a decent read. It’s not the most cutting edge of publications, but there aren’t many alternatives.
The other newspaper in Phuket is the Phuket Gazette, which has been around for more than 10 years. The Phuket Gazette is a more solid, rounded publication than its counterpart. Phuket Gazette isn’t perfect, but it does a good job of bringing some real issues to the table.
Phuket Gazette comes out every week on Saturday with news and features and a bunch of regular columns. Phuket Gazette is essentially a real newspaper and it’s worth a read to keep abreast of what’s happening around the island.
From a tourist’s point of view, you won’t get much benefit from reading the Phuket Gazette or the Phuket Post other than learning a bit about the island and maybe finding a place to eat or party at. If you’re on the island, there’s no harm in reading both newspapers.
We heard some disturbing news from Patong Beach today. Last week, there were a couple of foreign guys riding motorbikes around the streets of Patong Beach. They were goofing around and riding too fast when one of them lost control and slid his bike into a car.
While he was lying in the middle of the street at Patong Beach, the owner of the car allegedly took upon itself to lay the smack down, stomping on this poor guy’s head. To make matters worse, a bunch of Patong Beach motorcycle-taxi drivers decided to join in the fun. So you had a large group of Thai people beating seven shades of hell out of a tourist — in broad daylight.
You hear too many stories like this one about Patong Beach. The police came and charged the foreigner with reckless driving while the Thai thugs walked away. Sure, the foreigner shouldn’t have been showboating on his bike, but he didn’t deserve to be beaten in the middle of the street.
Just another day at Patong Beach and another reason why we hardly ever go there any more. The place is losing its charm — fast. We don’t even vibe with the nightlife at Patong Beach all that much any more.
There’s a party at Nai Yang Beach tonight for anyone interested. If you’ve never been to Nai Yang Beach, this is as good an excuse as any to pop up and check the place out. Nai Yang Beach is cool, it’s pretty chilled and the water is nice. Only trouble is that the beach can get a little messy.
At the moment it’s low season so the beach cleanups aren’t as frequent as they normally are. Anyway, the party is actually to celebrate the opening of a kite-surfing shop. Kite surfing, for those who might not know, is when you use a massive kite (more like a parachute) to pull yourself across the sea while you stand on a kind of small surfboard.
Kite surfing in Phuket is, by all accounts, a lot of fun. Of all the Phuket beaches, Nai Yang appears to be the best place to go kite surfing. At this time of year, the water is pretty choppy and the wind has started picking up. It’s not the best time or place for swimming in Phuket, however.
The party has free food and drink, which usually means that there will be hundreds of people there.
For anyone who has ever been to Patong, you will no doubt have seen that Soi Bangla is a pretty messy place. Late at night, there are some areas of Patong that are not exactly the most savory of spots. Tourists are often put off by the large amounts of rubbish that seem accumulate around Soi Bangla.
The situation in Patong has become so dire that the Kathu police chief (Kathu being the district under which jurisdiction of Patong falls) has vowed to cleanup the area — by enforcing laws that have existed for years.
The premise of this story, which was reported in the local paper the Gazette, is that the police chief has set out new guidelines for all Patong vendors along Soi Bangla. These vendors are now not allowed to take out their trash between 6 pm and 2 am. After 2 am, they can put their garbage on the street for the Patong refuse collectors to come and pick up.
Putting garbage on the street already carries a fine of up to 1,000 baht, but the police chief said that the law is never enforced in Patong. All that might be about to change as Patong tries to clean up its act for the sake of tourists.
We reckon this initiative will last about two weeks.
While most men look for ample curves in a female partner, one guy in Udon Thani province, Thailand, took the concept a few steps too far after he married a 12-foot python.
It gets better. Satian Kenkudlung, 35, married his python because, he says, the giant snake is actually the 600-year-old spirit of his former lover, reincarnated in the form of a snake so that the couple could be together again.
As the story goes, Satian was the bodyguard of a deity called Phrayanakho, whose daughter, Sathida, Satian fell hopelessly in love with. Phrayanakho had Satian executed as a result and Sathida died of a broken heart.
Fate has kept the couple together.
This match made in heaven has attracted throngs of curious locals, all keen to catch a glimpse of the mysterious man and his snake wife.
The saga reached new levels recently when the snake was alleged to have laid an egg, the supposed fruit of Satian and his snake’s love affair.
The governor of the province, Supoj Laowansiri, raised his suspicions about the egg and said that the incident appeared to be “well planned”, coming as it did just a few days after the snake wife mysteriously vanished.
One of the most common questions we are asked about Phuket is what our favorite Phuket beach is. With about a dozen easily accessible beaches to choose from, it’s hard to pick one as our favorite.
One Phuket beach that we never tire of visiting is Mai Khao Beach. Being such an enormous beach, there are countless deserted spots where you won’t be disturbed by those bloody banana boats or any other tourists. Mai Khao is one Phuket beach that can feel a little too secluded at times, but that’s how we like it.
On the flip side, the most popular Phuket beach is, of course, Patong Beach. While we don’t make a habit of visiting Patong Beach for the sake of the sand and the water, in terms of places to party, Patong really is the only Phuket beach with much of a nightlife scene.
Perhaps the most underrated Phuket beach is Yanui Beach, which is a really beautiful spot.
With low season upon us, there is a lot of rain, but there are still sunny days when it’s possible to make it out to the beach.
Powered by WordPress | Blog (RSS) | Comments (RSS)
Phuket Vogue is a resource dedicated to bringing you up-to-date information about restaurants and nightlife in Phuket. This website is constantly expanding to bring you the most vogue clubs and eateries on the island. Whether you want to party in Patong or dine out in Phuket City, we have the info for you. We love Phuket. Privacy policy
