The collection
Andaman Sea · Loud in the middle, silent at both ends
The bay on the far side is the reason to leave the beach. Phang Nga is a shallow green sea with three hundred limestone islands standing in it, and the good ones are hollow — collapsed cave systems with a lagoon inside and one low tunnel in, passable by canoe for about ninety minutes either side of low tide and impassable the rest of the day. You go in lying flat in the boat. Inside is a circle of jungle and vertical rock with the sea breathing under it, and the noise of the world does not follow you through. It is forty minutes from a beach chair.
Phuket is fifty kilometres long and spends most of that length being misunderstood. The island's reputation was made on a two-kilometre stretch of the west coast where the bars start at four and the sea is the least interesting thing in sight — and almost nobody who comes for the island ever goes there. What is actually here is older and much stranger: a tin island, mined by Hokkien Chinese families who came south in the nineteenth century and got rich enough to build a town of shophouses with shuttered arcades and tiled floors shipped from Penang. The ore ran out, the rubber came in, and the coast was left to itself for another eighty years. Then the headlands were found. Between the capes the beaches are cut off from each other by granite ridges thick with rubber and wild mangosteen, and each one ends up its own small country — Pansea reached by a single lane, Nai Thon empty on a Tuesday in February, the whole east coast facing a bay full of limestone that most visitors never turn to look at.
Three hundred limestone towers in shallow green water east of the island, several of them hollow. The hongs — collapsed caves with a lagoon and a ring of jungle inside — are reached by canoe through a tunnel that only clears for about ninety minutes either side of low tide, lying flat as you go under.
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Pansea Beach
Aman began here. Teak pavilions in a working coconut plantation, and a black pool with nothing at the far end but the Andaman.
Thalang, Dibuk and Soi Romanee, built by the Hokkien families the tin boom made rich: shuttered five-foot arcades, stucco in faded ochre and green, and Penang tile underfoot. Still a working town rather than a preserved one — a goldsmith, a coffee shop and a shrine on the same block.
The island's most revered temple, built around the memory of two monks who set broken bones during the nineteenth-century tin-miners' rebellion. Answered prayers are repaid with firecrackers, let off in a brick kiln in the courtyard that goes all morning.
The last stand of the forest that once covered the whole island — a few square kilometres of evergreen on the northeast slope, with a gibbon rehabilitation project inside it releasing birds back into a canopy that can just about hold them.
The southern tip, a bare headland of casuarina and grass running out into the Andaman. Everyone comes for the sunset and most of them stand in the same place; walk down the spine toward the lighthouse and the crowd is behind you within two minutes.
Eleven kilometres of undeveloped sand on the northern shore, inside a national park. Leatherback turtles still come ashore here between November and February — rarely now, and never on a schedule, which is the point of it.
Kamala Hills
A clay cone, a canvas tent, a nest on the ridge: 38 villas on a rainforest hillside, and no two the same.
Emerald Bay, Patong
600 metres of white sand at the quiet end of Patong, and a hillside of pavilions above it.
Cape Yamu
A headland on the wrong side of Phuket — which is to say the quiet side — looking out at Phang Nga Bay.
Pansea Beach
A bay reached by one lane, cedar roofs stepped through the coconut palms, and a black hexagonal pool where the grass ends.
Nai Thon
A wooded headland above a bay nobody else can reach, with 61 villas down its slope, every one of them with its own pool.
Laguna Phuket, Bang Tao
A chain of lagoons behind Bang Tao beach holds 217 villas, and every one has a pool of its own.
Nai Harn Bay, Rawai
On the cliff above Nai Harn Bay, at the quiet south tip of Phuket, with the Andaman filling every window that faces it.
Naka Yai Island, off Ao Po
On Naka Yai, a small island off Phuket's east coast, reached only by a 5-minute speedboat from Ao Po Grand Marina.
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