Kamala
"Kamala is what Patong would look like if it had made different decisions thirty years ago."
The mosque in the centre of Kamala village is a small white building with a green dome, set back from the road behind a screen of palms, and its call to prayer on Friday afternoons carries all the way to the beach. This is a detail that reminds you that Kamala was a Muslim fishing village long before it became a beach destination, and it remains one — the village is still here, operating in parallel with the tourist strip along the beachfront, and the coexistence is less uneasy than it sounds.
I came to Kamala on the recommendation of a woman who ran the coffee shop on Soi Romanee in Phuket Old Town. “Go there for lunch,” she said, “and don’t tell anyone about the khao mok gai.” Khao mok gai is Thai biryani, essentially — chicken cooked in turmeric-stained rice with raisins and crispy shallots — and the version sold from a stall near the mosque on Friday lunches is made by a woman who runs out by two in the afternoon. I arrived at one-thirty and got the second-to-last portion and ate it on a plastic chair in the shade with a glass of sweet iced tea, and it was worth every part of the drive from Phuket City.
The beach is two kilometres long and faces due west, which means the sunsets are architectural. The sand is dark gold rather than pale white, and the trees come close to the waterline at both ends of the bay, creating a natural frame. The surf is moderate — bodyboardable in the afternoons, swimmable in the mornings — and the beach is wide enough that it never feels full. There are sun beds for hire from two operations near the centre, and a beach bar at the southern end that has been there long enough to have developed a personality.
The Phuket FantaSea cultural theme park sits on the hill above the north end of Kamala Bay, which is either a blight or an attraction depending on your tolerance for theatrical productions involving elephants. I walked past it, noted the parking lot, and went to the beach.
What Kamala has that its neighbors don’t is a functional village economy that predates the tourist one. There are hardware shops and a school and a fresh produce market that operates every morning at five for the fishing community. The road that runs inland from the beach passes through the village proper, with its older wooden houses and its children on bicycles, and the transition from beach strip to working community takes about fifty metres. That proximity to ordinary life is rarer in Phuket than it should be.
When to go: November to April for calm seas. Kamala is worth visiting on a Friday to catch the mosque market for lunch. The Phuket FantaSea runs evenings only from Tuesday to Sunday; it does not affect the daytime beach experience.