Karon Beach

The beach at Karon is three kilometres long and wide enough that it takes a genuine effort to fill it. I walked its full length one morning from the southern point at Karon Hill to the northern end where the road curves back toward Patong, and counted maybe forty people spread across the whole thing. This in high season, in November, on a day without a cloud. Karon is one of those places that benefits enormously from being next to something more famous.

The sand squeaks when you walk on it. This is not a metaphor — the silica content of the sand at Karon is high enough that the compression of a footstep produces an audible squeak, and once you notice it you cannot stop noticing it. I mentioned this to a Belgian man who had been coming to Karon for fifteen years and he said, with a certain pride of ownership, “Yes. That’s just Karon.” The sand is also pale almost to white, finer than Patong or Surin, and the beach slopes gently into the water in a way that makes the entry into the sea feel like something you’re easing into rather than plunging through.

The town behind the beach is functional rather than attractive — the usual beach-road strip of travel agencies, massage parlors, and restaurants that have been here long enough to have lost ambition. But on the small lake behind the southern end of the beach, Karon Lake, there is a park where the local Thai community comes in the evenings to walk and exercise and feed the fish. I stumbled across it looking for a shortcut back to my guesthouse and spent an hour watching an aerobics class of approximately sixty women in matching visors performing choreography to Thai pop music at a volume that carried across the water. It was not what I had come to Phuket for and I was entirely glad I saw it.

The snorkeling off the southern headland — Karon Hill — is the best on this stretch of coast. A rocky point drops into water clear enough to see the coral in detail, and there are schools of parrotfish and the occasional leopard shark in the deeper water below the rocks. You can walk out to the point from the southern end of the beach and enter the water directly off the rocks at low tide, no boat required.

The road that climbs over Karon Hill toward Kata gives one of the best views in southern Phuket: Karon Bay sweeping north, Kata Bay curling south, and the open Andaman to the west going blue all the way to the horizon.

When to go: November to April for swimming. The surf picks up on Karon’s exposed face from May onwards, which is good for bodyboarders and terrible for children. The beach is at its least crowded in November and early December before the Christmas influx arrives.