Kata Noi

The first time I came to Kata Noi I didn’t know what it was called. I had rented a scooter in Phuket City and taken the road south through Kata, not quite sure where I was going, until the road curved around a headland and the bay opened below me — a tight crescent of pale sand, maybe two hundred metres end to end, backed by a jungle-covered hill on one side and a single beachside restaurant on the other. I pulled over and sat on the scooter for a moment just looking at it. It was the kind of view that makes you feel slightly cheated by everywhere you’ve been before.

The beach is small enough that you always know where you are on it. There is no room for the industrial sun-bed operation you get at Karon or the full beach-club apparatus of Surin. The restaurant at the far end — a simple open-sided place with tables nearly touching the sand — serves fried rice and pad krapao and cold Changs, and the service is slow in the best possible way, the way that suggests the person taking your order also finds the view distracting. I ate lunch there on three consecutive days and am not embarrassed about it.

The surf comes in from the southwest and in the afternoon it picks up enough to make swimming interesting — not dangerous, but you feel the push and pull of the Andaman in a way that reminds you this is an ocean and not a swimming pool. The morning is better for swimmers; by two in the afternoon the waves are drawing a crowd of young Thais with shortboards who use the headland at the northern end as a natural surfing funnel. Watching them from the beach while eating a bag of fruit bought from the woman who walks the sand with a cooler bag is one of those pure, useless afternoon pleasures that travel occasionally provides.

The hill between Kata Noi and the larger Kata Beach above holds a viewpoint that most people miss because the sign is modest and the path is steep. From the top you can see both bays simultaneously — Kata Noi curled below you like a comma, Kata spreading north beyond the headland. The light in the late afternoon turns the water every shade of blue and green in rapid succession. I took too many photographs and used none of them, because the photographs never explain what the light actually felt like.

When to go: November through April for calm seas and the clearest water. The surf season runs May through October, when the southwest swell picks up and the beach becomes more interesting for wave-riders than swimmers. Kata Noi stays swimmable through most of the shoulder months in ways that the more exposed beaches don’t.