Phuket Old Town

I found Phuket Old Town by accident, the way you find the things that actually matter. I had been dropped at the wrong end of town by a songthaew driver who seemed confident I wanted to be somewhere else, and I walked south along Thalang Road with no particular plan, just the morning light slanting off the shophouse facades in a way that made the pale yellows and dusty blues look like they were lit from the inside. Within two blocks I had forgotten about the beach.

The Sino-Portuguese architecture here belongs to the nineteenth century, built by the families of Chinese tin miners who came to Phuket when the island was still defined by ore rather than suntan lotion. The buildings survived the twentieth century more or less intact — two-storey, with continuous covered walkways at street level and iron-shuttered windows above, peeling gracefully in the humidity. Soi Romanee is the one that gets photographed most, and it deserves it: a narrow lane where the paint is allowed to flake, where someone has planted small pots of ferns along the base of every wall, and where a coffee shop operated by a woman who couldn’t have been younger than seventy serves filter coffee in the darkest, most serious way imaginable.

The food in the old town is southern Thai, which means it is angrier and more complex than the versions most tourists encounter in beach restaurants. Kanom jeen — rice noodles served with a ladle of southern curry — is what I ate at a street stall near Rang Hill, sitting on a plastic stool with my knees almost touching a stranger’s, the curry made with dried shrimp and turmeric and something else I couldn’t identify that kept pulling me back for another spoonful. The market at the top of Thalang Road on Saturday evenings closes the whole street to traffic and fills it with vendors selling mango sticky rice, grilled pork skewers, and kaeng tai pla — a fish kidney curry that smells alarming and tastes extraordinary. The locals come in numbers that tell you this is not a performance for visitors.

There are galleries in some of the older buildings now, and a few boutique guesthouses have taken over the upper floors of the shophouses, and you could argue that gentrification has found its way here. But it hasn’t quite won. The key-cutting shop and the Chinese apothecary and the old men playing chess in the afternoons are still there, sharing the block with the specialty coffee places, and the tension between them feels like the most honest thing about Phuket. This is what the island looked like before it became about the beaches.

When to go: The old town is good year-round since it is not beach-dependent. The Saturday Walking Street runs every week. Avoid the midday heat of March and April — those covered walkways exist for a reason, but they only help so much.