Jack Barker
To eight-year-old Lucy, Thailand’s Songkran festival came as something
of a dream. In the middle of the country’s hottest season, her
travelling world exploded into a waterfight.
The idea of Songkran, the Thai New Year festival, which is celebrated from
13-15 April, is that flowing water will wash away your sins: in practice, it
means a smiling, good-humoured war, with flat-bed trucks patrolling the
streets laden with huge drums of water to be lavishly sprayed at anyone in
range. Lucy busily engaged in water-pistol gunfights and was quick to take
advantage of the water drum outside our hotel restaurant, chucking
pint-sized bowlfuls of water over passing scooters, pedestrians and vehicles
and squealing delightedly as they returned fire.
To Wilf, aged three, it was all faintly bewildering. He stumped along the
street as strangers claimed luck by dabbing wet patches of coloured paste on
his small furrowed blonde forehead. Though he carried a water pistol, he was
more soaked than soaking. So, after three hours of mayhem, I sardined the
family on to our rental scooter and drove a mile or so to the beach.
I had first visited Thailand as a backpacker, and although I wasn’t sure how
to introduce a young family to this vibrant Far Eastern nation, I knew I had
to try. Instead of facing up to the capital city, Bangkok, I decided to try
three beach destinations – on three very different budgets.
Money tends to insulate the traveller from local life, so it was appropriate
that we experienced the Songkran festival on our cheapest budget, at Khao
Lak. This is one of the calmest of all Thailand’s mainland resort districts,
a quiet little place mid-way between the frenetic industrial-level tourist
development of Phuket to the south and the simple fishing villages that dot
the coast towards Burma to the north.
Not so long ago this stretch of shore was virgin mangrove swamp. A frantic
real-estate boom through the 1980s developed the region, but it was pretty
much returned to nature by the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, which reduced it to
a wasteland of broken concrete and fragments of wood.
There are no hostess bars in Khao Lak, no massage girls trawling the beach. A
police launch, casually tossed a kilometre inshore by the Tsunami, is now
marooned in the middle of a field and protected by a heritage stall selling
commemorative magazines illustrating the scale of the devastation. Though a
string of small businesses line the main inland road, tropical undergrowth
and fast-growing trees are recolonising the beachfront area faster than the
scatter of small-scale developments.
There were beachfront chalets on offer, but not with family rooms and not at
my self-imposed budget of £20 per night, so our room was in a newly built
concrete complex set back from the area’s busiest (and therefore probably
best) restaurant. Lucy’s bed was a mattress on the floor, Wilf’s the sofa.
The beach was either a long hot walk away or an entertaining ride on an
overloaded rental scooter. Meals were a delight as the owners had children
ours could play with. Wilf shared toys with their youngest on the floor
under the TV while Lucy dressed up and did hair-plaity things with their
elder daughter, leaving us free to lay into exquisite selections of spicy
Thai seafood.
Our next destination was Phuket, the most developed of all Thailand’s
beach-oriented islands. Two hours by coach got us to Phuket Town, and a
20-minute taxi drove us across the island to the most developed beach,
Patong, to check into the Holiday Inn.
In the UK, Holiday Inn is a pretty modest brand: not so in Thailand. Its
Patong property has an excellent reputation for families, packing in Brits
and Australians who return every year. At the front desk, the busboys showed
Wilf magic tricks while I was looked after graciously by the check-in staff
and then shown to a family suite. This boasted blackout curtains and a
separate twin-bunked children’s room, with its own games console and DVD
player. When we hit the pools, the children found new English-speaking
friends in the kids’ club, with its range of treasure hunts and games.
Meanwhile, the restaurants served fine Thai cuisine alongside a children’s
menu that I’d have been perfectly happy to tuck into myself.
In a way, it was almost too comfortable. The resort itself was hemmed in by
busy roads lined with stalls selling T-shirts, handicrafts and bootleg CDs;
the beach was narrow, the water infested with jet-skis and banana boats.
Phuket’s taxi drivers operate a bracingly expensive cartel so it took real
commitment to clear Patong’s city limits and see what else the island had to
offer: spectacular waterfalls in its forested heartland, and the quieter,
less developed beaches to the south.
It was easier to sign up to group activities arranged by countless
tourist agency stalls. The children raved about Phuket Phantasea, the
nightly theatrical extravaganza, with stylised dancers acting out a
sanitised history of Thailand and massed herds of choreographed
elephants, though I watched bad-tempered, brooding about how much it
had cost.
A knockout highlight, however, was our day among the islands of Phang Nga Bay:
sheer limestone outcrops that we could explore by inflatable canoe, paddling
in through hidden caves to enter sheltered, secret inner lagoons.
This was April, though, and the rains were on our tail. They slammed into
Phuket in a warm, drenching wall of water that forced us under the battered
umbrellas of a beachfront restaurant. My wife Nicky and I planned an escape
east, across Thailand’s southern mainland to the Gulf of Thailand, where a
different monsoon system holds sway. Koh Samui, we thought, should still be
dry and sunny.
Combined coach-and-boat tickets made the journey easy: it was four hours
overland to Surat Thani, where we were colour-coded with lapel stickers so
we could be efficiently herded on to the correct ferry. As soon as the boat
docked, however, the sea breeze dropped away and we were instantly
dishevelled in the tropical heat. We were very pleased to see a resort 4×4,
air-conditioned and immaculate, waiting for our arrival.
Our base on Koh Samui was the most opulent yet, and here the insulating bubble
of luxury was even harder to escape. The Karma Samui is a lavish development
of pool villas tiered out over a strip of undeveloped coast, available for
holidays but also, should you have the budget, for sale. Beautiful, cool and
icily neat, the Thai receptionist at the Karma Samui packed us smoothly into
a golf buggy and drove us the hundred yards to our four-bedroom pool villa.
The main room was vast, with huge picture windows on every side and elegant
furnishings. The bedrooms were on either side of the main courtyard: at its
heart was a pool. This was what Wilf focused on. No matter that a glorious
sunset was painting the sky, no matter that he was still fully dressed; he
wasn’t even bothered that he couldn’t swim. He walked straight out of the
living room and down the pool steps. There he wallowed, luxuriating in the
cool still waters of our own private pool.
As the days went on, the Karma Samui strengthened its hold on my family. The
restaurant was superb, and Nicky was also seduced by the tiny but perfectly
equipped kitchen. Lucy – who hates children’s clubs – loved the one-on-one
attention she got from Amy at the kids’ club here. The beach was poor but
the family didn’t care. Why did they need a beach when they had their own
pool?
I persuaded them to stroll among the timber-clad shopfronts of the fishing
village of Bophut, but to get anywhere we needed to call a taxi and this, in
the tropical heat, was sometimes just too much effort. A plan to zipwire
through the island’s inland jungle canopy stayed as just a plan; shamefully
we didn’t manage to make the boat-trip out to snorkel in the Ang Thong
National Park. Instead, the children borrowed Kangaroo Jack from the hotel’s
DVD library to play on our monstrous flat-screen TV and roared with laughter
in air-conditioned luxury.
I don’t know if this mattered. After all, we were on holiday, and there’s no
law that says you have to explore. But it seemed to me the more luxurious
our accommodation the fewer people we’d met and the less we had seen our
surroundings. In a country as beautiful and exotic as Thailand, there’s no
excuse for that.
Getting there
The writer flew with Thai Airways (0870 606 0911; thai airways.co.uk), which
flies from Heathrow to Bangkok. BA (0844 493 0787; ba.com) and Eva Air
(020-7380 8300; evaair. com) also fly from Heathrow.
Staying there
Khao Lak Seafood Restaurant, 19/1 Moo 7 Petkasem Rd, Kuk Kak, Khao Lak (00 66
76 485 318; khaolakseafood.com). Family rooms in a new-built complex start
at £12.
Holiday Inn Phuket, 52 Thaweewong Road, Patong Beach, Phuket (0870 400 9670;
holiday.phuket.com). Doubles start at £68 per night; family suite starts at
£136.
Seven nights’ B&B at the Karma Samui, Koh Samui cost from £1,457 per
person (inc flights) through Abercrombie & Kent (0845 618 2200;
abercrombiekent.co.uk).
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