Khao Lak

The coast of Phang Nga north of Phuket lived for centuries on tin, rubber, coconuts and fishing. Takua Pa, a little inland to the north, was the important place: an old trading settlement on a river route across the peninsula, later a tin-mining town whose Chinese merchant families built the shophouses that still line its old street. The beaches themselves held scattered fishing hamlets and plantations, with the forested ridge of Khao Lak behind them, and no road worth the name until the 20th century.

Tourism came late and grew quickly. German and Scandinavian travellers began arriving in the 1980s and 1990s, drawn by empty sand and by diving on the Similan Islands, which had been declared a national park in 1982. Low-rise resorts spread along the beaches through the 1990s, and by 2004 Khao Lak was a substantial destination, busy with European visitors over Christmas.

On the morning of 26 December 2004 the Indian Ocean tsunami came ashore here with greater force than anywhere else in Thailand. The flat, open coast gave no protection; resorts, villages and the fishing fleet were destroyed, and the final death toll along this coast was put at more than 4,000, among them large numbers of foreign visitors. Patrol Boat 813, carried almost 1.25 kilometres inland from Bang Niang beach, was left where it stopped and is preserved as a museum ship, and memorials along the coast mark the events. Rebuilding took years and was accompanied by warning towers, sirens and marked evacuation routes; the resorts returned, and the area's reputation for quiet beaches and serious diving with it.

Khao Lak is a working coast that acquired a resort strip, and the two sit side by side. Behind the hotels are villages of rubber tappers, palm growers and fishing families, Buddhist and Muslim in roughly equal measure in parts of Phang Nga, with mosques and temples within a few kilometres of each other. The southern Thai dialect is spoken, quick and clipped, and Hokkien-descended families in Takua Pa keep Chinese shrine festivals, including the meat-free ninth lunar month.

The diving community gives the strip its other character. Instructors and crew from Thailand and abroad live here through the dry season, liveaboards fill and empty at Thap Lamu pier, and conversation on the main road turns on visibility, whale sharks and park closures. Because the Similan and Surin parks shut for the monsoon, the whole area empties in a way that few Thai resorts do, and the seasonal rhythm is more pronounced than in Phuket.

The tsunami remains the defining shared experience. It is commemorated each December, and the memorials — the police boat above all — are visited by Thai and foreign families alike. Residents generally speak of it plainly when asked, but it is a subject approached with care rather than curiosity, and photography at the memorials is best kept discreet.

Khao Lak is not a single town but a line of villages — Khuk Khak, Bang Niang, Nang Thong, Bang Sak and others — mostly in Takua Pa district, with the original Khao Lak village further south in Thai Mueang, together home to only a few thousand permanent residents, plus a seasonal workforce drawn from the Isan provinces and from Myanmar. Takua Pa town, about twenty-five kilometres north, provides the hospital, schools, banks and government offices.

The economy runs on tourism from November to April and on rubber, oil palm, fishing and small-scale farming for the rest of the year. Many families do both: tapping rubber before dawn in the wet months, working in hotels and dive shops when the season turns. Land along the coast has been bought and built on steadily since the rebuilding, and the price of it, water supply in the dry months and the condition of the reefs are the recurring local concerns.

The daily rhythm follows the road and the sea. Dive boats leave Thap Lamu before dawn, markets trade early, the middle of the day is hot and quiet, and the beaches fill again in the late afternoon for the sunset over the Andaman Sea. In the monsoon the strip shrinks to a handful of open restaurants, the surf is loud, and the coast belongs to residents again.

The cooking here is southern Thai, hotter and more turmeric-heavy than in Bangkok. Kaeng som, a sour fish curry coloured orange with turmeric and sharpened with tamarind, is the everyday standard; kua kling is minced meat dry-fried with a fierce paste of chilli, turmeric and pepper; and kaeng tai pla, built on fermented fish innards, marks a kitchen cooking for locals rather than visitors. Rice and a plate of raw vegetables come alongside to temper them.

Seafood is the obvious strength: prawns, squid, crab and whole fish landed at Thap Lamu and the smaller piers, sold by weight and grilled over charcoal. Muslim kitchens in the villages add khao mok gai, spiced chicken with yellow rice, roti folded around banana and condensed milk or eaten with curry, and massaman, the mild, aromatic curry with Muslim roots. Breakfast for residents is often khanom jeen, fermented rice noodles under a curry sauce, or rice soup with pork.

Takua Pa, with its Hokkien Chinese past, brings dishes closer to those of Phuket — braised pork with black pepper and garlic, five-spice stews and noodle soups — and coffee shops that open before dawn and serve coffee thick with condensed milk. Along the resort strip itself the menus are broad, with German and Scandinavian dishes reflecting the visitors who have come here for thirty years, and fruit stalls selling mangosteen, rambutan and durian in season.