Phuket back to normal but rival resort suffers

PHUKET - Patong's girlie bars are filling with western men, its nightclubs are again heaving and honeymooning couples buying souvenirs are jamming the footpaths.

The resort island of Phuket in Thailand is back in business after the tsunami.

Prayers for the return of big-spending tourists marked the beginning this month of the tourist high season in Phuket, where Patong's night life is the centre of attention.

The feeling is that Phuket's tsunami-affected western beaches, including Patong, have almost totally recovered since the killer waves of last Boxing Day.

Optimistic locals keen to move on and make money say tourist numbers are at about 80 per cent of last year's.

New sea walls are a reminder of the tsunami's effect; minor reconstruction continues at only a few spots in Phuket, and beachfront sites such as Patong's Holiday Inn have been rebuilt.

Tests on part of a tsunami advance warning system for Patong beach were successfully completed this month.

A complete warning system for the entire Andaman coast is expected to be fully working by the end of next year.

But if Phuket was damaged by the tsunami then its tourism rival Khao Lak, 100km to the north in Phang Nga Province, was flattened.

Most of the 5400 people killed on Thailand's Andaman Sea coastline by the tsunami, half of them tourists, died at Khao Lak.

Now a photo stop, a large police boat washed 3km inland still lies at the base of a hill. Nearby, a mangled collection of helmets and motorcycle bits and pieces forms an unofficial shrine to the many killed as they travelled along the low coast road.

A sign in a cafe just north of Khao Lak offering one million baht (about $35,000) for information about the whereabouts of two-year-old Swedish boy Johannes Adamsson includes a picture of a happy little lad. He was last seen alive in a tree with a six-year-old girl who said he had been rescued in a boat.

The sign says his parents "have reason to believe he is alive and well".

Based in Phuket, an international team of forensic experts continues the job of victim identification on remains kept in refrigerated containers.

But they say many of the bodies, either washed out to sea or buried inland under silt and rubble, may never be found.

Compared with Thailand's beach tourism flagship of Phuket, Khao Lak seems to be years from a tourism recovery.

New housing for displaced locals is still under construction.

Khao Lak officials complain in local newspapers that resources have been poured into Phuket at the expense of reconstruction in their province.

A T-shirt being sold to tourists in Phuket captures the mood. One side asks "what's next?" for Khao Lak after a terrorist alert in 2001, Sars in 2002, bird flu in 2003 and the tsunami of 2004. Defiantly, the other side of the shirts says "Still Surviving".

So while Khao Lak recovers from the tsunami it appears it will also have to counter the effect reports of bird flu elsewhere in Thailand might have on tourists here.

Phuket's governor has already banned cock-fighting and stepped up livestock inspections at checkpoints.

- AAP