Phuket Days: Adventure at Nai Harn Beach    Patrick Campbell

There were some places that had, early on, convinced my ageing psyche that they really were the place to be. Nai Harn Beach was one such location. Today, Wan and I were going to picnic on the beach. We had been doing it for so long , it had become a sort of ritual. We knew from past experience that the best place to go was under the casuarina pines, where you could move your deck chair into light or shade, as the sun’s rays filtered through the high branches.

Wan, a model of efficiency, had packed the food in plastic boxes: a home-made chicken massaman curry with peanuts , boiled eggs, crisp stalks of Chinese kale, rice, a fresh coconut. Plus her own supply of nam prik. That wasn’t all. She also put a large carboy of fresh water in the back of the truck, conscious that I loved a shower after a sea-dip that left me feeling as salty and desiccated as an old kipper.

Wan sat, lotus-style on the woven mat she had brought, sprinkled powder around its edges to deter the wood ants, and dispensed food. Later, we would sunbathe on the beach and watch the world go by: prosperous-looking, portly couples on their daily constitutional from The Nai Harn, an eccentric Englishman exercising his three Jack Russell terriers, gay poseurs showing off their tanned, sculptured bodies fresh from a session in the gym, sinuous, bikini-clad Russian beauties, fully clothed Thai families, the childrens’ tee shirts still dripping salt water.

Over the past decade or so, Nai Harn Beach had undergone several transformations. Like a giant bulldozer, the 2004 tsunami had cleared all before it: every lounger, beach tent, drinks stall, all the money-making paraphernalia had gone. Only nature, in the guise of deep-rooted sea almonds and stilt palms higher up on the dunes, had resisted the inundation.

But slowly, perhaps inevitably, almost unnoticed, the man-made evidences had re-appeared. Unseen termites colonising a new site. The restaurants beyond the casuarinas, damaged but not destroyed by the flooding, had started to encroach, with tables and chairs set once again among the pines. More permanent structures had followed. Down on the beach itself, the march of loungers and parasols and massage tents had started again in earnest .

At a stroke, the new political regime changed all that. A massive “clean-up” of Phuket’s west coast beaches was ordered in 2016, and Nai Harn, along with Kata, Kamala, Surin and Karon, was returned, more-or-less, to its pristine state. The sunbeds and parasols, the massage shacks,the drinks vendors, disappeared once more. So far, so good.

Now it was time for a swim. It was a grand day for a dip. Red warning flags were stuck in the sand in the middle of the beach, so I walked along the sand, newly moistened by the high tide, to The Nai Harn resort end of the shore where the sea was always benign. Often I went snorkelling there, for the rocks that made up the headland still harboured plenty of coral. And where there was healthy coral, there were always reef fish in abundance – trigger fish, wrasse, damsel, angel and banner fish.

Today, however, I just wanted to swim. I waded out, dived through the breakers, into the calm, limpid waters beyond and swam. 200 metres out, I luxuriated in the calm of the moment. Hardly a sound. Ethereal.The people on the shore looked like Lilliputians, beyond them a dark green screen of casuarinas trees. Flanking the bay were gaunt rocky headlands, with stands of coconuts planted high on the hillside amid verdant trees. Looking seawards, I took in the arc of bay and blue, blue sea, the concave of a sky coming to meet the ocean.