Rawai Beach

Rawai is the beach that people arrive at, look at, and decide has gone wrong. There is no sweep of sand, the water is full of moored long-tails, and at low tide it goes to mud. Then they eat there and understand it.

It is not a swimming beach and it never was. It is the southern tip of Phuket, the island’s working waterfront, and the departure point for everything offshore.

Why nobody swims

The bay is shallow a long way out and much of the bottom is seagrass, which is good for the dugong that occasionally turn up in Phuket’s southern waters and bad for wading into. Long-tails are moored across most of the frontage because this is where they live, not because they are waiting for you. As the tide drops the sand gives way to mud and broken shell.

Nai Harn is ten minutes over the hill and is everything Rawai is not, which is the practical answer for anyone staying here.

The one number on this site to ignore

This is the beach where our own measurement is furthest from the truth, and it is worth setting out because it explains what a wave figure can and cannot do.

The marine grid we use is about five kilometres across. Rawai falls in the same cell as Kata and Nai Harn, so it is given their numbers: 1.34 metres in July, the roughest on the island.

Rawai is not rough in July. Kata and Nai Harn face west and southwest and take the southwest monsoon on the nose. Rawai faces south, around the headland, so the same weather arrives across the island rather than into the bay. In practice it is one of the calmest stretches of water on Phuket in exactly the months the west coast is closed by red flags, which is why the boat fleet lives here.

The figure is not wrong so much as answering a different question: it describes the open sea in that cell, not what happens at a shoreline five kilometres round a corner. The measurement page says as much in general terms, and Rawai is the specific case.

The seafood row

The reason to come. A line of restaurants runs behind the beach, and in front of them are fishmongers with the morning’s catch on ice: prawns, crab, squid, snapper, whatever the boats brought in. You buy from the fishmonger and carry it to a restaurant, which cooks it for a fee per dish.

It is the cheapest way to eat well on Phuket and one of the few genuinely local things left on the island’s south. Ask the price per kilo before you point, and ask the cooking charge before you sit down; both are normal questions and nobody minds them.

The pier, and the islands

Gallery

In pictures

Rawai’s landing pier at the eastern end is one of two main departure points on southern Phuket, the other being Chalong just north. Long-tails run to Coral Island in about fifteen minutes and to the Racha islands in around an hour, along with the smaller groups off the southern tip.

It is also where the island’s sea-gypsy community lives. The Urak Lawoi have been on this coast far longer than the resorts, and their village sits at the eastern end of the beach. It is a place people live rather than an attraction, and it is worth knowing that before wandering through it with a camera.

Staying here

Rawai has quietly become Phuket’s long-stay quarter: gyms, cafes, international schools and a lot of people who came for a month and stayed. That is a recommendation for a second visit and a warning for a first one, because none of it is what a week on Phuket is usually about.

The island’s four main bases, none of which is Rawai, are on where to stay in Phuket, and the beaches compared against each other are on the beaches page.