IS PHUKET changing for the better? How does it compare with the Phuket of 30 years ago? Does the island have a future?

A News Analysis think-piece at the weekend prompted some informed responses from Phuketwan readers, generating plenty of food for thought. Here are three readers' viewpoints that broaden everyone's collective knowledge about Phuket's past and Phuket's future:


WHEN I FIRST came to Phuket 31 years ago our bungalow owners patrolled the beach every night armed with a rifle. Piracy was rife and bandits still raided up and down the coast, they said.

When I finally moved here nine years ago, pretty much every farang on the island knew each other and after staying for a few years everyone had mellowed out and adjusted to local conditions.

Over the past three or four years years I've noticed quite a change in the type of person coming here. You still get the older ones who just want to chill out, play golf all day and blend in with the community, but you are now attracting younger guys who are too hyped up to blend in or adapt to local conditions.

The soccer hooligan element, as I call it. These guys end up in timeshare or the muay thai camps and they just don't settle down. They bring all their emotional baggage with them that longer term expats have left behind or dispensed with soon after their arrival.

This will sooner or later bring them grief. This is becoming evident in some of the stories written recently on Phuketwan.

Phuket will never return to the way it was and that is why most of the people I know from 10-15 years ago have moved to other parts of Thailand or left the country altogether.

I too am looking to move on after half a lifetime relationship with Phuket. But Phuketians are a resourceful bunch (they've had to deal with a lot of change over the last three decades) and they will sort it out in their own way and in their own timeframe. All the doomsayers who say that Phuket is finished this and Phuket is finished that just don't get the place.

For an island that the British tried to steal in the 1800s but was never able to do so, Phuket has done well. Phuket will survive, in a different form for sure, but Phuket will survive because she is far too beautiful not to.

Andyman


I HAVE OBSERVED that in the past a lot of the expats I met here came for one of two reasons. Either they were seeking something (love, freedom, fresh start) or they were running from something (ex-wife, job, boredom, their past in general and in a few cases the law). As stated before, those looking for something often don't find it and you can run but can't hide.

In other words, we are who we are and end up facing most of the same issues and looking for the same things we were in our homelands.

Thailand is a country that really does offer a great deal of personal freedom. Something I love. But part of that package is there are not a lot of barriers. People can pretty much do whatever they want, for better or worse no one is checking up on you.

Want to get drunk and stay drunk you can, drive crazy, etc. the normal social limits are pretty out the window and the Thais will leave you alone.

That also means that there are no support systems or safety net so that when people fall, they really go down. (Mental illness is a good example, whether for good or bad there really are not facilities for treatment or protecting these people from themselves or others from them).

It is really endemic to a free society (as in free from restriction) that these people are left to roam. There have always been people on the fringes of our community who struggled with this freedom.

I have always believed that a lot of the laws, inspection and such in the west were unneeded. That left to their own, people would behave within limits, and society could self-regulate. Currently in the community this theory is being tested.

It seems clear to me that tolerating aberrant behavior among expats can't go on. Either we begin to police our own community to some extent or we will force this society to do it for us. When the immigration rules, restrictions (or worse) become tighter, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

Ya Think Doctor


I ALSO WORRY about the amount of money coming to this island from foreign investors and where it's coming from. And let's just admit it, we all have an idea and have heard the rumors. Drugs, sex, money laundering, mafia etc etc.

Whilst I'm sure that some of it is legitimately earned, to what extent is unknown and as so many readers have pointed out with regards to the types of people who are attracted to Phuket, it appears more and more that it is individuals who are seeking out a place where the law is not the law.

The more long-term farangs you meet here, the more ''disillusioned'' one becomes. Most come in search of something, and it is appearing more and more likely, to me at least, that it is the ''culture'' here that is drawing the wrong types of individuals. When I say ''culture'' I am referring to the melting pot that is Phuket.

The mix of current political practices, the culture of entrenched corruption, the constant prostrations to Mammon, sex tourism, drugs, excessive consumption of alcohol, and not to mention all the financial reasons people come here, mean that you will, as another pointed out, ''reap what you sow''.

I don't blame Thais for their views on farangs here and I don't blame farangs for their views of Thai people here. This island in many ways attracts the worst of both worlds and conjures up visions of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Having said that, there are honorable people here, both Thai and farang, but they take some seeking out, and living in a 'bubble'' and trying to see the good things here and remaining, whilst aware of the bad, living in that bubble of sunshine is not such a bad way to deal with life here.

Anonymous

What's your perspective? Please broaden all our Phuket horizons via the Comment box below.