PHUKET'S Governor is heading for the Mediterranean holiday coast, along with just about every family in Europe, to compare how the French resort of Nice shapes up against Phuket.

Governor Wichai Praisa-Ngob will be on the Cote d'Azur from July 16-22, which should be long enough to assess how Phuket's twin city manages its affairs and whether its much-younger Thai sibling can learn a lot about future directions.

The trip is a return visit as part of an exchange program that has already seen a Nice team visit Phuket.

Governor Wichai made his first overseas trip to the huge ITB Berlin travel fair in Germany earlier this year and found it such a worthwhile experience that he headed back to Barcelona in Spain soon after.

While the governor has a window of opportunity of only a couple of months before he retires, observers expect him to press for a rationalisation of excessive tuk-tuk fares and for a better public transport system before his personal October deadline.

Although French and Thai cultures are very different, Phuket and Nice have some similarities: both are coastal beach holiday resorts, both are mixtures of populations of different backgrounds, and both have suffered tsunamis.

The Nice tsunami was of less significance than Phuket's 2004 tsunami: the undersea landslide in 1979 led to a big wave that killed 23 compared to the 220,000 who died in the Indian Ocean tsunami.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about politics in Nice in its period of greatest development: ''Two men dominated this period: Jean Medecin, mayor for 33 years from 1928 to 1943 and from 1947 to 1965 and his son Jacques, mayor for 24 years from 1966 to 1990.

''Under their leadership, the city experienced extensive urban renewal and new constructions were undertaken (Convention centre, theatres, new thoroughfares and expressways, etc.) The arrival of the Pieds-Noirs, refugees from Algeria after 1962 independence, also gave the city a boost and somewhat changed the make-up of its population and traditional views.

''By the late 1980s, rumors of political corruption in the city government surfaced and eventually formal accusations against Jacques Medecin forced him to flee France in 1990. Later arrested in Uruguay in 1993, he was extradited back to France in 1994, convicted of several counts of corruption and associated crimes, and sentenced to imprisonment.

''Nice is the second most popular French city after Paris, a fact which, combined with the difficulties of land travel at long distance (partly because of the Alps), allows it to have the second busiest airport in France in terms of passenger numbers (close to 10,000,000 passengers in 2005).

''The high speed TGV train connects Paris and Nice (a 10-hour overnight trip in a couchette), with a stop in neighboring Marseilles.''

Governor Wichai is already a fan of Europe's high-speed trains. The thought of one being commissioned from Bangkok to Phuket if the island - along with Phang Nga and Krabi - succeeds in bidding for World Expo 2020 is an exciting prospect.

It's also a safe bet that Governor Wichai will be checking to see whether the local taxis have meters, and how their fares compare with the cost of other necessities in France. He will probably be looking forward to a local bus ride, too