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Bicycling Bourton with Phuket veteran Bill Dobbs
Bicycling Bourton with Phuket veteran Bill Dobbs
My good friend, 83-year-old Bill Dobbs, first set eyes on Phuket some 73 years ago, in 1953, when he was a mere slip of an Irish lad of ten summers. Bill’s father had spent his career in international shipping based in Singapore and Malaysia and had taken the family, including young Bill, for a holiday to an undeveloped and largely empty island called Phuket, about which he’d heard glowing reports.
A Phuket icon turns 90
A Phuket icon turns 90
“Phuket is like a stage where everyone is an actor in an absurdist comedy of errors! It’s insane, but it’s never boring”
Beat a retreat from the heat
Beat a retreat from the heat
I was feeling frazzled of brow and lazy of cycling leg as Phuket’s annual super-hot season started to take its toll, draining my motivation to get up at an ever-earlier hour in order to avoid the scorching heat and morning rush-hour mayhem of the island’s roads.
Cycling down memory lane
Cycling down memory lane
Turning 76 while riding a bicycle, as I recently did, is not for the faint-hearted, well not in Phuket’s torrid maelstrom it’s not!
Phuket needs more shady deals
Phuket needs more shady deals
There’s a creeping blight of Seven-Elevens, Makros, SuperCheaps and Tesco Lotus’s slowly eating into the leafy fabric of once pristine Phuket. We all know that.
Love is in the air... not to mention the bubbles
Love is in the air... not to mention the bubbles
Saint Valentine’s Day is traditionally a time for romance, flowers, candle-lit dinners and the whispering of sweet nothings into the shell-like ear of the object of your affections. But in Phuket there can be other distractions.
Phuket’s ‘Caveman’ turns 80
Phuket’s ‘Caveman’ turns 80
John Gray is one of the Andaman’s most iconic and internationally famous characters who reached his 80th birthday just a few weeks ago. What better way to celebrate the life of this extraordinary man than to take a nostalgic peak at John’s unique trajectory, both through his life and through this amazing part of the world which he calls home.
A Meal With... Sid Carter: Memories of a ‘Happy Hooker’
A Meal With... Sid Carter: Memories of a ‘Happy Hooker’
I recently heard the sad news that an old friend and enthusiastic Phuket visitor named Sid Carter had passed away in his English hometown of Southampton. Sid visited Phuket several times and was a great lover of the Andaman region’s many charms. His passing made me reflect on the more contemplative and immersive style of tourism which Sid loved, compared with the hedonistic excess which seems to be today’s norm.
Blazing Saddles: A Thai girl in Monet’s garden
Blazing Saddles: A Thai girl in Monet’s garden
My diminutive Thai partner Pattie and I had travelled to Paris to take in the dramatic tourist attractions of that most contradictory of cities. Historically and artistically stunning, yes, but equally frustrating and downright annoying in many of its present guises.
The art of ‘Slow Cycling’
The art of ‘Slow Cycling’
Fighting my way through a forest of jostling ‘selfie sticks’, I hopped off my bike atop Promthep Cape at sunset in order to take in the iconic moment when our great scarlet solar power station dipped below the horizon. The selfie sticks clashed and bristled like febrile insect antennae and a collective explosion of ‘influencer’ verbal ejaculations ran through the assembled ranks of ‘content generators’ as the sun finally disappeared for another night.
A Meal with… Thomas Brack
A Meal with… Thomas Brack
Thomas Brack is one of Phuket’s most respected restaurant managers and for many years ran, with exceptional grace and efficiency, the famous 9th Floor restaurant off Rat-U-Thit 200 Pi Rd in Patong. So, to meet him, as I recently did, beaming happily in a school playground surrounded by a legion of boisterous, energetic youngsters was something of an enigma.
Blazing Saddles: Have a Nice day!
Blazing Saddles: Have a Nice day!
I awoke to the seductive aroma of freshly baked croissants and brewing coffee and realised that despite the dream I’d just been having about a gang of bikini-clad ladyboys fighting a pitched battle against a rabble of unregistered taxi mafiosi in Soi Bangla, I was in fact a long way from Phuket!
Hope, health and happiness in Kalim
Hope, health and happiness in Kalim
Phuket’s Kalim region sits over a small hill to the immediate north of Patong, the world-famous epicentre of hedonism and decadence on the island. Although it is so close to the immense cash flow of Patong’s buzzing cash registers, Kalim is a rather down-at-heel suburb populated by many impoverished families…. fisherfolk, odd-jobbers and the unemployed.
Blazing Saddles: A Year in Phuket
Blazing Saddles: A Year in Phuket
I moved to Phuket to live and take over the editorship of Art Asia Publishing’s Phuket Magazine in 2006. I’d jumped from the grinding maw of an exceedingly high (blood) pressured career as an advertising agency Vice President, based in Bangkok…. one of the hottest, congested and polluted cities on Earth. 
Blazing Saddles: ‘Kayaking Commuters’ Down Under
Blazing Saddles: ‘Kayaking Commuters’ Down Under
Forgoing my normal morning bike ride at six o’clock and the terror of Phuket’s daily road mayhem, one recent chilly and misty dawn, I found myself wolfing down a bacon and egg roll and coffee at a little Rose Bay café on the southern foreshore of Sydney Harbour. Nothing unusual about that you might say, until you notice that I’m wearing waterproof shorts and a spray jacket and that my knees are knocking uncontrollably together.
Blazing Saddles: Cycling with Serendib
Blazing Saddles: Cycling with Serendib
Coined by the early Persian traders for the island also known to British colonialists as ‘Ceylon’ and today as Sri Lanka, Serendib is a lovely word with a delightful meaning. The Oxford dictionary defines it as “the unplanned discovery of charming or beguiling experiences” and it can be a part of travelling even in these frenetic days, IF you take the time to slow down and let the magic of happenstance divert you.
Blazing Saddles: Peddle, paddle, pain au chocolat
Blazing Saddles: Peddle, paddle, pain au chocolat
One early morning last week, I discovered the meaning of life and also the secret of eternal youth, which is not a bad morning’s work for what started as a routine bike ride in southern Phuket.
A Meal With... the Inspiration Tina Hall
A Meal With... the Inspiration Tina Hall
‘Inspiration’ is a quality many in the Andaman region are seeking in these challenging times. Having recently returned from three months in the UK, my first impression of Phuket was a feeling of rather gloomy resignation to the current difficulties. While the pandemic seemed to be under control and had been officially ‘re-branded’ as a ‘communicable disease’, the touristic life-blood of the island is still very much a hoped-for dream.
Blazing Saddles: Cycling with Steve
Blazing Saddles: Cycling with Steve
It was the mid-1990s and I was working as a senior vice president for one of the world’s largest communications groups based in Bangkok. I seemed to be forever jet-lagged from flying around Asia-Pacific to various meetings. I had high blood pressure, took sleeping pills to cope with work stress and jet-lag and had intractable sinusitis from the acrid air pollution of the city.
Memories of a True Rock ’n’ Roll Dad
Memories of a True Rock ’n’ Roll Dad
My dear friend of many years, Sam Wilkinson sadly passed away some weeks ago back in his home-town of Liverpool, in England. Sam was a wonderful character, known and loved by many in Phuket and around Thailand. He was a sort of romantic troubadour and wandering artist of abundant talents… in music, words, wit and just the noble art of enjoying life to the full! Sam was always kind and loving, sometimes almost unworldly and seeming to belong in a kinder, gentler era than the one we now inhabit.