If you want to write a story about a party town, Sunday is not the night to plan your visit. Even so, this story begins exactly there, at around 9 p.m. in late March, two years after the pandemic started.
Such was the hour at which I found myself standing at the entrance to Bangla Road in Phuket, the biggest party street on the biggest island in Thailand. The #Banglaroad hashtag on Instagram offers a pretty good sense of what you can expect from the area: bright lights, small outfits, and a general Vegas-meets-Jersey-shore vibe. I had booked a reporting trip to Phuket to write about hotels, real estate, and Russian money. Where better, I figured, to write about how tourism has changed than in the heart — or is it the underbelly? — of Thailand tourism itself?
I had arrived on the island nine hours earlier, gotten a PCR swab in the airport, and posted…
