Festivals Galore On Phuket
Phuket may be the largest island in Thailand and a legendary holiday place since the 1950s with an international airport and all manner of luxury Phuket hotels and resorts that spread up and down enormous tracts of hills and jungle terrain, but it is also an island steeped in many tribal traditions that are celebrated throughout the year with colorful and exciting festivals that attract people from all over the island, all over Thailand, all over Southeast Asia and all over the world.
The Phuket Vegetarian Festival runs once a year but it is about far more than food. Tribes people and ethnic groups from all over the region arrive with their special cuisines and cooking methods and visitors will be treated to the sight of cooks whipping up exotic delicacies that they have probably never seen anything like before in their lives.
Apart from the food however, the Phuket Vegetarian Festival is marked with all manner of bizarre and frightening displays of physical extremes such as self impalement on spears and piercing chests with sharp steel spikes. It is often considered a mark of bravery and sexuality to keep the spikes in as deep as possible for the longest time possible. The more spikes, the bigger the hero. These displays are not for the faint hearted.
Christmas is the antithesis to this - a western, Christian festival that is marked all over Phuket partly because most of the people that flock to Phuket for their holidays each year do so over the Christmas break. Christmas banquets including roast porn and beef with all the trimmings and even plum puddings covered in steaming custard are served up in the searing tropical heat for the homesick foreigners that arrive here every December by the tens of thousands.
Every Phuket hotel will be booked solid during the Christmas period and vacancies do not become any more common soon after with the onset of the western New Year festival, which involves many holiday makers staying in town for an extended summer break away from the cold weather they have back in their northern hemisphere homes.
Only a few weeks pass by before the start of the Chinese New Year, which makes every other festival in Phuket seem tiny and uneventful by comparison. Fireworks and rums go off day and night and every shop front and hotel is decorated with all kinds of red lanterns and other Chinese New Year paraphernalia.
There is a large Chinese population in Phuket just as there is all over Thailand and even so, Chinese New Year is the major festival throughout all of Asia. Many Thais take their annual holidays during Chinese New Year and so during this festival period not only hotel rooms but flights in and out of Phuket are scarce and priced to the absolute maximum.
Because Phuket is so festive at all times of the year, it may be a wise idea to travel to the Pearl of the Orient outside of festival periods. There is plenty of fun to be had at any time of the year here and while there are no major festivals taking place, great value in accommodation and transport prices abound. It makes sense to travel to Phuket outside of peak times, which always coincide with festivals.
