Kata Beach

This guide to Kata Beach in Phuket opens with the fishermen who still launch their boats before dawn, much as they did before any tourists arrived. It follows Mom Luang Tridhosyuth Devakul, a Harvard-trained architect of Thai royal descent, and the resort he brought to this fishing village in the early 1980s. His own thatched bungalow on the hillside between Kata and Kata Noi later grew into a boutique resort called Mom Tri's Villa Royale.