Patong Beach

This guide to Patong Beach in Phuket opens on the morning of December 26, 2004, when the sea pulled back further than anyone on the beach could explain. It also traces the decades before that morning -- a fishing village reachable only by boat until the 1940s, without electricity until 1979, transformed into a resort strip in barely thirty years. Picture the seabed exposed that morning, dark and dry.