Phuket Archery Club owner Santi (left) and his brother Chai, on the range. Chai is holding a conventional long bow, while Santi has a modern compound bow. - Photo © Alasdair Forbes 2010.

Twang. Thunk. Robin Hood was good at it. So was William Tell – he could split an apple at 100 paces. Henry V of England won the battle of Agincourt 600 years ago in great part due to his archers. Closer to Thailand, Phra Narai in the Ramayana was an astonishingly good archer.

And now you can be too, maybe. You won’t know till you try, and you can now try at the newly opened Phuket Archery Club, in Phuket Town.

The club is the brainchild of Santi Tontungtrong, who learned how to use a bow and arrow in Bangkok, got hooked on the sport, and decided it was just what he and Phuket needs.

“We have all these shooting ranges here, and guns are too easy to get hold of,” he said. “When kids get hold of a gun, they are going to want to use it. This is a much healthier outlet for them. It’s a real sport. I want to get schools involved, too.”

The range at the club consists of a piece of open grass surrounded by a metal wall on two sides and a building on the left. Set up in this space are 16 targets at various distances from the covered firing area.

There’s a shop with arrows, bows of various types and prices, finger guards, arm guards and quivers for those who want to get really serious about things.

But the club has plenty of equipment for hire. Pay B200 for the use of it, and B50 for the range, and you get a happy hour of twanging away. The club will even throw in free lessons for those who’ve never done it before.

If you have your own equipment, you pay just B50 an hour for using the range, or there’s a deal until the end of October: pay B300 a month and get the use of the range at B20 an hour.

There’s plenty of parking space, and there’s an area for a café when Santi can get someone to rent it.

The Phuket Archery Club is just off Ong Sim Phai Rd. Heading away from the Robinson department store towards the seahorse roundabout, keep an eye on the right side of the road. You’ll see two enormous arrows sticking out of the ground.

Santi can be reached at +66 (0) 8 1979 5680, or contact his niece, Sudrak Phongpheng, by email to phongpheng@hotmail.com

Here's T+L. But where's Phuket?

Here’s an oddity: despite the politically-inspired Red Shirt violence in the Thai capital just a couple of months ago, Bangkok is, according to a poll of readers of Travel+Leisure magazine, the best city in the world.

Second-best in the world is Chiang Mai, home of  fugutive ex-premier and alleged Red Shirt funder Thaksin Shinawatra.

Yet Phuket – no riots, no fuss, almost no Red Shirts – doesn’t even make it into the Top 10 Islands list in the same poll. (Two competitors, Bali and the Maldives, come 4th and 10th respectively.)

Three Phuket resorts do get into the Top 500. They are Le Meridien, Amanpuri and the JW Marriott Phuket Resort & Spa (in that order). But none of these scores sufficient votes to make it into the Top 50 worldwide.

Plainly, some of the placings in the list are the result of current events. For example, 11 of the Top 50 resorts in this year’s T+L poll – including the global No 1 - are in South Africa, and another eight are in nearby countries such as Botswana, Tanzania and Kenya. That wouldn’t have anything to do with the World Cup, would it?

But the results do raise concerns for Phuket. The island trumpets its successes in other polls, particularly the Condé Nast Traveler magazine awards. But where Traveler sells 800,000 copies a month, T+L clocks up 950,000 copies (source).

T+L is still the Big One. Phuket’s travel industry needs to figure out how to make a bigger impression with the magazine’s readers and editors.

Pool villa at the Outrigger Laguna Phuket resort.

Outrigger Hotels and Resorts, Asia, has officially settled on Phuket as its Regional Operating Headquarters (ROH) and has also been approved by the Thai Government’s Board of Investment (BoI).

With its offices in Plaza del Mar, just outside the gates of the Laguna complex, Outrigger is the first company to set up an ROH in Phuket.

“We are a resort company so we have chosen a resort location,” said Outrigger’s Senior Vice President, Asia, Mr Darren Edmonstone. “Our expertise since our formation in Hawaii over 60 years ago pertains to warm climate resort holidays. Phuket with its great aviation access, human resources and culture of hospitality is a perfect regional headquarters for us in Asia.”

ROH status gives Outrigger privileges and responsibilities in the areas of taxation, human resources, research, product development, sourcing of raw materials and parts, credit management, marketing, sales and technical support. BoI approval has a number of additional advantages, including foreign majority ownership of the business, and easier work permit and visas procedures.

In addition, Edmonstone said, “The quality and variety of Phuket’s existing human resource pool is excellent and improving all the time. Furthermore, with a headquarters in Phuket, Outrigger can easily access resort areas of potential business interest … around Asia.”

The company, which has its corporate HQ in Hawaii, has been on a drive into Asia over the past three years. It manages Outrigger Laguna Phuket Resort & Villas, along with a property in Bali, and is looking at other resorts and hotels in Indonesia, Vietnam, Hainan (China), South Korea, the Maldives and India.

The sun sets over the Andaman Sea. Now holiday home buyers can have confidence that the real estate view is rather more attractive, too, according to Jones Lang LaSalle's transparency survey. - Photo by Rene Erhardt

After tourism and rubber, property is the third-biggest industry in Phuket, so sellers of homes on the island – who have been looking at blank order books thanks to the global financial crisis and the Red Shirt violence in Bangkok – will be happy to know that Thailand’s ranking for the transparency of its real estate market has improved, giving buyers increased confidence.

The country still ranks 39th out of 81 property markets surveyed by real estate services giant Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) and its investment management business, LaSalle Investment Management, which compile the biennial rankings.

In the last survey, in 2008, Thailand came 45th. Its score has improved steadily, from 3.40 in 2006, to 3.16 in 2008 and 3.02 this year. (Scores range from 1 for total transparency to 5 for “opaque”.)

“The improved score is primarily a reflection of more transparency in the capital markets, specifically as they relate to real estate,” a release from JLL explained. “Currently there are 60 firms listed under the Property Development sector on the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET). There are also 26 property funds that trade on the SET, holding assets of various real estate types. These listed vehicles are subject to higher governance and regulation, as well as regular and standardized reporting, thus providing more transparency to Thailand’s real estate markets.

“This is in contrast with the past when Thailand suffered badly from a lack of information about real estate transactions in the market. Major sale transactions in particular tended to be kept confidential by the sellers and/or the purchasers. As a result, actual transacted values against which to benchmark were scarce.”

'Generally, rising levels of transparency help reduce investment risks." - Longlom Bunnag, Chairman of Jones Lang LaSalle in Thailand

However, Longlom Bunnag, Chairman of JLL in Thailand, warned, “Generally, rising levels of transparency help reduce investment risks, particularly for foreign investors. However, the improved level of transparency in Thailand’s real estate market does not necessarily attract more investment.

“Certain investment decisions in some semi-transparent and opaque markets are opportunistic and in some cases exploit the lack of transparency, thus capturing higher returns.”

“That said, higher levels of market transparency and an increased availability of reliable market information do even the playing field overall, helping investors as well as owners and occupiers make more informed real estate decisions,” he said.

Australia ranks first in JLL’s 2010 survey, followed by Canada and the United Kingdom. Thailand, at 39th, still ranks as “semi-transparent”, one place behind Brazil and one place ahead of Bulgaria.

Phuket’s biggest rivals in the tropical beach property business, the Philippines, Indonesia (Bali) and Vietnam rank a long way behind; the Philippines in 48th place with a score of 3.15, Indonesia at 57th with a score of 3.46 and Vietnam six places from the bottom of the list with a score of 4.25, lower even than such murky places as Pakistan and Kazakhstan.

However, Malaysia, which has been trying to lure property buyers away from Phuket with promises of freehold land ownership and long-term residence visas, ranks 25th – and 2nd in Southeast Asia – with a score of 2.30. Singapore leads in the region, in 16th place worldwide with a score of 1.73.

The survey was compiled from responses to a 20-question survey, with each question having a five-choice answer (1-5), with 1 meaning the market is highly transparent and 5 meaning the market is opaque.

Here is the full list:

No coffee or massage without the card. Scott Rosenberg makes his point, watched by amused sponsor Charn Wongstayanont of Phuket Jet Tour.

Around 100 people turned up at the Royal Phuket Marina last night for the official opening party of the 2010 Phuket Film Festival. Most were the usual suspects from Phuket, but there was also a sprinkling of movie people from Bangkok, specially invited for the event, along with Italian, American and Indian movie people whose films are showing during the festival.

But the gravitational centre of the evening was organiser Scott Rosenberg. As wide as a double-decker London bus, with a pate as shiny as the ball in a pinball machine. In his unmistakable light cream jacket, he binged around the centre courtyard of the marina like, well, like the ball in a pinball machine, issuing instructions to all and sundry.

A particular concern was that no one  – and that means no one – should get a free coffee or a free neck and shoulder massage without first showing they had a special GIC Film Festival lifestyle card.

Brightening up the evening was Swedish-Chinese actress Ase Wang, fresh from filming of the made-in-Thailand movie, 'The Prince & Me: The Elephant Adventure'.

But now it was time for the speeches. Again, Mr Rosenberg dominated, giving thanks and conch-design trophies to all the sponsors. Well, most of them. Apparently the Red Shirt problem in Bangkok had resulted in the trophy makers coming up short on the order, so in many cases it was “Hold this for a photo. Now give it back. Don’t worry – you’ll get one. I promise.”

The situation was eased somewhat by the fact that some of the sponsors seemed to have forgotten about the event, including the main media sponsor. “Anyone here from…? No? A reporter maybe? No?” Ah well. One plastic conch saved.

Finally, the celebrities were lined up for a group photo. Lots of people took pictures, though whether they knew who they were photographing was not clear.

And then it started to rain in earnest.

—

The Phuket Film Festival runs until June 13. A schedule of movie showings and events may be seen/downloaded here.

David Roberts.

The Phuket International Academy’s Sports and Leisure Club (PIASLC) recently made two key appointments, hiring David Roberts as Director of Operations, overseeing the day-to-day operations of the club, and Muay Thai fighter “Thanootong”, Prasert (Nok) Intanoo, a former national champion, to handle all Thai boxing instruction.

Born and raised in British Columbia, Canada, Roberts was a professional tennis player before moving into business management for various élite sporting facilities in Asia. At the PIASLC he will be focusing primarily on co-ordination between club services, sports academies and membership programmes.

He has been at the helm of some of the largest private clubs in Beijing and Shanghai. Prior to being recruited by the PIASLC, he was with the Centara Hotels and Resorts group.

Mr Roberts also brings his experience in pre-openings to the PIASLC as it moves towards a November completion date and transition into full operations.

“This is a fantastic opportunity to join a visionary project and be a part of what is undoubtedly going to be one of the premier sports and training facilities in Asia,” Roberts said.

Thantoong was a Muay Thai professional boxer for 15 years, racking up an impressive 70 wins in his career. At just 17 years of age he was national flyweight champion.

A physical education graduate of Taksin University, Songkhla, he went on from professional boxing to work for the Marriott hospitality group for nine years as recreation supervisor, teaching Muay Thai instructor while also overseeing wellness, corporate team building and children’s activities. He is also a qualified Pilates teacher and personal trainer and is certified by the Thai Yoga Institute as a teacher.

Michael Ma - "I’ve been green for 30 years."

Michael Ma’s getting pretty fit these days. It’s all that climbing up and down steps at his latest acquisition, the hillside Indochine Resort in Phuket, formerly the troubled Villa Santi property development.

The Phuket resort is a new departure for Ma’s company, the Indochine Group. It’s the group’s first venture in Thailand, and its first resort – all the other Indochine properties so far have been bars, restaurants and night clubs.

Is it hard running a resort? Not really, he says. After all, in the rooms and villas, people serve their own drinks. All the resort managers he has spoken to agreed that the food and beverage aspect is the hardest – and F&B is something Indochine knows inside and out, and on a large scale.

Each of its major outlets – five complexes in Singapore, two each in KL and Hamburg and one in Jakarta, which Dubai next on the list – can hold up to 2,000 people, and the ones in Singapore have catered to events for the International Union of Conservation for Nature, the IMF and the World Bank, along with after-event parties for the MTV Asia awards and the International Indian Film Academy Awards.

It also hosted the International Olympic 2012 Bid parties of London, New York, and Paris – all at the same time in different venues.

Apart from the big parties, individual guests have included Henry Kissinger, Michael Bloomberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair and his wife, Mrs. Cherie Blair, and Prince Albert of Monaco. None of these people would tolerate shoddy F&B for long.

The hardest thing about Indochine Phuket, he says, has been getting it finished. The contractor’s six months behind schedule. “This is the hardest it’s ever been,” he says. “Even in Jakarta and Delhi things went much faster than this. That’s why I need to be here right now.” But he perseveres, stumping up and down the steps to deliver instructions in Thai, Lao or English, depending on who needs chivvying along.

Ma’s Indochine Group quietly bought Villa Santi a couple of years ago. He loves the site of the resort, climbing up a hill at the north end of Patong Bay, giving it a panorama that delights Ma night and day. All his existing bars, restaurants and nightclubs – in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, India and Germany – have great views, he explains, but Indochine Phuket is the only one with a 24/7 panorama.

Daytime panorama from Indochine. At night there are the bright lights of Patong, hot air balloons and, often fireworks.

The view is an essential part of Ma’s outlook on business, his approach to tackling new projects. He explains, “I like to see the end-game first. Then I work backwards. I see the picture and I know the ending of the story. I’m a film producer and director.

“I love food, wine, partying. I’ve been doing that since I was about 14-15 years old. Then I got into art and design, so it’s an eclectic mixture of my experience. When I was a commodity trader I went to the best bars and restaurants all over the world – and you see the difference. I know exactly what I want.

“Every day, at the end of the party, there’s romance. Every day there’s drama. It’s an Oscar-winning story. So you just take that story and elongate it to eight hours a day or, in the case of the resort, 24 hours a day.”
Ma’s definitely got a sybaritic side to him – he counts beautiful people and glitterati such as Sting, David and Victoria “Posh Spice” Beckham, INXS, Gong Li and Mariah Carey among his acquaintances.

But apart from that and his palpable business acumen, he is also very serious about the environment and takes his social responsibilities as a given.

These attitudes are not PR BS. Many resorts – indeed, many corporations, even property developers – tout themselves as “green”. But few can claim among their friends Dr Ashok Khosla, President of the IUCN, the umbrella for hundreds of green activist groups, including the WWWF and Greenpeace. The IUCN is the only environmental organisation to have observer status at the UN. Ma is its Singapore representative.

In an interview, he launches immediately into an explanation of how he is striving to make Indochine Phuket as green as possible.

“It’s not that we ‘want’ to be green – I’ve been green for 30 years. We don’t do shark fin soup, bluefin tuna, yellow tuna, or sturgeon. We’ve been doing this for 11 years in Singapore and everywhere else.

“Everything that we’ve built new [at Indochine Phuket has environmental considerations in mind]. There’s double insulation, there’s LED lighting, there’s a heat exchange system going in so that whenever we turn on the aircon we get free hot water.

“Our investment level is higher but the aim is to reduce power consumption. We’re looking at composting. Anything non-dairy, non-protein will be separated for local pig farms. Any plant trimmings will be turned into fertiliser.

“Our ‘timber’ decking is 50% recycled plastic, 50% rice hull. All the plastic chairs you see are recycled plastic with UV inhibitor so they’re built to be light and last for years. That’s the sort of spec we’re going for.”

Whenever possible, locally-sourced materials are used, not just because they may be cheaper, but because transporting them produces less CO2 than if they were brought, say, from Bangkok.

Similarly, for many companies, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is something they feel they must do in order to show they are good corporate citizens – with a helpful PR spinoff.

Ma, however, was taking his social responsibilities seriously long before he went into business. In Australia, where he grew up after his family fled the arrival of the communist regime in his native Laos, he acted, when he was just 16 or 17, as an interpreter between the Indochinese community (many of whom could speak little or no English) and the authorities and NGOs.

Through interpreting, Ma met the Mayor of Sydney and other politicians, and soon graduated into an advocacy role. He was urged to go into politics and joined the more conservative of the two main political parties, the Liberals. This was not, he explained, because he had political ambitions, o because his views are right wing – far from it – but because someone pointed out that the Liberals had no members with Southeast Asian backgrounds.

“I joined so that I could maybe counterbalance some of the people on the extreme right – the Pauline Hansons and so on.” In 1990 he was voted Young Liberal of the Year.

Twenty years on, and he is still involved in supporting the community, locally and in a much wider way. In Singapore, he says, he is on the board of such entities as Action for Community Enterprise, and is a consultant with the National Environment Agency and the Urban Redevelopment Authority.

Naturally, the company is involved. In the recent past, Indochine has organised events supporting tsunami relief, aid to children with HIV and heart research. This is in addition to its Green Festival, aimed at raising awareness of the issues before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change.

All of these has a strong fun element, reflecting Ma’s own philosophy of life. He’s not going to go as far as giving up his good food, wine and partying to go live in a cave in order to save the environment. And he’s not going to give up his stretch limo. “People ask me how I can be green and have a stretch limo. I tell them it can carry eight people with the same engine as the four-seat version,” he grins.

Dewa Resort, at Nai Yang Beach, is the latest to sign up LaTour for its management expertise.

LaTour Hotels & Resorts of San Diego, California, which recently signed up to manage the Indochine Resort in Kalim,  has signed up its second property in Phuket: The Dewa at Nai Yang.

In a public statement, Phuket landmark Lars Ydmark, the boss of Tri-Asia, which developed and owns the hotel, explained, “We’re excited to put Dewa Phuket Resort into LaTour Hotels & Resorts’ group of managed properties and welcome their team’s expertise and guidance in providing premier services.

“By introducing Latour, we will only enhance further what we have already achieved and thereby add more value for all our individual home owners at Dewa Phuket. As the saying goes, more tools in the tool box.”

LaTour is a new name in the hotel business, founded just a couple of years ago, and with just nine properties in its portfolio – four in the US, three in Mexico and, now, two in Thailand.

However, it does have a great deal of experience in it’s senior management team. Founder, chairman and CEO Thomas LaTour was for many years the boss of Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, growing it from one hotel to 45 during his tenure. He is also a big wheel in ResortCom International.

In fact, most of the top management of LaTour and ResortCom are the same people.

In case you were wondering, ResortCom International – despite the coincidence of names – is not affiliated to timeshare exchange giant RCI, though John Small, chairman of ResortCom and vice-chairman of LaTour, once worked for RCI Management – an RCI subsidiary which manages timeshare properties, but doesn’t sell timeshare. And ResortCom also boats that it “can provide a fully integrated platform and 100% of the operational and back office services for a timeshare or fractional resort developer” Clear?

Be that as it may, Ydmark says that there will be no timeshare at Dewa, which is part-resort, part-privately owned apartments. “LaTour is a manager of high-end mixed-use boutique resorts so that fits perfectly with what we have. That’s why we’re delighted to get in bed with them,” he said.

From left: Kkaew, Jane, PSV Director Nuttisa, Riz, Able and Poy.

You may recall the story we ran about Women’s Will Power, a group of five 30-somethings living in Phuket who removed 90% of their clothing for a glamour calendar, which was then sold to raise money for charity.

The exercise, we’re happy to report, was a success, with the ladies recently visiting Phuket Sunshine Village (PSV), a shelter primarily for abused children but also for kids suffering in the aftermath of the 2004 Asian Tsunami.

The five – Tipwarintron “Riz” Tanaakarachod, Able Wanamakok, Jiraporn “Jane” Chaiyasat, Tippanate “Kkaew” Pittyasamai and Pathamaphan “Poy” Ratanaphan – were fully clothed when they arrived at PSV to hand over a giant cheque for 120,000 baht to the home’s director, Khun Nuttisa. Magician Khun Magic (what else should she be called?) entertained the kids to make the visit complete.

Able says that there are still a few calendars left, which are selling at the discounted price of B299. To get one, contact her by email or look for the Women’s Will Power Charity Group on Facebook.

An F/A 18 jet fighter parked in front of the Nimitz's "island".

The nuclear-powered US aircraft carrier Nimitz, with close to 6,000 crew on board, dropped anchor off Phuket yesterday (January 31) for a few days of R&R. It was accompanied by the guided missile frigate USS Rentz and the destroyer USS Pinckney.

Phuket is a change of scenery for the crew, who have spent seven months involved in Operation Enduring Freedom, providing air support for troops on the ground in Afghanistan, and flying more than 1,450 sorties over that benighted country – an average of 12 sorties a day.

The Nimitz is big – 333 metres long, with a fight deck covering 1.8 hectares – and goes up ten decks above the waterline and the same below. It needs to be big – it carries 62 aircraft: F/A 18 jet fighters, EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare aircraft, E-2C Hawkeye command-and-control and early warning aircraft, plus a bunch of helicopters used for everything from transport to clobbering submarines. Parking space on the flight deck is at a premium.

Commanding the ship is Capt Paul Monger, and the Nimitz also carries his boss, Rear Admiral John “Fozzie” Miller, who is in charge of Carrier Strike Group 11, which includes another four warships. Both are former pilots who still enjoy a spin from time to time.

Movie buffs may recall the Nimitz starring in the the 1980 sci-fi movie The Final Countdown, alongside Kirk Douglas, James Farentino and Martin Sheen. More recently, in 2005, the US TV channel PBS aired a 10-part miniseries called Carrier, documenting naval life aboard the Nimitz.