Laguna Phuket, with its six – soon to be seven – resorts, has put together an array of family entertainment and activities called the Summer Family Festival, running from July 8 to August 30.

The 2nd Phuket Film Festival is dead – and its demise was totally unnecessary.

Organised every year to coincide with Songkran is Phuket Bike Week, which runs from April 9 to 12. This year is the 15th Bike Week, and hundreds of bikers with their machines are expected to descend on Phuket from all over Asia and further afield.

Formal events will include a bike exhibition at Jungceylon in Patong, which will feature some truly amazing custom machines, and a formal dinner for bikers (black leather tie, no doubt) on April 11 at Tainaan restaurant opposite Central Festival.

Go back 300 hundred years or so, and most of the people living on Phuket were Muslims of Malay extraction. Even today, about 30 percent of the island’s population are Sunni Muslim, and preserve Islamic traditions.

These traditions are celebrated annually in the Hilal Town Halal Food Festival, this year at Saphan Hin (on the southeast edge of Phuket Town) from April 30 to May 3.

Anyone who’s spent more than five minutes on Phuket will have seen the Heroines monument in the middle of the circle halfway between Phuket Town and Thalang. The statue of two women holding swords commemorates the defeat 224 years ago of a Burmese army by the people of Thalang (then the capital of the island).
The victory is celebrated every year on Phuket with a week of activities, culminating in a free open-air theatrical performance on the supposed site of the final battle in the five-week defence of Phuket. This year, the performance, featuring hundreds of people, takes place on the nights of March 13, 14 and 15.

FROM A ROCKY START in 2006, when just 80 people attended (there was a huge storm that waterlogged the site and blew the tents to shreds – the event was moved indoors but most people thought it was canceled), the annual Phuket Blues-Rock Festival has grown steadily in terms of the number of bands (12 [...]

Update: Phuket Film Festival cancelled this year. The second edition of Thailand’s Phuket Film Festival is set for June 4-11, with promotion activities getting under way with Thursday’s launch of the fest’s Web site, www.phuketfilmfestival.asia. The 2009 fest expects to screen 50-60 films, hold workshops on film preservation and children’s animation and showcase filming locations [...]