The most gruesome and some would argue most exciting festival, the Phuket Vegetarian Festival is once again upon us.

For a week-long period, devotees, a.k.a medians for the spirits, will be spearing flesh, walking on hot coals and channelling past spirits.

Phuket town is the place where the majority of the celebrations takes place and on the last night of proceedings on 6 October will probably resemble something you have had nightmares about.

Smoke-filled streets, incessant explosions from firecrackers and people lumbering through the streets bleeding and screaming. There?s a good chance you?ll get hurt, but hey, it only happens once a year and it?s a good opportunity for you to explore Phuket Town, if you haven?t yet.

Sure it has crazy roads, occasional traffic jams, and nonsensical shops, but if you just dismiss the place out of hand, you?ll be missing out on what little remains of any real local Thai culture?outside of the small fishing villages.
All the major celebrations take place here, not just the vegetarian festival to many smaller fairs, motor shows, food festivals, school parades, and the basic civic life that exists in any authentic place.

Sure you can get a simulacrum of all these celebrations in Patong plus a bunch of partially clothed girls and a multitude of drunken foreigners, but, as with everything in Patong, it has a plastic, showy taste like Tang or Pop-Tarts. To extend the plastic/food analogy a bit further, the plastic wrap comes off in Phuket Town and while things aren?t as clean, flashy, or as appealing to the eye, what you get is real.

The old town in Phuket has a bunch of great old Sino-Portuguese buildings that remain from the 18th Century. During this period the Hokkien Chinese were primarily responsible for running the island?s tin mining operations, and, as the trade developed, much of the old town was built to provide the infrastructure to support the growing commerce.

The shop-house is a particularly interesting feature of the old town as its mongrel offspring in the form of modern shop-houses can be seen island wide. The front of the building contains the basic shop and the upper floors a residence.

Shop-houses are usually found built in rows, giving rise to the Hokkien Chinese term tiam choo, meaning a row of cheap looking, identical houses, that were thrown up in an unimaginative effort to extract maximum income from mixed use commercial/residential land.

However, time and the relative inefficiency of skilled labor used of old have given the old town shop-houses a quiet charm. In fact, some areas like Romanee Street are so small and narrow you can tell, despite the paving, that they were never designed for cars. Here and in a few other areas, you can feel a real sense of history, which is completely lacking in the rest of hastily built Phuket.

So, while it?s unordered, small, often dirty and crowded, it?s also real. That might seem like damning with faint praise, but real can sometimes be the most precious of things in Phuket.

Get yourself downtown, grab some firecrackers, earplugs and a banana if you see this lady...