Things to do in Phuket Town

Lard Yai runs along about 350 metres of Thalang Road and it happens on Sunday evenings only, which is the single most useful fact about visiting Phuket Town. The street closes to traffic in the late afternoon and fills with food stalls, craft sellers and performers until around ten. Eat rather than shop: o-aew, the shaved ice with banana and syrup, moo hong, pork belly stewed with garlic and black pepper, and Hokkien noodles are the local specialities. It is busy and it is worth it.

On Krabi Road in a 1934 building that was a Chinese language school before it was a museum, and the best single hour for understanding why the town looks the way it does. The exhibits cover Hokkien migration, the tin mining that paid for the shophouses, and Peranakan wedding customs, with a room on Phuket food that is worth reading before you go looking for it. It is air conditioned, which matters in the middle of the day, and it takes about an hour.

The island's largest and busiest temple, and worth being clear that it is about eight kilometres south of Phuket Town rather than in it, so it needs a taxi or a scooter. The Grand Pagoda holds a relic said to be a splinter of bone of the Buddha, and the upper terrace gives the view. Devotees set off firecrackers in a brick kiln in the courtyard, which is loud and constant. Shoulders and knees covered, as at any working Thai temple.

A hill on the edge of town with a road and steps to a viewpoint, used by local people as an exercise route in the early morning and evening, and home to a troop of long-tailed macaques. Do not feed them. Feeding is what has made them bold: they snatch bags and plastic carriers, bites and scratches carry a rabies risk and need medical attention the same day, and the food they are given is bad for them. Keep anything edible out of sight and do not stop to pose.

The old quarter is a walk rather than a sight, and Thalang, Dibuk, Krabi, Yaowarat and the short lane of Soi Romanee are the streets to cover. The shophouses went up from the late nineteenth century on tin money, in the Sino-Portuguese style, and the street art trail painted across the quarter is now as much of a draw as the buildings. Soi Romanee was the town's red-light lane and is now its prettiest street. Early morning and late afternoon for the light.

About three kilometres south of the centre on the bypass road, open on Saturday and Sunday evenings, and much the biggest market on the island. It is where Phuket locals shop rather than a market laid on for visitors, so most of it is clothes, phone cases and household goods, with a large and cheap food section at one end. Come for the food and the scale of the place. Go by taxi, wear something you do not mind sweating through, and bring small notes.

An hour of painted optical illusions built to be photographed, and worth being plain about: there is no cultural content here, the point is the pictures. Galleries are themed and the staff will show you where to stand for each one to make the perspective work. It is the obvious wet afternoon option in the old town and it is aimed squarely at families and groups. Bring a phone with space on it and expect to leave with forty near-identical photographs.

A Sino-Portuguese mansion on Krabi Road, built in 1903 and still owned and occupied by the same family, which is what separates it from a museum. You are shown through rooms that are still in use, with the original Italian floor tiles, shuttered windows and period furniture, and the family's own photographs on the walls. It has been used as a film location more than once. Half an hour, and the most atmospheric interior in the town.

The most important Taoist shrine in Phuket, on Ranong Road, dedicated to Tean Hu Ong Tao Tek, and the centre of the Vegetarian Festival, properly the Nine Emperor Gods Festival. That falls in the ninth lunar month, so usually September or October rather than a fixed date, and it is when the processions and the body-piercing rituals it is known for take place. Outside the festival it is a quiet working shrine, heavy with incense, and takes fifteen minutes.

Built out of painted shipping containers on Yaowarat Road just north of the old quarter, and aimed at Thai students and young locals rather than at visitors, which is exactly why it is worth the walk. Food stalls, cheap clothes, tattoo studios and usually live music. It runs on most evenings apart from Monday, though the schedule does shift, so check before making a special trip. Cheaper than anything in the old town and much less crowded than Lard Yai.

Down a narrow alley off Phang Nga Road, so easy to walk past that most people do. It is a small Taoist shrine built by a Hokkien family at the end of the nineteenth century, with a painted ceiling and altars in a space barely wider than a corridor. Ten minutes, no ticket desk, and it is the one place in the old town where you are likely to be alone. Take the alley slowly, because the entrance is easy to miss from the street.

In the old post office on Montri Road, a small museum of stamps and postal history that sounds dull and is redeemed by the building and by the specific thing it documents: how a tin mining island at the edge of Siam was connected to the rest of the world. Twenty minutes, and it is one of the few indoor options in the quarter that is not a shophouse museum. Worth pairing with the walk down Montri and Dibuk rather than making a trip for.