One Drive That Earns the Hire Car: Phuket's Southern Loop

If you hire a car on Phuket and only use it once, use it for this. The southern end of the island strings four of its best stops along a single arc, all of them free to enter, and the whole thing works out to well under two hours of actual driving. Done at the right time of day it ends with the sunset the island is known for. Done at the wrong time of day it ends with you descending an unlit hill road in the rain.

The route, in the order that matters: Phuket Old Town → Wat Chalong → Nakkerd Hill and the Big Buddha → the Karon viewpoint → Promthep Cape.

Drive it in that direction and not the other. The sequence is not about distance; it is about which way you are facing when the light goes.

The short answer: leave the Old Town around 1pm and be at Promthep Cape an hour before sunset. Nothing on the route charges admission, parking is free at every stop, and the only demanding bit is the long descent off Nakkerd Hill. If you would rather look at the view than the road, Phuket: Private Guided Tour with Choice of Locations is the one offer that can drive this exact loop – four hours from €117.52 for the whole group of up to nine people, with hotel pickup, and you pick the stops yourself.

Check availability and prices for the private guided tour with your choice of stops

Start after lunch, not after breakfast

The arithmetic is simple. Local guides put sunset at Promthep Cape between roughly 6pm and 6.45pm depending on the month, and recommend arriving 60 to 90 minutes early for a decent spot. Working backwards: leave the Old Town at about 1pm, and the stops in between take exactly the time they should.

Driving times, without stops and in ordinary traffic. Treat them as planning figures rather than promises – Phuket’s roads have a rush hour like anywhere else:

That last row is the escape hatch. If you are running late, skip the viewpoint and go straight down – the cape is the stop that cannot be moved.

The stops, and what to do about parking

Wat Chalong is the island’s principal working temple and the first stop out of town. It is a temple in use rather than a monument, and the dress code that applies at the Big Buddha applies here too: covered shoulders, covered knees. Parking is on site.

The Big Buddha on Nakkerd Hill is the stop that justifies the car. Admission is free and so is parking, and there is a proper car park at the top rather than a verge. The access road is the thing to know about in advance: it climbs off the Chalong roundabout in a long series of bends with several steep pitches. It is paved and signposted, and it is lined with cafés and stalls where people stop to let the engine breathe. In an underpowered hire car, use second gear on the way up and – this is the part people forget – on the way down. Riding the brakes down a Phuket hill for five minutes is how brakes stop working.

The dress code is enforced at the top: no shorts, no short skirts, no sleeveless shirts. Cover-ups are usually available to borrow at the entrance, but bringing your own saves a queue.

The Karon viewpoint, on the ridge road between Kata Noi and Nai Harn, gives you the three-bay panorama – Kata Noi, Kata and Karon stacked up the coast. It is a roadside pull-in rather than a site, the parking is limited, and a coach arriving fills it. Five minutes here is enough, and five minutes is often all the space allows.

Promthep Cape is the finish. There is no entry ticket and there is a large car park; the toilets charge a few baht. The headland itself is a short walk out over open ground with no shade, which is why the hour before sunset is the right hour and the middle of the afternoon is not.

Two practical notes that nobody writes down. First, the car park fills from about an hour before sunset in the dry season, and the overflow parks along the approach road – arrive early or accept the walk. Second, everybody leaves at the same moment. The ten minutes after the sun goes are the worst ten minutes of the day to be in that car park. Bring something to drink, let it clear, and drive out of a headland that has emptied instead of one that is emptying.

The evening half, and the honest warning

From Promthep you are ten minutes from Rawai and Nai Harn and their beach restaurants, and that is the sensible end of the day: eat down there, then drive back into town on the main road.

What is not sensible is to finish this drive by going over Patong Hill in the dark because the map offers it as a shortcut to the west coast. The road between Kathu and Patong is steep enough that it is a long-standing black spot for heavy vehicles, with a run of brake-failure crashes reported at the Pla Ra curve over the years, several of them in daylight and in dry weather. None of that is about hire cars specifically – it is about the gradient, and the gradient is the same for you. If you are staying in Patong, drive this loop on a day you are happy to come back the long way round, or do the hill in daylight, once, before you do it tired.

What the monsoon does to this route

Thailand’s Andaman coast runs on the southwest monsoon, and the Thai Meteorological Department puts the wet season here from about mid-May to mid-October. That changes this drive in two ways, and only one of them is obvious.

The obvious one: the sunset is the point of the route, and in the wet months there is a fair chance it is behind cloud. The cape is still worth the trip – the view is the geography, not the weather – but do not build an evening around a photograph you may not get.

The less obvious one: the surfaces. A steep descent on Nakkerd Hill with the road running with water is a different exercise from the same descent in February, and on a scooter it is a different exercise again. In the wet months, do this loop in the early afternoon and be off the hills before the daily downpour, not after it.

In the dry season, November to April, the constraint is the other way round: the light is reliable and so is the crowd. That is when arriving at Promthep 90 minutes early is advice rather than a formality.

When the guided tour is the better buy

Three cases, and they are not a sales pitch – they are the cases where we would not drive it ourselves.

You want to look at the view rather than the road. The hill sections demand attention, and the driver sees the least of the trip. Phuket: Private Guided Tour with Choice of Locations runs four hours from €117.52 for the whole group of up to nine people, with hotel pickup included, and lets you pick three to seven places from a list of about 30 – the Karon viewpoint, Promthep Cape, Wat Chalong and the Old Town are all on it. Split four ways, that is roughly €29 each, which is not far off a day’s hire once you add fuel and the deposit.

For three of the five stops at a fraction of that, Phuket City Highlights: Big Buddha, Wat Chalong & Old Town is five hours from €18.95 with 4.7 stars from 279 reviews and hotel pickup. What it does not include is the part this route is built around: the ridge viewpoint and the cape at sunset.

See prices and dates for the Phuket city highlights tour

The day ends with a drink. Thailand’s blood alcohol limit is 0.05 %, and 0.02 % for drivers under 20 or licensed less than five years. A sundowner at the cape and a hire car do not belong in the same evening.

You want the Old Town and the night market in the same day. That is a different shape of day, and Phuket: Full-Day City Tour with Night Market does it in nine hours from €33.22 with 4.5 stars from 3,185 reviews, or Phuket: Guided Tour of Phuket City with Hotel Transfers at €31.89 and 4.8 stars from 3,191 reviews. Both collect you, which removes the parking problem in the Old Town entirely – and the Old Town has a parking problem.

See prices and dates for the full-day city tour with the night market

If you are driving it

Remember which side you are on. Thailand is a left-hand-traffic country, the hill roads are narrow, and the motorbike traffic moves through gaps you would not consider. Carry your national licence and your international driving permit together – the UK Foreign Office tells drivers to “carry both the 1968 version of the international driving permit (IDP) and your UK driving licence” in Thailand, and an IDP cannot be obtained once you have arrived.

If the car is still a question rather than a decision, start here instead; for a week on the west coast the answer is often no. If it is a decision, the excess and the deposit are worth twenty minutes before you book, and you can compare what is available on your dates directly.

Our recommendation

For most visitors: drive it yourself, leaving the Old Town at about 1pm. No ticket, no booking and no fixed schedule, and the one stop that cannot be moved – the cape at sunset – stays entirely in your hands. Under two hours at the wheel buys a whole afternoon.

For groups of up to nine who would rather be driven: Phuket: Private Guided Tour with Choice of Locations, four hours from €119.59 for the whole group, 4.7 stars from 236 reviews. It is the only offer here that can put the Karon viewpoint and Promthep Cape into one afternoon, and split four ways it costs about what the car does.

For couples and solo travellers watching the budget: Phuket City Highlights: Big Buddha, Wat Chalong & Old Town, five hours from €18.95 with 4.7 stars from 279 reviews. You get the temples and the Old Town with somebody else on the hill road – and you give up the ridge viewpoint and the sunset.

For anyone staying in Patong: take the pickup rather than the hill. Phuket: Guided Tour of Phuket City with Hotel Transfers costs €31.89 and holds 4.8 stars from 3,191 reviews, and Patong Hill after dark is the one part of this day we would not do twice.

Check availability and prices for the guided city tour with hotel transfers

Who should not drive this route at all? Anyone who intends to have a drink at the cape, anyone on a scooter in the wet months, and anyone travelling without an international driving permit alongside their national licence.

The stops themselves turn up again in our photo-tour guide to the viewpoints and in what to see in Phuket, and if you would rather have a guide choose the order, the city and old town tours cover the same ground with somebody else at the wheel.

Sources: Thai Meteorological Department · UK Foreign Office travel advice for Thailand