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Phuket does seem just a bit of a haul simply to spend eight days largely immersed in water, salted or chlorinated. After all, you can gradually resemble a massive, sun-reddened prune at any one of 100 resorts around this rather larger and more proximate island. And when you’re paying size-able wedges of your own dough to accommodate your family in almost unseemly luxury, why bother hauling the four of you thousands of further clicks? But within about 20 minutes of arriving at Le Meridien Phuket Beach Resort, you begin to realize why you’ve gone the extra few thousand yards.

By that tick of the clock you’ve had welcoming drinks thrust into your sweaty paw and been festooned with garlands. The luggage has been hauled way up to the suite overlooking the sea and you’ve appreciated at once that the balcony space alone is substantially bigger than your house.

Then you’ve repaired hastily to the private beach with its palm umbrellas and lounges draped with tent-size yellow towels.

To float in the pure waters of the Andaman Sea under the ultra-light of the equatorial sun – your senses smitten by the tropic’s rich fog, the most vivid shades of blue and green you’ve seen – is to approach clarity.

Lingering doubts as to the wisdom of the journey are dissipating more rapidly than the ice in one of the exotic part in a drinking vessel they’ll bring you from the bar. Just sign here, sir.

Two flights from Sydney, a private shuttle from the airport and you’re a hemisphere removed from the dysfunction and decay of Sydney. You’re also sequestered from the burger bars and beer barns of seething, post-tsunami Patong.

Indeed, aside from my wife’s misguided insistence on visiting a restaurant of apparent repute and my daughter’s desire to watch elephants frolic, there is no compelling reason to leave these almost obscenely opulent hectares.

Should the attraction of lying torpid and inert in or close to the beach or one of the lake-like pools pall, it’s not as though there isn’t more than enough to pass the long daylight hours.

Ignoring the abomination of jet skis, there’s tennis on first-rate courts with instructors for the young or the inept; squash on air-conditioned courts (preferable to the 95 per cent humidity) or a golf driving range. If you must cluster, there’s also water polo, volleyball and five-a-side football.

You can always cruise to Phi Phi Island on the restored Royal Air Force launch. But save for a daily bit of teeth-gritting and sweating in the gym to counter the intake of Singha beer it really does seems a bit mad to leave the pristine water’s edge.

There are no fewer than 10 restaurants and bars within a short stagger of the suite, grilled Andaman seafood a specialty at most.

Of these, we’d opt for dinner at Ariake Japanese restaurant or the traditional Royal Thai fare of Wang Warin, both eateries a stroll down the main thoroughfare through the central open-air pagoda.

Lunch is best enjoyed at the beach side barbecue and wood-oven pizza pavilion.

All provide points from which to observe the passing procession of humanity.

Phuket is pretty much equidistant from Paris as Sydney, and while the European Union was seemingly trying to annexe the place with an extended clan of hugely voluble Italians (garnished with nose-in-the-air French and the odd German or two), eastern Europe is there in force in the size-able shapes and suet faces of heavily tattooed Russians.

When you’ve tired of this rich pageant, and you’re done playing late-evening frames of pool at the bar downstairs from Pakarang – which reverberates each evening with wildly cheesy stage shows – there’s always the vast expanses of your Royal Suite.

It’s an impossibly pleasant place to recuperate from all the recreating; an aircraft-carrier landing deck of a bed in the main bedroom, two living rooms and a dining area with vast flat-screen televisions visible from all angles bar the bathroom.

When two PlayStation-generation kids agree that even these can’t compare with the vista they see without – during day or night – you know with certainty the journey has been worth every dollar and every kilometer.

Written by Paul Pottinger - Published on news.com.au