Sea Gypsies Fish Market

Located on the south-eastern tip of Phuket Island, Rawai houses one of the island's oldest fishermen communities. Known as Sea Gypsies or Chao Lay, they are a previously nomadic minority of Melanesian origin that have lived wandering around the western coast of Malaysia and Thailand for hundreds of years. Even today the descendants of these nomadic fishermen get their livelihood from the Andaman Sea, and their village is the most popular attraction of Rawai. The Sea Gypsy Village is located at the eastern end of Rawai Beach and hosts several shops selling shell products and handicraft, a large number of longtail boats moored along the shore, excellent and cheap seafood restaurants on the waterfront, and a small fresh seafood market, which is a very popular attraction in itself. Located along the dirt road to the left of Rawai Pier, the Sea Gypsies Fish Market is only 100 metres long but offers the island's freshest fish at the cheapest price. It consists of different stalls selling the catch of the day along the waterfront promenade, with a number of simple local restaurants alongside the inland. The wide selection of often live fish and shellfish is brought here daily, mostly caught by fishermen living in the small village that surrounds the market, or at least so it should be. However, it is not surprising that a lot of fish and crustaceans are farmed north of the island as is now common worldwide. Each stall is a family business and most have bubbling tanks and buckets full of live seafood, while butchered samples lied in beds of ice. The stallholders are generally friendly and for the most part everyone pays the same price, however vendors could make customers bargain over price depending on the season and type of seafood. For example, Red Snapper normally starts at 250 baht per kilogram, crabs cost about 350 baht, prawns of various sizes and species range from 850 to 1,500 baht. Of course there is also an abundance of shrimps, squid, clams, mussels, groupers, oysters and live lobsters on offer. To complete your experience at Sea Gypsies Fish Market, you need only carry your purchases across the road, where you'll find a choice of simple restaurants to cook them for you, usually for a hundred baht per kilo. As the market is also very popular with locals, most of the preparations available come from southern Thai cuisine, such as prawns in tamarind sauce, mussels in garlic-chilli sauce or whole deep-fried fish in sweet and sour sauce. This market is very popular among locals, tourists and foreign residents and is mostly crowded all the time, however the best time to visit it is about lunch time, when the catch of day is freshest.Read More