I flew to one of Thailand's biggest party streets 2 years after it went dark during the pandemic. What I found was an island on the brink of rebirth.

Such was the hour at which I found myself standing at the entrance to Bangla Road in Phuket, the biggest party street on the biggest island in Thailand. The #Banglaroad hashtag on Instagram offers a pretty good sense of what you can expect from the area: bright lights, small outfits, and a general Vegas-meets-Jersey-shore vibe. I had booked a reporting trip to Phuket to write about hotels, real estate, and Russian money. Where better, I figured, to write about how tourism has changed than in the heart — or is it the underbelly? — of Thailand tourism itself?

I had arrived on the island nine hours earlier, gotten a PCR swab in the airport, and posted up in my hotel room until my test results came back negative, as required under Thailand's entry restrictions. When I finally stepped out at night, I was struck by the smell of booze and salt.

In calf-length leggings, running shoes, sans sunburn, and stone-cold sober, it's hard to say exactly which part of me was most out of place on the party scene of Bangla Road. But I pulled on my mask and flashed my wrist for a temperature screening (both required to enter the street) and stepped into the fray.

To stand at the corner of any intersection in Bangla Road is to be hit by a cacophony of sounds.

One bar had projected Lady Gaga's disco-themed music video onto its walls. At a club called New York Live Music, a female singer was scream-singing "Edge of Glory." (It was a big night for Lady Gaga.) Down the road, yet another song blared from a multi-floor bar called the Tiger Club, which featured enormous, plastic statues of tigers in various stages of mid-pounce.

From a dark corner between buildings, the glow of a cigarette caught my eye. Two police officers were surveying the scene.

Women, some young and some not so young, were lined up on the sides of the road. Some were waving to passersby and others standing more vacantly, swaying along placidly to the tune of something.

The city was ready to entertain its guests. The only thing missing was those guests, or the critical mass thereof. The street was no longer deserted, as eerie photos throughout the lockdowns and closed borders of 2020 and 2021 had captured, but the flickering strobe lights couldn't hide how many empty seats most of the bars had.

I walked up and down the street twice. It was full of hawkers selling their wares — glow-in-the-dark spinny things that fly, individually wrapped roses, menus touting Pad Thai and cheeseburgers.

Turning right off the main drag onto a quieter alleyway, I found an open-air bar advertising beer pong and pool. Inside was a guy in a white shirt drinking a light beer. As I snapped a couple photos, I saw another man approaching from the direction of the party.

He greeted me, and I eyed him warily. When I didn't respond, he asked me what language I spoke. "English," I finally told him, and his face lit up. "Perfect," he said.

His name, he told me, was Aris, and he was a club promoter from Greece. Or, rather, he had been a club promoter until the pandemic struck and all the clubs closed. I asked him what he thought of tonight's scene.

"Not bad," he told me, "But last night's was better." He gestured towards the pool and pong bar behind us. "That place, last night," he started, pulling out his phone and flipped through some photos, finally tilting the screen towards me: It was the same bar, and it was in fact full of people.

"It's the only place in town with beer pong," Aris added after a moment. "You know this game?" When I nodded, he smiled. "Of course, you know this game. You are American."

We had approached Bangla Road again. Surrounded by flashing lights and waving women, I asked him if he was nervous about finding a job in the club industry.

"No," he told me, quietly but surely. "In this town, as long as you know people — I'm not worried."

At 8 a.m. on Monday, I posted up at a beachfront Starbucks with my laptop. First came the wave of joggers, albeit not many of them. Around 9 a.m., a group of Americans sat next to me and loudly began extolling the virtues of bitcoin to each other. By 10:30 a.m., a steady stream of motorcycles and pickup trucks was sputtering by. And then, a tan, be-Speedoed man well into middle age barreled across the walkway, bellowed at an oncoming car, and marched into a 7-11.

It was 11 a.m., and Patong Beach was awake.

The next morning, I stopped by a little standalone booth on Beach Road. A woman with coral lipstick was sitting behind the counter, and laid forth in front of her were shiny brochures advertising day trips to other islands.

Her name was Pu. She'd been living in Phuket for 35 years, and before the pandemic, she had worked in hotels. She'd been working the tourism booth since July and had plans to run her own booth one day. She said she's currently pacing at around 75% of her sales goals. "Some days," she said, "I have two or three customers who buy, but I have many checking for prices."

When I asked her what tour she'd recommend booking, she said Phi Phi island: "Go now, it's beautiful, because it's empty."

The island relies heavily on tourism: Before the pandemic, travel accounted for 80% of Phuket's economy and more than 300,000 jobs. In 2019, Phuket's international airport recorded 5.3 million arrivals. But in 2020, that decreased to 1.1 million arrivals. From January to July 2021, the island clocked 600,000 arrivals, data from Airports of Thailand shows. Tourism revenue cratered. Nightly hotel-room demand fell to sub-20% in early 2020 and stayed there through the middle of 2021, per data from Thailand's ministry of tourism and sports.

Throughout the course of 2021, Thailand made attempts at reopening. In July, it launched a plan called Phuket Sandbox, under which tourists could travel around Thailand if they quarantined in Phuket; 14,000 international tourists arrived on the island that month. It was a big step up from its pandemic low, and still a giant step down from its pre-pandemic standard.

The pandemic's effects on Thailand's economy have been dire. More than 70% of the country's households saw their incomes fall during the pandemic, a Gallup Poll, funded by the World Bank, found in a survey of 2,000 Thai families; 60% of low-income families reported running out of food. Sangchai Theerakulwanich, the chairman of the Federation of Thai SME, told Bloomberg in July that 80% of the country's small- and medium-sized enterprises could be out of business by the end of the year.

Despite warnings of this nature, if you don't leave Patong Beach's main drag, you can almost convince yourself the town will emerge from the pandemic looking like itself. But then you do leave the main drag, and what you see immediately is not a case of complete abandonment, but rather a study in closely placed extremes.

These two bars, for example, are separated by a wall and nothing else. (I took these photos seconds apart.) The one that's not abandoned is one wall closer to the beach.

Further out from the city center, things got worse.

On my final night, I hiked up a steep, paved hill that wound away from Patong Beach and towards Paradise Beach. Stray dogs surveyed me from sidewalk perches, panting calmly. Couples on scooters roared by and utility trucks tooted their horns every time they passed something living, myself and strays alike.

I had been here almost exactly two years earlier, when the world was very different. At that time, lining one side of the narrow highway to Paradise Beach, I had walked by a lively, if impoverished, strip of homes and small businesses.

Today, it was deserted.

The sidewalk was full of wood and garbage. On one robins-egg-blue shack, the paint had peeled off the wall in the shape of a cross. The door gaped dark and empty like a missing tooth.

A couple doors down was a small shop with windows on two sides, "Thai oil massage" decals still intact. Inside, the floor was littered with small, dead leaves.

For all the empty seats at all the empty restaurants I'd seen so far, I kept coming back to the signs of recovery I was seeing. A couple days after I left Phuket, I asked Bill Barnett, the founder and CEO of Phuket-based hospitality consultancy C9 Hotelworks, if he thought the pandemic was the end of Phuket. He said it wasn't — but that it was a tipping point in the island's hospitality cycle.

"You need disruption," Barnett said. "It starts a new cycle, and you see who comes back, who's still standing."

"We're still standing," Barnett said of the island. "The early markets back were through Sandbox. We saw friends and family coming back, lots of people who have vacation homes and second homes, Europeans." Then, he said, it was businesspeople, and eventually, also, tourists.

Over the next few days of my trip, business owners across the island — in Patong Beach, Cherngtalay, Phuket Town — would all tell me that the pandemic had wrought various levels of destruction on their businesses. But even within those stories there were the upsides: The Turkish restaurant owner who managed to open a new spot in Phuket Town because rents were 50% lower; the French-Thai pastry chef who bought a three-floor building on Patong's Beach Road and was now transforming it into a coworking-space-cum-restaurant; Pu, selling brochures on the street and already planning to open her own tourism stand one day.

After two years at a standstill, it's not what I expected to find, but Phuket struck me as less an island in crisis and more an island on the brink of rebirth — bruised and battered, yes, but with a resigned sense that even this would pass.