The death and destruction that scarred Thailand’s main holiday island of Phuket after the Boxing Day tsunami three years ago may have been erased, but many Thai people remain wary of the sea.

The tourists are back, perhaps not quite in the numbers before that horror day in 2004 when a wall of water spawned by a massive earthquake below the Andaman Sea carried all before it, killing about 230,000 people in 12 Indian Ocean nations, from Indonesia to Sri Lanka.

In Thailand, it’s estimated as many as 2,000 holidaymakers, many from Europe, died as the giant waves smashed into luxury hotels along the coast, at Kamala, Karon and Kata, and at Khao Lak, 100km north of Phuket, which bore the brunt of the carnage.

The United Nations has confirmed the deaths of 5,395 people in Thailand, with official estimates, including the missing, putting the toll at 8,212 dead after a giant wave, and three further waves, hit Thailand’s southern coastline about breakfast time on that Boxing Day morning.

While the toll was far greater elsewhere in the region, it was the chaotic scenes of destruction in Thailand — and at Patong Beach on Phuket, in particular — beamed into living rooms that brought home the almost unimaginable scope of this human catastrophe.

Phuket is on the mend.

Today, the resorts, shops and restaurants have been rebuilt and their recovery rides on the return of the tourist hordes. The Australians are pouring back, and the big-spending Europeans — whose compatriots bore the brunt of the foreign death toll — are trickling back, but not in the same numbers as before the tsunami.

But the signs are there for a new wave of tourist-led prosperity.

Tour operators say the waters around Phuket Island have never been clearer, bringing into focus the chaotic mess of smashed, bone-white coral littering the seabed in some of the coastal paradises for which southwestern Thailand is famous.

Coral reefs will take years to recover, if at all — one dive at Monkey Beach east of the holiday isle showed the dead, pulverized coral formations scattered like a carpet of bones across the sea floor. But not all is lost. Many pockets of wonder remain around the island of Phuket and some areas were and are completely untouched but for the hills of everyday rubbish often piled behind picture postcard foreshore.

Such was the miserable sight that met this traveller at Maya Bay on Phi Phi Leh, the idyllic island that juts out of the sea about a 45-minute speedboat ride east from Phuket and made famous by Leonardo Di Caprio in the 2000 film, The Beach. A film Thais say almost destroyed the fragile environment after film crews bulldozed dunes and flora, and imported hundreds of palm trees for its heavy-handed Hollywood touch.

Paradoxically, the tsunami is credited with dramatically improving the once magical bay, with the high waves cleaning up Maya beach and washing away Hollywood’s handiwork.

Phi Phi Leh is still well worth the visit, with its inviting, shallow blue-green waters washing the base of towering cliffs and lazily lapping on to its horseshoe-shaped white beach. Along the way, take in the (almost) rebuilt resort area of neighbouring Phi Phi Don.

You also can hit the deckchairs on the pocket paradise of Khai Nai island, brave the "ancestors" at Monkey Beach, go birdnest-spotting at Vikis which make up the Phi Phi island group.

Go snorkelling, sea-kayaking or simply take in the grandeur of Loh Sama Bay and the other coves, inlets and islands.

Also, it’s hard to go past the James Bond Island tour without taking a look for yourself. Located in Phang Nga Bay centred on Khao Phingkan — a slender sugarloaf island with amazingly sheer cliffs that rise so steeply from the ocean it’s like an eruption of coral and limestone frozen in time and space.

It must have been as mesmerizing an attraction to the makers of the Roger Moore Bond movie Man With the Golden Gun in 1974 as it is today to a new wave of tourists.

This tour was a non-stop day of fun activities: a wide-eyed exploration of Panak Island and the nearby bat cave, kayaking at the eerie limestone arch at Tham Lod Noi, lunch at the floating Muslim gypsy village jutting out from Panyee Island, Hong Island, swimming and snorkelling at Naka Island. The holiday heart of Phuket is Patong Beach and its resort strip. Officially, about 250 people there lost their lives to the tsunami, but few you talk to haven’t lost a loved one, a relative or a friend.

"Charlie" Chuchai revealed a thick black texta line and the scrawled legend 26/12/2004 beside it three-quarters of the way up the fading turquoise toilet wall in his jewelery shop opposite the Holiday Inn Resort and across the road from Patong Beach.

The texta scrawls marked the height the tide of mud and disaster reached as it smashed through Charlie’s store and everything else in its path that dreadful day.

Charlie, a Buddhist, lost friends in the tsunami, but is a changed man not so much over lives lost but lives saved — of his and his family. Boxing Day 2004 was the first day he had closed his shop in 20 years, in anticipation of a dreamed-of holiday in the far-away village of his birth.

And, later, when the jeweller numbly climbed, waded and crawled over the wreckage of his business to salvage what he could, there was treasure in the sodden rubble. His entire inventory of gold, gems and jewelery lay submerged but intact in a safe on the floor.

That’s all part of today’s Phuket tourist experience: go shopping, buy a meal or take a tour and they’ll throw in an inspirational story of loss and hope.

At night, Patong puts on its party face and tourists, tuk-tuks and taxis head for Bangla Road for its restaurants and bars.

There, a visual feast of sights and frights swirls around you: Singha beer-fuelled, dressed-down tourists, dressed-up locals, barely dressed bar girls, impossibly pretty "lady boys" outside mostly seedy-looking nightclubs.

While Bangla Road at night is a free-spirited, adults-only assault on the senses, the rest of the Patong area is dripping in family fare, from its neon-lighted smorgasbord of international and Thai restaurants to outdoor cabaret performances, the shop-’til-you-drop stalls and markets.