Where to live in Phatthalung.

The provincial capital sits in Khuha Sawan subdistrict, where King Rama VI ordered the city moved in 1924, and it is the only town-municipality in the whole province — the other forty-eight municipalities are subdistrict-level. Everything institutional is here: Phatthalung Hospital, the provincial administration, the banks, the markets, the immigration office and the courts. It is also one of the very few provincial capitals in Thailand with a genuine landmark inside the town rather than beside it: Khao Ok Thalu, the 177-metre limestone hill with a natural hole clean through it, stands directly over the streets and is the image on the provincial seal. The railway station is in the same subdistrict, a class 1 station 846.01 kilometres from Thon Buri on the Southern Line, opened in January 1913 — which means an overnight sleeper to Bangkok leaves from the middle of town. Housing is rooms above shophouses, small owner-run apartment blocks and townhouses. For most newcomers this is the sensible default, and it is the only part of the province where you can live without a vehicle.

Drive east out of the capital and within a few kilometres the rice paddies give out onto Songkhla Lake. Lam Pam is where Phatthalung meets its water: a shoreline strip of open-air seafood restaurants on stilts, moored fishing boats, and the long shallow expanse of the lagoon running away south. The lake is the reason the province's official aquatic emblem is the tinfoil barb, known locally as pla lam-pam and named after this very stretch of shore. It is worth being precise about what this water is, because it changes what living beside it means: Songkhla Lake is a chain of lagoon basins, not the sea, and Phatthalung is formally one of only two landlocked provinces in southern Thailand. There is no surf, no tide to speak of and no beach in the Andaman sense — there is a very large, very shallow, very calm body of brackish and fresh water with birds on it. Housing here is houses and townhouses let by their owners, generally with a garden and parking. It suits people who want the water and the sunsets and are ten minutes from the hospital rather than an hour.

North of the capital the province opens into its rice plain, and at the top of it sits the single most remarkable thing in Phatthalung. Thale Noi — the name means "little sea" — is the smallest and northernmost basin of the Songkhla Lake chain, and the non-hunting area around it covers 460 square kilometres. It was declared on 29 April 1975 as the first official non-hunting area anywhere in Thailand, and in 1998 the Kuan Ki Sian knoll within it, just 4.94 square kilometres, became Thailand's very first Ramsar Wetland of International Importance. The lake itself is roughly five kilometres by six with an average depth of about 1.2 metres, dropping to 80 centimetres in the dry season. Around it stand the largest paperbark (Melaleuca) swamp forests in the country, and on it graze more than four thousand water buffalo farmed by around 280 families — the animals that appear in every photograph of the place, standing chest-deep among the lotus. Pa Phayom, west of Khuan Khanun, holds the Thaksin University Phatthalung campus at Ban Phrao, established in 1989 across roughly 3,500 rai. Housing is village houses and farm compounds let directly by owners; there is no organised rental sector.

The western edge of the province runs up against the Nakhon Si Thammarat mountain range — the Banthat, the spine that separates Phatthalung from Trang — and this is where the province gets its waterfalls, its national park and most of its rubber. Khao Pu–Khao Ya National Park straddles the Trang border here, and the provincial motto's พราวน้ำตก, "dazzling waterfalls", is about this side of the province rather than the lake side. It is a striking piece of geography: from the capital you can see rice paddy in the foreground, limestone karst behind it and mountain forest behind that, all within about twenty kilometres. It is also the least serviced part of Phatthalung, and forest covers only 628 square kilometres of the province — 16.3 per cent — so the green here is mostly worked land rather than wilderness. Housing is detached houses, farm compounds and village properties let directly by owners, with gardens and parking and almost never an online listing. It is the cheapest part of the province by a clear margin, and the drive to Phatthalung Hospital is the number that decides whether it works for you.

South of the capital, Phatthalung narrows between the mountains and the lake and runs down toward Songkhla province. Khao Chaison is the best-known stop, for hot mineral springs that give the last line of the provincial motto — น้ำพุร้อน — its subject; Bang Kaeo is the smallest district in the province; Pa Bon runs up into the hills; and Pak Phayun sits right on the water at the point where the lagoon system starts to widen into Thale Luang. What makes this half of the province quietly interesting is the direction of travel: Hat Yai, the commercial capital of the whole south, is roughly a hundred kilometres and under two hours away down the same road and the same railway, which puts private hospitals, an international airport and a genuine shopping city within a comfortable day trip. Housing is townhouses, houses and a handful of owner-run apartment blocks in the district towns. It suits people who want rural southern Thailand at rural prices but are unwilling to be four hours from a city.