Phuket is a great place for the famous and the infamous to hang out. Last weekend, Rihanna paid a fleeting visit and aroused her worldwide fan base with tweets about and photos of sex shows and cruelty to cuddly creatures called slow lorises.

This week, Phuket police pounced at a spacious villa and arrested American Joseph Hunter, 48, wanted for the murder of a judge in the Philippines and drug-running across four countries.

And on Thursday the spotlight shifted to Ben Darcy, 24, a handsome bodybuilder who has emerged as a key figure in a story encompassing two key football codes across two countries, Australia and Thailand.

With him may have been another figure rapidly achieving a kind of fame, a friend from his schooldays, Canberra Raiders star Sandor Earl. Earl is reported to have joined Darcy on Phuket at the weekend.

Darcy usually turns up each day with three or four friends to pump iron at an exclusive gym in southern Phuket, but on Thursday he was missing.

The four-storey gym, with a restaurant and swimming pool on the top deck, would not be out of place in one of Sydney's swank eastern suburbs. It has everything a bodybuilder could possibly want.

In a corner on the ground floor is the Phuket Pro Nutrition Shop where supplements and hormones can be bought and the slogan reads ''DYMATIZE THAILAND, Building better Bodies''.

Staff at the gym on Thursday described Darcy as a good-looking regular who signed on as a member about a month ago. He usually turned up riding a motorcycle and speaks passable Thai, they said.

Later we visited Muay Thai House, a short distance from the gym and the heartland for the latest tourist trend on Phuket - the exercise and martial arts invasion. Darcy had been staying in a bungalow there, along with many other young fit tourists, but checked out on September 8, we were told.

Just down the road from the motel-style accommodation is another Phuket Pro Nutrition Shop, with a tattoo store alongside it. Body art and bodybuilding sit alongside each other to greet youthful invaders who want to get fit and sharpen their abs on Phuket.

Muay Thai - Thai kickboxing - is popular with all martial arts followers, and with athletes of all kinds looking for something a little exotic and different. With the novelty of the new destination have also come bodybuilders.

On Phuket's west coast, in the holiday hub of Patong, there is a third Phuket Pro Nutrition Shop, again with a tattoo shop alongside. The man behind the counter there said his name was Captain and that he often worked out at the exclusive gym with Darcy.

Where was the store's owner, we asked? ''He's not here, and he doesn't need to come here,'' Captain told us. ''He watches what's going on by security camera from his home.''

One wall of the store is lined with drums of whey and other protein supplements. Captain sees us as customers and is quick to show us a catalogue of hormones that we might need. ''These all come from Germany. They're top quality,'' he said, noting that a course of injections of IG Tropin or Somatrope at 13,000 baht ($440) each would probably change our lives.

There are other, cheaper options but he said the high-end, high-priced products come without side effects. ''Some of these others will leave you needing anti-oestrogen,'' he said. ''But with IG Tropin and Somatrope, your balls are safe.''

A rising market for fitness activities and bodybuilding is being well catered for by Phuket Pro Nutrition, which has opened three Phuket stores and has a fourth in Chiang Mai, with two more scheduled for Bangkok and Pattaya.

Online at its site, the brand boasts many different kinds of customers, ''including athletes and Muay Thai fighters''.

Down the road outside one of the southern Phuket Pro Nutrition stores can be found topless joggers in Thai boxing shorts, gyms such as Fight Lab and Phuket Top Team, and even a Fight Club Restaurant and Nightclub.

Muay Thai kickboxers ascribe to a strict regime of health and peaceful coexistence outside the ring. The advent of bodybuilding as a corollary attraction has broadened the mix and hardened some muscles on Phuket.

Some adherents of Muay Thai lack the discipline that is supposed to be the mental side of the sport, with one British kickboxer, Lee Aldhouse, killing another, former US marine Dashawn Longfellow, in a knife ambush three years ago.

Since then, islanders have been more wary about whether outsiders who come to Phuket for exercise and martial arts training are really gentle and entirely at peace with the world outside the ring or gym.

Correction: An earlier headline on this story incorrectly stated that Phuket police had swooped on Ben Darcy.