|
Thailand: Tourist Playground of the East
In an Internet hook-up joint in Bangkok's Khao San Road I was secretly reading the exaggerated email a teenage girl from Calgary was writing to her family. "I probably won't write emails for a while - alright!? I'll be trekking in the mountainous north. Bangkok must be the friendliest place on earth! The people are beautiful! The Grand Palace is beautiful, its temple fa‡ade covered in gold - can you imagine!?? This place is just SOOOO amazing. Thailand is unbelievable."
It was evening, the air swaddled with the reek of deep-frying oil, the sounds of the street bellicose - the impatient growl of motorbike taxis, the soupy murmur of a thousand voices, the drifts of badly-mixed dance music and yesteryear's pop and hip-hop hits. I stepped outside and my instinct was to shield my eyes from the explosive scene. A jostle of neon signs - of guesthouses, restaurants, travel agents, bars, clubs, supermarkets - jutted out from the buildings into the street, as though out on a limb; and the whole effect from my perspective at one end of the road was as if I was looking at a huge billboard covered with entries in a competition for gaudiest neon sign of the year. The ground was equally cluttered. There were portable stalls selling drinks and all manner of cheap and impromptu grub. The pavements were usurped by stands of fake designer clothes. There were Thais on their haunches and their accessories arranged on sarongs laid on the tarmac. There were the flower-painted, psychedelic hippy vans with their roof stripped off, playing loud music and churning out unrefined cocktails with names such as Sex on the Beach.
This road and the surrounding streets might cater for at least a million visitors annually. (Bangkok is a regional hub, and Thailand gets almost seven million visitors annually, making it the most visited country in Asia). Discovered in the 1970's when intrepid backpackers found accommodation in households, Khao San Road remains the cheapest district to stay in Bangkok. It is something of a backpackers' base in Southeast Asia, where backpacking gear can be bought and exchanged, and Thais wait outside guesthouses with a sign announcing: "We buy everything - cameras, rucksacks, clothes, books, etc." But I had expected something shabbier and less organised - potholed roads, beleaguered and gaunt backpackers, dubious businesses in rickety shops, guesthouses whose wooden structure sagged, flies feasting on street food - not tarmaced roads, well-groomed policemen, the food-stall attendees wearing chef's hat and apron. I didn't expect to see English lads slouched outside the bars beers in hand, wearing English national football team T-shirts and flaunting ugly tattoos that gave them an air of menace, and English girls with their breasts propped and their thighs insufficiently covered.
At one of the roofless cocktail vans we met an English couple who were on the final leg of the Grand Tour; they had been through Asia and Australia, and now had stopped briefly in Thailand on the way back. They dreaded going back; the English were close-minded, racist, materialistic. The woman said: "Look at this. Just one street and you get such a variety. If you have pink hair, or if you are a transvestite, no one gives you a second glance. In England, if you look different, you become a piece of gossip. You are judged all the time."
She was talking about the various street artists who would, for a fee, transform you - they could pleat and dye your hair, they could make you a head-dress of studs and shells, they could draw a henna tattoo on your arm or thigh - and she was talking about the Thai transvestites swaggering down the street hand-in-hand, making a show of their acquired girlie mannerisms. But wasn't this street a show of sorts? Did outlandish hair or fake tattoos make a place open-minded - or a theme park? Normally, after long travels, people rediscover an appreciation for the place they call home: for this couple it was the opposite.
At another cocktail van, where we hung with a group of Irish twenty-something's who were in the process of getting drunk, a parade of animals were presented to us. A man appeared with an iguana on his shoulder which one could embrace for a tip; many did, and the man collected 100B. Another man rode an elephant, offering us bags of bananas to be fed to the elephant at 50B per bag. There were no shortage of foster feeders; the elephant squealed in panic and delight at the prospect of food (it was obviously starved all day). Next, a woman unfurled the load in a hammock to reveal cages in which five finches lacked the space to stretch their wings. The offer: 50B would buy the release of a cage of birds. The group of Irish collected enough money to pay for the freedom of two cages of birds. (The Western pity and curiosity for animals could certainly be exploited for easy profits. They paid for the birds' liberation because they were obviously trapped, but weren't the iguana and the elephant also imprisoned, psychologically if not physically? Wasn't feeding and fondling them - and buying the birds' release - contributing, paradoxically and unwittingly, to the perpetual entrapment of wildlife?)
It was the same in other parts of Thailand: an array of cheap thrills with a whiff of outlandish exoticism. In Patpong, the notorious Go-Go bars, ghosts of their seventies' incarnation when abundant sex was on offer, have become something like sex circuses. You gape at the shows performed by dextrous contraction of vaginal muscles (such as shooting blow-darts from the vagina at a cluster of balloons), you are subjected to a massage until you feel compelled to give a tip, and then, on the way out, you find your way blocked by bouncers who demand a 200B "entrance fee."
In a lot of ways, Thailand started to feel something like a manufactured experience. The floating markets, one of Bangkok's most enduring images, have survived for the sake of tourists, like historical re-enactments. In Chiang Mai the experience is also packaged: you trek in a group to the so-called hill tribe villages, you take some snapshots and shake off the begging village children with pens or sweets or money, then you ride an elephant.
Yet this isn't the whole story. The Thais have an infectious kind of reckless energy which, coupled with the country's saleability and accessibility, gives you a distinct sense of possible hedonism and adventure. There's definitely an exotic buzz in the air, and if you're after three weeks of mindless indulgence, or if Thailand is your introduction to Asia, then it might be your destination. But if lying on a beach or riding an elephant doesn't fulfil you, if ecstasy and beach parties and sexual gratification isn't your idea of travel, if you want to make your own discoveries, if you want cultural depth, if you're after something profounder than straight fun, then Thailand is likely to frustrate you. The only great natural attractions I found, (tenuously) protected from commercialisation and over-development under the National Marine Park umbrella, were some of the low-key islands - there are several of these, the most popular of which is the Ko Chang island chain: their rugged beaches and forests and reefs were pristine, and it was possible to enjoy some of the best jungle treks and scuba diving to be had anywhere. But in Koh Samui, one of Thailand's quintessential islands, I could have been in any of the brashest resorts in the Mediterranean or the Caribbean. That was no fun for me: after escaping from the summer invasion of sun-and-sea package tourism in Malta, I came halfway across the world to find the same thing, only more intense.
© Victor Paul Borg
|
