Once our first round of drinks arrived, Bob confessed that he and I never knew each other; rather, he’d seen a story about me in the alumni magazine and figured it might be interesting to spend an evening with me on their first visit to Bangkok. He didn’t exactly put it that way, but it was obvious. He was paying for the drinks, so I ordered another and while I didn’t like being deceived or patronized, I figured what the hell, it was just one night and maybe he or his wife would be fun to get to know.
You’ve already guessed. I was wrong.
I won’t bore you with the details, just take my word for it when I say it was one of the least interesting and at times most infuriating evenings of my life in Bangkok, many of which are spent entertaining out-of-towners. Over a period of five hours we uncovered nothing we had in common other than the university, about which I had only distant memories.
Worse, they refused to leave the bubble in which they arrived and, from my point of view, they expected to leave the Land of Smiles without much of anything to smile about. Ordering a meal for them—their first taken outside their hotel, they said—was hampered by their belief that Thai food would either (1) poison them, or (2) merely invoke less than amusing damage to their gastro-intestinal systems. The appearance of sticky rice, part of the restaurant’s cuisine, actually made them ask if it were possible to get a potato.
The Levys seemed terrified by their excursion. The air was polluted; the traffic was worse than it was back home in Kansas City; the heat and humidity were insufferable; the food looked as if it were alive or, worse, dead; the language was abrasive and undecipherable; the river that ran past their hotel was brown; and they were sure they would contract AIDS from some passing doorknob or toilet seat. Why, I wondered, had they come to Thailand?
As we walked along the soi (street) to the main road to catch a cab after dinner, I spotted a small elephant being led by its trainer, who was selling bananas to passers-by, on the opposite side of the street. I thought this offered a perfect opportunity to introduce the Levys to something really Thai, and explained how the animal’s native habitat had been destroyed, forcing the elephants to come to the city to beg. They wouldn’t go near the tiny beast, practically withdrew into the wall in fear (on the opposite side of the street, mind you), and showed visible relief when they clambered into a taxi, to be hurried back to the security of their five-star hotel.
The Levys were what another writer, Carol Hollinger, author of a truly fabulous little book called Mai Pen Rai Means Never Mind (1965), called “the ‘Humph’ people,” the visitors to Thailand who greeted each new experience with a “Humph!” of disdain or disgust, the visitors who “stayed at the fancy hotels and hurried down to Jim Thompson’s to buy Thai silk.” And then went home.
Good riddance, say I, but the Thai government loves these awful people because they spend more money here than other visitors do. The backpackers are welcomed, reluctantly. The sex tourists, too, but never openly. And it’s those two visitor categories that give the country much of the reputation that the nation’s leaders claim they would like to shed.
In an effort to move in that direction, the Thai government in early 2002 announced plans to create two new tourist destinations that would appeal to the well-heeled traveler. Both schemes were hare-brained, but in Thailand you expected that. One was to turn a relatively unspoiled island in the southeast, Koh Chang, into “another Phuket” (the government’s phrase, not mine), but this time for the rich. The intent was to attract the kind of money that Phuket does, without the bars and trashy souvenir shops.
“We want to build a five-star image for Koh Chang by focusing on the environment,” said Pornchai Kaemapuckpong, a member of the government’s Koh Chang Development Committee. “People coming here should be proud that they can afford its high-end lifestyle.” How high-end? The goal was to attract tourists who could spend between US$1,250-1,500 a day. That Koh Chang was a national forest seventy five percent owned by the Royal Forestry Department and that the entire fifty-two-island Koh Chang archipelago was established as a Marine National Park in 1982 appeared to be regarded as irrelevant.
“For many, this has a depressingly familiar ring,” Vipasai Niyamabha wrote in The Nation (Feb. 2, 2002). “And just who stands to benefit? We have witnessed parts of Pattaya become another Patpong; Koh Tao like Khao San Road, and Koh Phi Phi another Patong Beach. Is Koh Chang destined to fill her coffers yet lose her soul?”
The other scheme was even crazier. It involved the governments of Thailand, Laos and Cambodia cooperating to construct a five-star resort that would be in what was to be called “The Emerald Triangle,” because at the time it was nothing but green jungle located where the three nations meet. The idea was to build a golf course that would allow players to swing their clubs in all three in a single round of play. There were problems, however, one being that much of the territory under discussion was heavily mined from the 1980s, when the Khmer Rouge were fighting in the area.
Major General Kitti Sufksomsatarn, director of the Thailand Mine Action Centre, estimated the cost of the de-mining would be in the neighborhood of US$10.2 million, not including construction of an access road required to reach the site, and take at least a year; he also said that his organization could not assist because the scheme was planned for commercial rather than humanitarian reasons. Talk about the Emerald Triangle stopped.
Why such crazy ideas get any attention at all led inevitably to the doors of the Tourism Authority of Thailand, then a highly politicized arm of the government. In adopting a tourism master plan the same month that these two schemes were announced, the TAT, as it’s known, identified five tourism categories, all aimed at the “quality” tourist. These ranged from beaches and islands with potential for development to nature reserves and forests to historical destinations. It was suggested, for instance, that the ancient capital of Ayutthaya be turned into a “living museum” like America’s Williamsburg.
That was in 2002, when Thailand called tourism the key sector leading to economic recovery following the Asian meltdown of 1997. In the next two years, the government had to deal with a slew of new challenges both at home and abroad. TAT figures showed arrivals climbed from under seven million in 1995 to almost eleven million in 2002, but that figure fell by more than a million in 2003, thanks to wars in the Middle East, SARS and terrorist incidents in the region. Sunny predictions regarding a comeback in 2004 subsequently were torpedoed by repeated bird flu outbreaks and separatist violence in Thailand’s Muslim south.
There were other problems, and these could be longer lasting. In a report to the government, the TAT (quoting The Nation on Feb. 25, 2002) concluded that Thailand was “caught in a trap of low prices and profits growth. Although the country welcomes around ten million tourists a year, foreign visitors are spending less time here, and less money, and perhaps looking to alternative destinations such as Vietnam and Cambodia.”
Thus, the country was “caught in a vicious circle of being a cheap destination.”
Over the years, Thailand’s image took other hits so serious they made “cheap” sound almost flattering. Most (in)famously, Newsweek (Jul. 12, 1999) said the country’s economic advantages over its neighbors were limited to “sex and golf.” In 2002, in a special section devoted to Thailand’s economy, The Economist said two growth industries that merited special attention were “sex and drugs.” And in 2004, when the TAT hired a group of researchers at California State University to explore ways the nation might attract more long-stay American tourists, it was told that something had to be done to overcome the perception that the entire country was “dirty, polluted and traffic congested.”