stuff 'n other stuff

work bookshelves, a photo by moncur_d on Flickr.

I’m about to move offices so I though I’d memorialize my own little bit of bookshelf porn – amazingly they’re (relatively) tidy and organised …

I’d like to recommend the New Mandala blog for its coverage of politics in South East Asia – its coverage of the Thai election has been superb.

As to the election itself, we now have a result, with a landslide win for Yingluck, and everyone is being responsible for the moment.

Questions of course remain of how well Pheu Thai will ride the social reform tiger while placating both the conservative old money parts of Thai society and the army …

well it looks like the world is finally paying attention to the Thai election with a good report in the Guardian (syndicated in the SMH among others), a good piece in the NYTimes on the impact of the social changes of the last twenty years on rural Thailand. I have a little anecdote to add to the NYT report – almost everywhere we went everyone had fairly zippy smartphones, even though there’s no 3G service worth a damn outside of Bangkok. In itself this is not unusual, in poor countries the mobile networks have often leapfrogged the wired infrastructure and are simply more pervasive – I’ve seen similar effects in Laos and Morocco.

Anyway, the anecdote. We were riding in a tuk tuk in Ao Nang when the driver muttered ‘sorry’ and pulled over to the side of the road, and pulled out a state of the art Blackberry, and checked his Twitter feed, grunted, tapped a reply and off we set again. Now it makes sense that a tuk tuk man would have a smart phone, even if it represents a considerable investment, as he doubtless gets jobs and bookings by email and text message – but twitter?

(For people deeply interested in the Thai election the Bangkok Post remains the most up to date with coverage with news of a possible offshore deal about Thaksin and another statement by the army saying that they won’t intervene.)

Something that struck me during our recent trip to Thailand was the sheer number of tourists from what used to be known as the sub-continent – a tribute both to the growth of discount air travel in both India and Thailand and the growing wealth of the Indian middle class – and yes, they were most definitely there to shop …

In Ao Nang, across the street from  some dodgy looking bars is a MacDonalds.

Outside the McDonalds is the usual garish Ronald McDonald effigy – except is Thailand, so the figure is standing, palms together in a classic wai gesture …

Thailand, being a poor country, is full of people trying to turn a dollar. Most are legit, some are dodgy and some are very dodgy.

The dodgy ones tend to cluster around where tourists go on the basis that you are both naiver and richer than they are. Mostly they’re fairly transparent, such as the friendly stranger who tells you ‘XYZ is closed today’ when it isn’t, and then tries to persuade you to sign up to an over priced tour of an alternative attraction.

The ones at the Grand Palace in Bangkok are in a different league. The other guys are amateurs compared to them.

This is how the scam works.

There are three gates. You can only buy a ticket to go in at the middle gate, which is the one opposite an overpriced French style pavement cafe. Your cab of course cannot get close for love nor money and so will drop you somewhere nearby.

Helpful official looking guys with neat white shirts, Thai flag pins and official looking badges on lanyards will see you working out just where the hell you are and intervene, directing you to one of the other gates, rather than the main gate (which has a sign warning you to ‘beware of wily strangers’). Reasons given include “we’ve opened an extra gate”, “there’s a lot of tour groups ahead, quicker if you try the other gate”.

At this point you believe them as they’re not spruiking anything, and given you can’t read Thai, you can’t tell the difference between a used Patpong bus pass and Thai museums staff pass.

So you go down to the other, wrong, gate and another similarly attired guy will say, “so sorry, we’ve just had to stop people going in as there’s too many people in already” which looks kind of plausible as you are now standing in front of a gate where they are clearly not letting people in. And again you believe him as he doesn’t seem to be selling anything. So you ask him when you should come back and he says something utterly reasonable like “First thing tomorrow to be sure, but you could try around 1pm as the tour groups are often gone by then”.

You of course have trekked across the city, and don’t want to come back tomorrow, as today’s your last day, or whatever so you decide to come back later, which leaves you stuck for ninety or so minutes. So you visibly wonder what to do.

This is when your scammer hooks you. “Look,” he says, “get a tuk tuk down to the river and get a boat to the market or the wats on the other side and come back at 1pm”, and when you look positive, he gets you a tuk tuk, and the tuk tuk guy looks legit, with a nice blue jacket with a logo on it, unlike the usual grubby pants and t-shirt of your standard Bangkok tuk tuk man.

The tuk tuk man then takes you to a pier not used by the river commuter service, but where strangely enough there is a guy doing tours of the river in a longtail boat at considerably more than the going rate …

Now I’ll admit we fell for the scammers in the white shirts, even though we’re experienced travellers. At first we even thought it was just a dodgy tuk tuk man, so we made our excuses, left, flagged down  a cab, and went  back to the grand palace – incidentally finding the only cab driver in Bangkok who didn’t know how to get to it – he had to stop and ask a newspaper seller – only for our white shirted friends to try the same scam on us again. This time we ignored them …

Bangkok is a big brash, noisy slut of a city, and getting around it can be intimidating, with manic cab drivers, whose meters often seem to be broken, even more manic tuk tuk drivers intent on taking you somewhere you don’t want to go and the rest. And the traffic periodically jams solid – for example it took the cab taking us to the airport 45 minutes to get from our hotel on Soi 18 the couple of kilometres up Sukhimvit Road to the Expressway onramp.

But don’t let this put you off – if you’re a tourist it’s easy as long as you’re prepared to make some choices and pay a little bit more than you absolutely need to. Make sure that your hotel is close to a Skytrain station – the elevated metro system, as opposed to the underground – and given the number of international hotels off Sukhimvit who will do deal via Expedia and the rest it’s not a big ask.

Using the Skytrain will:

• take you to Mo Chit and the Chatuchak Weekend Market
• take you to the National Stadium (and Jim Thompson’s  House)
• take you to Siam Square and Chitlom for shopping
• Lumphini park for spot of calm in the middle of a frenetic city
• take you to the Central Boat pier at Saphan Taksin for the river boat service

the latter being especially useful if you want to visit the Wats along the river and the Grand Palace. Ignore what Lonely Planet says about the tourist boat – basically it runs every hour on the half hour between 0930 and 1630 (by which time you don’t care as all the wats are closed) and for a 150 Baht (say $5) they will sell you a hop on hop off ticket and a guide on to getting to all the main attractions. What’s more you don’t have to wait for the tourist boat, you can board any of the normal boats flying an orange flag to hop between piers.

Let the boat take you up the river to get oriented and then jump off on the way back to visit the sights of your choice. And if you don’t get to see everything you can always come back another day and buy some single hop tickets on the local passenger boats now you’re oriented.

Now the skytrain/riverboat combination doesn’t go everywhere – some parts of Chinatown and Bhalumpong are inconveniently out of reach, for example, but if you have a two or three day stop over it will let you do most of what you realistically are going to manage.

Using the Skytrain is straightforward as well – you can buy single tickets – a hassle, you need a handful of coins for the machine, a rechargeable ticket, or for 350 Baht ($12) a 30 day smart card ticket with 15 trips loaded on it, and at the equivalent of $12 cheap enough to throw or give away when you’ve finished with the seven or eight trips you’re likely to rack up in a  three day stop over. To put the ticket costs in perspective, an average tourist cab ride – say from your hotel to the wats – will cost between a 120 and 150 Baht.

The Skytrain is also part of the experience – you get to see into people’s yards, into an overgrown chinese cemetery near Sala Daeng, and also watch the cheesy video ads on the train.

My personal favourite Skytrain moment was listening to the station announcement for Nana station. The announcement would go Na-naah in an incredibly sexy voice seemingly redolent of illict sex on a steamy afternoon (ok, I have a vivid imagination) but nevertheless something that fitted in with the vibe of the place.

As always your mileage may vary, but this certainly worked for us …

One day, when I was in Bangkok, I looked over the edge of the Skytrain walkway near Asoke station. Traffic was snarled as usual, and as always in Bangkok it was disciplined in an anarchic way, ie there are rules and understandings that allow the traffic to barely flow, rather than come to complete gridlock.

And then I saw a big, black, polished Mercedes pull out of the snarled traffic and drive down the other side of the road. Oncoming traffic gave way to it. No one hooted. No one tried to follow it.

That was truly the arrogance of power …

We’re just back after three weeks in steamy monsoonal Thailand, and yes, we had a great time. This wasn’t a serious trip, we spent most of the time swimming, snorkelling and doing other human things. It was most definitely un petit vacance pour destresser.

What was unescapable was the Thai election. Election posters everywhere and everywhere in Krabi, Ko Lanta and Bangkok there were as many posters for Yingluck, the ousted Thaksin’s proxy, as for the other candidates. And Yingluck had more campaign trucks playing her campaign songs than anyone else.

Now we should all be paying attention to what is happening. The decision and the politics are for Thais alone, but what is happening is very interesting.

Over the last thirty or so years Thailand has industrialised, and has gone from being a predominately rural poor country to a country that is partially industrialised to one in which some people, predominately poor peasants in the north and east, have been left  behind economically, others, those who work in the car and computer plants around Bangkok, have done a bit better, but as Thailand was seen as a low labour cost option, not that much better, and at the same time some people have become very rich indeed.

Thaksin appealed to the poor and the disenfranchised and this let the genie of social reform out of the bottle. The army and the establishment were not best pleased with him and they got rid of him in a military coup in 2006. Thaksin is alleged to have engaged in corrupt behaviour, but then they would say that wouldn’t they.

Along the way the social reform agenda has taken on a life of its own, culminating the redshirt movement and the near insurrection in Bangkok last year.

Yingluck has been riding the social reform tiger, and now looks likely to win the election, much to the consternation of the conservative army generals.  Which means that things will not continue as before.

What will happen, I don’t know. It’s for the Thai electorate to decide. But it has definite implications for all of us as the last thirty years of economic change and growth have integrated Thailand into the global economy – the Honda and Toyota plants, the WD hard disk plants and the rest – and disruption and violence are bad for (global) business