Back in Thailand after 28 years
I visited Bangkok briefly when I was a reporter on The Times back in 1979. Now I’m in the city again, staying in rather plusher accommodation at the Dusit Thani. Boy has the place changed, in ways that remind me why I no longer even think of trying to push the exotic international thriller idea.
Twenty eight years ago Bangkok was excruciating fun. I hadn’t travelled much in those days and this was one of my first big foreign jaunts. I remember the nightmares: getting around and fighting to stay in touch with London. There were no easy ways to phone internationally, and certainly no cheap ones. To get copy to the paper I, like any other foreign correspondent, usually had to find the local Cable & Wireless office and pass it to a telex operator or type the thing myself (anyone out there still remember how to use a telex keyboard?)
I vaguely remember I stayed somewhere along the Surawong road. Last night, still struggling with the time zone difference, I wandered around trying to see what remained from 1979, and pretty much failing. Back then Bangkok was still very much its own city. Foreign restaurants were rare, cheap transport meant tuc-tucs driven by men who knew the city less well than me. Today… well I stop short of saying it’s like everywhere else. But it is one of those bustling, sprawling modern cities that seem so common everywhere these days. KFC and McDonalds have made their mark. There seems to be a proliferation of branchs of Boots the Chemists for some reason.
And when I tried to find the old Vietnamese restaurant I used as a base I failed completely. The whole area seems to have been swallowed up by development, some of it quite swish, on the fringes of the still-bustling Patpong district (where even the touts seem somewhat smoother and less pushy than they used to be). Instead, desperate for a beer, I stumbled into a charming and friendly Mexican bar-cum-restaurant, Coyote, and sat down and had a Corona. I didn’t dare look to see where it was brewed. The place has wifi naturally so I went back to the Dusit Thani, picked up my Nokia N800, returned for another beer and phoned home for pennies using Skype over the Coyote’s network. Opposite, as I called, I couldn’t help noticing there was one of those fitness centres you find everywhere, the ones where they position the poor struggling yuppies inside so that those of us outside can see their heads bobbing up and down as they labour away on their machines.
This is a long, long way from taking tuc-tucs to the Cable & Wireless office. My first, failed attempt at a book was set in Asia. After all this was the time when people like John Le Carré was writing classics like The Honourable Schoolboy. But back then Asia was exotic. It’s a lot easier to navigate, and I suspect a lot more comfortable to live these days. But as a fictional location that frisson, which goes back to Somerset Maugham and beyond, has, for me anyway, disappeared a little, which is probably all for the good.
Most of my time will be spent in interviews and at the Dusit Thani, a nice place, though one of that era of Asian hotels (like the New Otani in Tokyo) that tries to convince you never to set foot outside the place. But I will be briefly in public view at the Asiabooks megastore at Siam Paragon around 6pm tomorrow night (Tuesday August 21) if you happen to be in town.
