It’s a shame that Bangkok’s “notorious nightlife” has been so profusely publicized. Many visitors probably confine themselves to their hotels in the evening and then flee the city the next day. Actually, Bangkok nightlife is so extensive that prostitution and sex shows occupy only a dreary corner.
From all walks of life, Thais take their food, fun, music, drinking, dancing and conviviality very seriously. Nightlife venues run into the thousands. So don’t conclude that the following glimpse of three very different neighborhoods is in any way exhaustive. The surface has been barely nicked. What can be said is that these are three long-running neighborhoods that will deliver sanuk (fun) wanderings and meetings with ordinary, chatty Thai people.
Upper Silom Road
It’s impossible to pinpoint Bangkok’s coolest neighborhood. The trendsetters are just too fickle. But Silom Soi 4 and Silom Soi 2–two lanes jutting off the east end of Silom Road–somehow endure while more fabulous spots are fuzzy memories. These two small lanes are great for people-watching and Read more »
July 4, 2008
Posted by Suzana |
Travel, Uncategorized | Bangkok, bars, clubs, Convent Road, dance, Lang Suan, nightlife, Phra Athit, Phra Sumen, pubs, restaurants, Saladaeng, Sarasin, Silom, Silom Soi 2, Ton Pho, travel trade, TravelAge West |
Leave a Comment
Some of Thailand’s biggest and most beautiful caves are all the more intriguing because they have been discovered only in the past decade. Yet all the superlatives must be couched in tentative terms (such as the “tallest known column”) because there are certainly more caves to be unearthed.
“Discovered” may not be the most accurate term. Frequently local villagers have known for countless generations that a nearby cave existed, but they had never ventured very far within because they feared ghostly occupants or lacked proper lights and equipment. The recent teams of foreign cavers therefore have often found themselves to be the first people to enter an underground chamber with a 15-metre high ceiling or to gaze upon a thousand-year-old flowstone resembling a frozen waterfall. Read more »
May 19, 2008
Posted by Suzana |
Environment, Travel, Uncategorized | caves, caves sidebar, geology, Kanchanaburi, limestone, Mae Hong Son, Pang Mapa, Southeast Asia, Thailand |
Leave a Comment
Thailand has a prostitution problem. It is of neither recent nor imported vintage. Nobody really knows quite how big the problem is or how many Thais are involved in the industry because, contrary to the impressions of many tourists, the sale of sexual services is illegal. Social scientists estimate that the number of prostitutes ranges from 500,000 to 1 million within Thailand. Tens of thousands of Thai women also work overseas as prostitutes, mostly as illegal migrant workers in Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia and other countries.
The 500,000 figure works out to be 10 percent of all Thai women aged between 15 and 25. When the large numbers of children, older women and men (the latter including transvestites and transsexuals) are considered, the estimate doesn’t seem far-fetched. After all, a well-known Thai journalist, Soporn Ongkara, a few years ago pointed out that in Bangkok there was only one neighborhood, the old royal city area, where sex was not for sale.
May 4, 2008
Posted by Suzana |
Society, Travel, Uncategorized | AIDS, Bangkok, Buddhism and prostitution, Insight Guide Bangkok, Insight Guide Thailand, prostitution, sex tourism, sex trade, Thailand, Thailand prostitution, trafficking |
Leave a Comment
Somewhere in the netherlands of Chainat Province, it’s early November, the ragged end of the rainy season and unseasonably cold. In heavy cloth pants and a woolen jacket buttoned up to the neck, Swai Rodtavorn is primed for the 22-degree chill. She stomps in flip-flops through an overgrown tangle of 100 trees, both coconut palms and kaffir lime, the latter better known here as makruut. “This is the worst season for makruut,” she huffs. Actually, there are plenty of the shiny double-winged green leaves that she can sell in nearby fresh markets for use in soups, curries and stir-fried food.
But she’s talking about the fruit. She makes a beeline for a laden tree. Since this mature tree is five years old, the lowest branches are higher than our heads. She needs long-handled clippers to cut one of the thorny branches. Citrus hystrix is one homely fruit. The size of a handball, it has the lumpy wrinkled surface of green brain. No Thai will profess to eating it. It’s too bitter and “strong” smelling. Read more »
April 5, 2008
Posted by Suzana |
Business, Travel, Uncategorized | Add new tag, aromatherapy, essential oil, flavors, fragrances, inflight magazine, kaffir lime, lemongrass, makruut, perfumer, Sawasdee, scent, Thai-China Flavours and Fragrance |
Leave a Comment
Down Highway One: Journeys through Vietnam and Cambodia
By Sue Downie
Asia 2000. 325 baht.
Reviewed by Susan Cunningham.
Among books about Vietnam in the doi moi era—since the acceptance of capitalist-style economics was unveiled in l987–Down Highway One by Sue Downie offers a refreshing perspective. It’s not yet another bittersweet nostalgia tour by an elderly U.S. veteran or a former war correspondent. Neither is it a quickie travelogue by someone whose prior knowledge of the country was derived from the Lonely Planet guidebook, too many viewings of “Apocalypse Now” and “Platoon,” and a skim through Michael Herr’s Dispatches.
Downie is above all a diligent reporter trying to describe how Vietnam looks and feels today. Or rather, how it looked and felt between 1988 and 1990. In 1988, she was the first Western Bloc journalist (apparently she’s Australian) since at least the 1950s to travel overland from the Chinese border town of Lang Son down the length of Vietnam and from Saigon to Phnom Penh. Her route was the 2,100 kilometre-long Highway One. She describes it as “a D-grade road–narrow and potholed with disintegrating edges.”
Her return visits in 1989 and 1990 added up to several more months. In 1990, she scored another first, becoming the first Western journalist to be based in Phnom Penh since the Khmer Rouge takeover in 1975. The story of the original journey is interspersed with updates on how quickly people, places, things and bureaucracy changed over the months and years. Although she didn’t speak Vietnamese or Khmer at the time, Downie was an astute observer and indefatigable notetaker. Her minders and interpreters must have thought her a terrible nag.
Whenever she spies a market or a roadside stall, she gives a telling rundown of the food, household goods, tools and even pharmaceuticals on sale. She finds out the prices and, if applicable, the country of origin. We discover what all the various agricultural stuff is that’s always drying in heaps alongside the dusty Vietnamese roadsides. We can picture the construction of houses and the state of crops. When Downie stops in a village, she notices how many people have bloated bellies or the rusty hair–sure signs of malnutrition. In short, when we read that one area is poorer than another, or richer than on her last visit, we know precisely why. Read more »
March 9, 2008
Posted by Suzana |
Books, Travel, Uncategorized | book review, Cambodia, Down Highway One, Sue Downie, The Nation, Vietnam |
Leave a Comment
