Destination: Thailand

Photo by Jim Benning.

Study: Almost One in 10 British Citizens Is Living Overseas

by Jim Benning | 12.14.06 | 2:12 PM ET

Britons love the expat life. A whopping 5.5 million of them are living abroad, according to a new study, and many of them are young workers without families. The BBC has a compelling package of stories about the phenomenon. Among the highlights from the main story:

Read More »

Seven Travel Stories to Tell Before You Die

by Jim Benning | 10.02.06 | 6:43 AM ET

I’ve never been too enamored of the 1,000 Places to See Before You Die approach to travel—or at least the approach that the title of the book suggests. Among other things, it emphasizes quantity over quality. But the San Francisco Chronicle’s John Flinn has offered a modest alternative checklist that I can get behind: seven travel stories you should be able to tell before you die. It puts the emphasis where it belongs, I think: on experiences and stories. Flinn just concluded a series of columns exploring the seven stories he believes are essential for every traveler, and he recounted his own version of each. “Go ahead and visit every one of those ‘1000 Places to See Before You Die,’ as catalogued in the best-selling book,” he wrote. “But spare your friends the description of the Taj Mahal. Yes, it’s beautiful. And, yes, of course, the Great Barrier Reef is awesome. Everybody knows this. And we don’t need to hear about the seventh hole at Pebble Beach. What we want to hear are stories.”

Read More »

Bangkok’s “Golden Land” Airport Opens

by Jim Benning | 09.28.06 | 2:26 PM ET

Despite the recent coup, Southeast Asia’s largest airport opened today, the highly anticipated $4 billion “mega airport” 20 miles from central Bangkok called Suvarnabhumi, or “Golden Land.” “First conceived in 1960,” the AP reports, “the high-profile project transformed a swamp where villagers once caught cobras for a living into a fertile ground for politicians and their cronies to profit from shady deals, allegedly ranging from land speculation to bribery and kickbacks from the $3.8 billion project.” Okay, so it got off to a shaky start. But since then, 99 monks and Brahmin priests have apologized to the spirits for any harm done. And now, travelers are raving about the place. According to the International Herald Tribune, officials hope the new airport, designed to move 45 million passengers a year, will “surpass Hong Kong as a regional air hub.” An express train to downtown Bangkok is scheduled to open next year.

Backpacker on the Thailand Coup: “Nobody’s Up in Arms About It”

by Jim Benning | 09.20.06 | 1:53 PM ET

Apparently the banana pancakes-eating, hair-braiding backpacker set hanging out on Bangkok’s Kao San Road continues to, uh, chill, despite the tumultuous events of the last 24 hours in Thailand. It was 21-year-old Scottish traveler Amy Farquhar who remarked to USA Today about the bloodless coup to remove Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, “Nobody’s up in arms about it.” Farquhar was referring to her fellow Kao San travelers, we imagine, and not the tank-driving, arms-wielding military who staged the coup. Some travelers are a bit more engaged. Self-proclaimed vagabond Paul Karl Lukacs has been filing reports about events at the blog Knife Tricks. Among other posts, he writes: “This evening, I saw ten soldiers stationed at Tha Phae Gate, the central crossroads in the tourist section of Chiang Mai, Thailand. I rarely see soldiers in the city, so this was clearly a show of force.” According to USA Today’s story, the U.S. Embassy is urging its citizens in Thailand to “monitor the situation closely.” For the time being, Americans are not being advised to leave the country.

Photo by Jim Benning.

The 9/11 Anniversary: World Hum Looks Back

by Michael Yessis | 09.11.06 | 7:00 AM ET

Five years ago, on the morning of the terrorist attacks in New York City, Washington D.C. and the air near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, World Hum was barely four months old. I was living in San Francisco, and Jim was making his way through Southeast Asia. “This isn’t the way you’re supposed to feel when you travel abroad,” Jim wrote in Terror in America: A Letter From Thailand, which we posted the following day. “You’re supposed to be immersed in the exotic, pleasantly buzzed, delightfully lost, happily, if temporarily, in exile. You’re supposed to shuck off your old self, lose track of the news back home and try on an utterly foreign way of life.”

Read More »

John Burdett on Thailand, Sex and ‘The Quiet Farang’

by Michael Yessis | 08.19.06 | 2:00 PM ET

The arrest of John Mark Karr in Bangkok for allegedly murdering JonBenet Ramsey almost 10 years ago has put Thailand’s reputation for sex tourism and as a haven for western drifters, or farang kee-nok, in the spotlight of American media. In an opinion piece in today’s New York Times, John Burdett, author of the crime novel Bangkok Tattoo, weighs in on why Thailand has, in the words of one Bangkok teacher he spoke to, become the place where farang go after they kill or rape somebody in their own country.

Read More »

Thai Monks Succumb to World Cup Hangovers

by Michael Yessis | 06.22.06 | 11:12 AM ET

Oh, those wild monks. The Nation newspaper in Thailand reports that they’ve been staying up all night watching World Cup matches, “causing them to skip their morning walk to beg for alms.” It’s not against the rules, says Phra Kru Sophonkaweewat, deputy abbot of Jedee Lung Wiharn Temple in Chiang Mai. “We allow them to watch some matches but they are prohibited from watching all of them and engaging in noisy cheering,” he said. “And no gambling is allowed.” Even though Thailand doesn’t have a team in the competition, the country is soccer mad and it has several connections to the tournament. All the game balls were made in a factory in Sri Racha, Chonburi province, and one Thai linesman is working the games in Germany. Check out stories in the International Herald Tribune/ThaiDay by World Hum contributor Newley Purnell.

Attack of the Thai Transvestites

by Jim Benning | 11.15.05 | 12:53 PM ET

It sounds more like a B-movie than real life, but apparently a gang of Thai transvestites has been robbing men in Bangkok. Their method? According to an AP story in USA Today: “concealing strong sedative pills under their tongues and spitting them down the throats of their victims while kissing, causing them to pass out so they can be easily robbed.” It’s not clear that tourists have been targetted very often, but police plan to warn visitors about the danger. Side note: The AP report describes the transvestites in question as “attractive.” Since when has the AP been rating transvestites?

The Allure of the Atlanta

by Michael Yessis | 03.15.05 | 7:46 PM ET

In the heart of one of Bangkok’s most notorious sex tourism districts lies the Atlanta Hotel. It’s “revered as the Taj Mahal of budget hotels,” writes Terry Ward in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. Ward, who also wrote the current feature story on World Hum’s home page, recently spent five nights in Bangkok, and she tracked down the hotel’s elusive owner, Charles Henn. Henn promotes the Atlanta as a haven from the sex trade, a civilized oasis whose existence relies primarily on word passed from traveler to traveler. “The kind of person that would want to know about the Atlanta, well, would be in a minority anyway,” he tells Ward, “It appeals to a certain kind of traveler, and that’s just as it should be.”

Tsunamis Bring Out the Best in Travelers

by Jim Benning | 01.30.05 | 7:03 PM ET

In much of Asia, Western tourists are best known for frittering away time on beaches and haggling over the price of $4 hotel rooms. But when the tsunamis struck, Jim Benning writes, many visitors proved worthy guests.

Read More »

Signs of Confusion

by Rolf Potts | 12.03.04 | 9:32 PM ET

Bad translations abound. In a Thai restaurant, Rolf Potts struggles to make sense of them.

Read More »

The First Rule of Visiting Thailand: Do Not Sit on the Buddha’s Head

by Michael Yessis | 09.14.04 | 11:27 PM ET

Thai government officials have had enough of culturally insensitive travelers to their country. To combat the problem, they plan to publish a book on Thai etiquette. A poster for a film called “Hollywood Buddha,” which featured a man sitting on a Buddha statue’s head, triggered the course of action, according to the BBC. “Some officials called for ‘malicious’ foreigners to be banned from Thailand,” the BBC reports. “But a government minister denied reports that it was preparing a blacklist to ban foreigners who had offended Thai culture.”

British Backpackers Slain in Thailand

by Jim Benning | 09.10.04 | 11:30 PM ET

A couple of young British backpackers in Thailand were apparently shot to death Thursday by an off-duty Thai police officer. The shootings followed an argument in the restaurant the officer owns northwest of Bangkok. The Independent has a report. The Bangkok Post has a story that requires registration to access. For those of us who’ve had the pleasure of traveling in Thailand, such violence directed at tourists is hard to imagine.

Welcome to Club Thailand. Your Limo is Waiting.

by Jim Benning | 01.08.04 | 9:16 PM ET

If you like visiting Thailand and have $25,000 to spare, you can be among the first owners of a “Thailand Elite” card, a wacky tourism program designed by Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra to attract big-money visitors. So far, about 100 tourists, many of them Chinese, have paid the one-time $25,000 membership fee, which entitles them to a five-year multiple-entry visa, free golf, airport limousine trips and a number of other perks. “Promoters of the VIP plan admit that snob value is part of the appeal when it comes to Asian travelers with a penchant for members-only clubs and public displays of wealth,” according to an article about the program in the Christian Science Monitor. “The sales brochure holds out the tantalizing prospect of rubbing shoulders with ‘celebrities from around the world’ that are being targeted as potential VIPs.”