Interesting piece touching on spirituality and travel in the Chapel Hill-based magazine The Sun. Andrew Boyd, who has written a yet-to-be published book about his “spiritual misadventures traveling around the world,” goes to Doi Suthep monastery in Thailand to quiet the noise in his soul. He’s a skeptic in a world of faith, bound by his “monkey brain” instincts. He lusts after German tourists and apprentice nuns, and swaps drug stories with a former Chicago stockbroker turned monastery-philosopher-in-residence. Enlightenment, it seems, is kind of hard to come by.

Photo by Wandering Angel via Flickr (Creative Commons).

Marie Claire, The Age and the Times UK are among the publications with recent stories about the plight of the “long-neck women,” a group of Kayan refugees from Burma who are known for wearing brass coils around their necks. Tourists from around the world flock to Northern Thailand to see them, but many of the long-neck women have apparently had enough of living in a “human zoo.” Several of the women have removed their coils and are fighting to move to New Zealand and Finland, where they have been offered resettlement. 

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Denis D. Gray looks at the rise of travel to “places once isolated by conflicts, hostile regimes and ‘off-road’ geography to which only the more intrepid travelers had earlier ventured.”

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It’s Bangkok, according to Time. The story seems to offer support for both sides in a brewing debate in our comments section about whether it’s more difficult to cross the street in Rome or some cities in Southeast Asia. The chaos of Bangkok sounds crazier than Rome, but so does the gridlock. And if cars in Bangkok are perpetually stopped, isn’t that an argument that it should be easier to cross there than in Rome?

Related on World Hum:
* How to Cross the Street in Rome

Peter Delevett’s latest World Hum story, The (Full Moon) Party’s Over, captures the scene at Koh Phangan’s famous (or infamous) Full Moon Party, but I was still curious what I might find from the parties on YouTube. The video offerings are many, and they are remarkably similar: farangs on a wide beach, drinks in hand, hooting and bopping to thumping disco music. The videos are amusing—for a couple of minutes. It’s not hard to see why Peter concluded the party was, at least as far as he was concerned, over:

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Seriously. King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who traditionally has worn dark colors, was recently spotted wearing a pink shirt, and that has prompted a run on pink shirts in the country. Reports the BBC: “Thais have been queuing in their hundreds” for shirts like the one pictured, and the “Phufa fashion chain said it had sold 40,000 pink shirts this month.” No word on whether backpackers in Thailand will trade in their ubiquitous Southeast Asian Red Bull T-shirts for something in pink. I hope so.

Photo: AP.

Full title: “Bad Karma: Confessions of a Reckless Traveller in Southeast Asia”

Author: Tamara Sheward

Released: Nov. 1, 2007 (U.S.)

Travel genre: Bad Aussies abroad (you know the type)

Territory covered: Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia

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More than 80 people were killed, including more than 50 foreigners, when an MD-82 operated by the budget airline One-Two-Go crashed Sunday on Phuket, Thailand’s popular resort island. News reports vary on the exact number killed and injured, but many note that it was Thailand’s worst air disaster in a decade. 

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In yesterday’s New York Times, World Hum contributor Newley Purnell highlights all the ways travelers can now blow their budgets on Khao San Road, Bangkok’s famed backpackers hangout. The once dingy “decompression chamber for those about to leave or enter Thailand,” as Alex Garland described it in “The Beach,” now contains a spa offering body wraps and salt scrubs, as well as a Starbucks, Purnell writes. The changes should come as no surprise, particularly in the wake of Khao San Road’s central role in “The Beach.”

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Cheap flights and men on “stag nights” have threatened to turn Riga, Latvia into a destination most noted for pubs, clubs, strip bars and a growing sex industry—a “Baltic Bangkok,” if you will. It’s easy shorthand and perhaps too simple of a way to characterize Riga—or Bangkok, or any city for that matter—but some people in Latvia fear the name and image will stick. Hence, the current “Stop Sex Terrorism” campaign, which, according to Reuters, aims to steer local women away from one-night stands and to educate them about the dangers of interacting with tourists. 

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Oh, to be Bill Gates’s yacht. The waters you’d sail. The navigational software that would chart your course. The luxury tourism developments you’d inspire. Developer Gulu Lalvani says a conversation he had with Gates in Phuket, Thailand earlier this year has inspired him to build a small island just off the Thailand coast in Phang Nga Bay. As Lalvani recalled, Gates told him: “If I could bring my yacht, I would come here every year.” The trouble is, Gates’s 54-meter yacht (a little larger than the pleasure craft pictured here) is too big for Phuket’s marina, which holds yachts up to 40 meters long. 

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Or something like that. CafePress.com has removed G-strings and dog attire featuring images of the Buddha from its online catalog after Thais protested the sale of the products. “Such products offend not only Thais, but Buddhists elsewhere in the world,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Piriya Khempon told Reuters.

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