"One night in Bangkok and the world is your oyster...", the lines at the end of the film Hangover 2 sung by a boxer Mike Tyson they were spinning in my head as I approached the runway of the airport in the capital by plane Thailand. I have been here several times, the last time in 2013, and what has changed since then is that Bangkok has become by far the most visited city in the world, last year it had 30,3 million visitors.
On the way from the airport to the downtown hotel, there were photos everywhere of Sirikit, Thailand's Queen Mother who passed away on October 24 last year, but across the country people are still signing books of mourning.
We got to Thompson's house by changing two trains with the sky train, an overhead railway that perfectly replaces the subway in this city. Jim Thompson was the greatest collector of antiques from Southeast Asia during the 20th century, a spy and a very controversial figure. His former home is now The Jim Thompson House, a museum that houses his collection. An elaborately carved wooden box with a glass top is placed in the bedroom. "It's the Mouse House", the hosts explained to us, a kind of television before television. They would let a white mouse into it, which would walk up and down the corridors, stairs and floors of the small wooden house, while the host, lying on the bed, relaxed while watching it through the glass window.
It was late afternoon and the perfect time for the King Power Mahanakhon SkyWalk – the highest observation deck in Thailand located at the top of the Mahankhon Building, at 314 meters high, which you can reach by elevator in just 15 seconds. As you climb, the silhouettes of the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, and other world attractions that this observation tower overlooks can be seen on the walls of the elevator.
Our hosts from Tourist organizations of Thailand took us to Poomjai Garden, a place where we had to cook our own food. Green curry was on the menu. Four of us media representatives from Serbia and two influencers chopped vegetables, kneaded coconut flour with water, cooked chicken and in the end got a pretty tasty meal, which we then sweetened with the local favorite dessert - mango sticky rice (cooked rice sprinkled with cinnamon and mango).
photo: Robert Choban…and Wat Arun temple
This was followed by a ride on one of the famous canals that cut through the entire city. We passed by temples, giant Buddha statues, private homes, schools and many, many photographs of the late Queen Mother. We arrived at Wat Arun Ratchawararam Ratchawaramahawihan or Wat Arun, on the west bank of the Chao Phraya River. The temple is named after the Hindu god Aruna, often personified as the radiance of the rising sun.
As you cannot enter the temples in Thailand with bare shoulders or exposed knees, the hosts decided to literally costume us in the traditional clothes of this country. A few dozen clothing rental boutiques, like the ones I've seen near temples in Kyoto, Japan, serve just that. In addition to wardrobe, women will also get a suitable Thai hairstyle.
photo: Robert ChobanPLEASANT: Baked scorpions and fried worms
We ended the day in Chinatown, one of the largest and oldest in the world - it was founded in 1782. When you pass through Chinatown Gate, you enter Yaowarat Road, the heart of Chinatown, or rather its belly because this street is often called the "belly of the dragon" because of the abundance of exotic food that is offered there. So colleague Igor ventured to try roasted scorpions and fried worms at one of the street stalls. For me, the taste of "mago sticky rice" that we ate after dinner was enough to end the day with dignity.
There are many reasons why Thailand attracts tourists. One comes to explore the temples, palaces and other traces of this kingdom's rich past. For others, the main motive is lounging on the beaches of Phuket, Pattaya, Ko Samui and other exotic resorts. Many are also attracted to sex tourism. While a few days later, on the promenade next to the city beach in Pattaya, we watched white men in their sixties and seventies walking in the company of barely adult Thai women, Epstein's files, which were intensively reported by all the media in those days, emerged as an inevitable association.
The sixties and seventies Bangkok was the last stop on the route of the famous Hippie Trail by which hundreds of thousands of hippies and other, mostly young people, eager for Eastern wisdom and experiences, from Europe and America, went in rented vans dotted with symbols of "flower children" to Kathmandu in Nepal, Goa in India and the easternmost - Bangkok in Thailand. The Americans traveled with Icelandic Air, the first low-cost carrier that took them from JFK Airport in New York via Iceland to Luxembourg Airport, where they rented vans and traveled across Europe, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan to Kathmandu, Goa or Bangkok. Svetlana Slapšak once told me: "My generation at the end of the sixties was not interested in the West at all. Nobody wanted to travel to London, Paris or New York. We all dreamed only of the East!"
It is interesting that all those countries through which the hippies passed were liberal, women wore mini-skirts in Tehran, marijuana was freely smoked on the streets in Kabul, there was peace everywhere on that route... Then in 1979, everything stopped - the Islamic Revolution broke out in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan took place, later the Iran-Iraq war began and since then this region has been bathed in blood for almost half a century. At the time of the Hippie Trail, the rest of Indochina (Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam) had been in the throes of war for two decades. And then those two regions were replaced - Indochina became a tourist mecca, and the Middle and Middle East became "dangerous places".
On our last evening in Bangkok, a delegation from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Thailand hosted us in a restaurant on the river bank opposite the Wat Arun temple. Although it was only three days before the parliamentary elections in that country, the officials of the Thai MSP were not in a "functionary campaign" but sat quietly on the riverbank and talked with some journalists and influencers from Southeastern Europe about the situation in the region tens of miles away from Bangkok. Only on the way did we mention their elections and the recent border conflicts with Cambodia, which Trump boasts that he "successfully ended".
We ate local food washed down with Australian wines (the only decent vineyard nearby), and I was interested in how significant decades and even centuries of peace, independence and capitalism are for the impressive numbers of Thai tourism today. That was not the case with the surrounding countries - all the detachments were under foreign administration, while Thailand was the only country in the area that was not colonized. Iran (Persia) has been independent for centuries, but since 1979 it has been under an Islamic theocracy, in constant wars - the latest one with the US and Israel is ongoing. Ethiopia and Liberia were the only independent countries in Africa in the 19th and first half of the 20th century, but the past decades in both countries were marked by civil wars and totalitarian regimes. Of the so-called countries Of the Third World, only Thailand has managed to preserve independence, monarchy, peace (to the greatest extent), democracy and capitalist order. The result of that combination is, we have confirmed, favorable.
