A few home truths for the Tourism Ministry

In keeping with the bungling efforts to boost tourism, here are a few more:

First, make sure there are 100,000 taxis clogging Bangkok’s every thoroughfare. This makes them especially hungry to rip off Bangkok visitors who don’t speak fluent Thai or who haven’t learned to keep a stash of small change. And of course we all enjoy the prospect of being run over occasionally by a multicoloured blur of metal, glass and rubber, with a grinning gold-toothed hellion speeding away.

Also, make sure the police don’t care a hoot about traffic safety and only show up before major holidays to roust the truck and motorcycle drivers for small donations.

And no Thai holiday would be complete without the BMA litter Stasi staging farang-only Sukhumvit shakedowns. Aided by the capricious Immigration process and the fact the only Immigration centre in this huge city is about as far from the middle of Bangkok as can be, this ensures that foreign visitors will continue to flood in, complain, get ripped off, shaken down, run over and scammed. And, in the never-ending karmic wheel of fate, it guarantees that the real but rapidly disappearing true Thainess in all its facets is tarnished in the eyes of the few tourists who manage to glimpse a beautiful country outside of the guided tours or beyond the slew of bad apples around them.

Niels Jeffreys