Traveling Again - In Bangkok

Wow, I can not believe it has been a month since my last post. Sure, it has been a busy month and I guess I did not have so much to write about but now I am bursting with things to discuss. The first of which is the on-going Thai political problems. This is an issue for us in Siem Reap because many of our customers visit Thailand before or after coming to Cambodia. The Thai political situation has been in a mess for so very long now. But, after traveling to Thailand frequently over the last 20 years and after having lived in Thailand and now Cambodia for the more than six years, the political problems are completely internal and have almost no affect on tourists here. If you really wanted, you could see some of the demonstrations in the government center of Bangkok but that is far removed from the mainstream tourist scene in Bangkok. In fact, if you were an average tourist here you would have no idea that there is anything going on, other than business as usual.

Now comes the problem between Thailand and Cambodia over a tiny disputed area around the border at Preah Vihear temple. I spoke to an ex-pat not long ago who works in the area on an ecological project and he said you would never know that there is anything going on there. That is before the recent border outbreak though. It seems to me such a silly and small thing. There is no dispute that Preah Vihear is on Cambodian soil and in my view the Thais are wrong to dispute the area near the temple. They are being petty and should follow what the international courts have decided decades ago about this issue. You really have to question why they are being so irrational.

Anyway, I bring both of these up because the media loves (and of course feeds off) these kind of stories. They get so worked up and blown out of proportion as to be comical in terms of the true functioning of daily life in the whole of each country. They really have no correlation whatsoever to tourists traveling in the region to Phuket, Chiang Mai, Phnom Penh, Siem Reap etc. It reminds me of the media frenzy over the tsunami which was a horrible tragedy of a grand scale. However, in the big picture of the region, it affected such a tiny, tiny part of the countries involved. But, if you followed it in the media from afar you were left to believe the whole of the region was wiped away. How bad was it? I had friends write to me (I live in Siem Reap!) asking if I was ok and how awful it must be there. I live 800km from Phuket! Even if I was living in Bangkok it would have had no affect on me. To put it in perspective, it reminded me of the San Francisco earthquake of 1989 which I experienced. From the media reports you would have thought that San Francisco had fallen off into the Pacific Ocean. When I finally reached my family they were surprised to learn otherwise. So, based on this example and comparing it to the tsunami, it would have been the equivalent of calling your friend in Denver to ask if they were OK after the SF earthquake and that it must be horrible there. The media has a job to do, and I am grateful for the news that we get. However, they have the ability to blow things out of proportion and distort reality. Long story short, I am in Bangkok and enjoying myself like usual. Buying things for the hotels, bar and spa. I will be traveling back overland and have heard of nothing but normal operations at the border. I will be glad to report back next week after I have made it back to Siem Reap.

And if you want some background on this issue, here is an article from a Thai group.