Travel: The Smiling Lures Of Thailand

What elsewhere one sees only in travel brochures, one finds in Thailand daily. It often seems, in fact, as if ancient gods — Bacchus, Neptune, Zeus and Venus — conspired to make the land a composite of holidaymakers’ fantasies. Here is a never-never land built on solid ground; a fairy-tale monarchy ruled by a Renaissance King and his classically beautiful Queen; an orchid-scented garden of scintillant temples, lush jungles, palmy white beaches and a capital built along tree-shaded canals; and a gentle Buddhist retreat filled with smiling, gracious people who make “tourist industry” sound like a contradiction in terms. The most pressing problem with the “Land of Smiles” may be simply that it is too hard to resist.

If skeptics are right in claiming that every country has its season in the sun, becomes the flavor of the year for just a spell (if it’s 1983, this must be China), this, without question, is the time of Thailand. Suddenly, faraway once-upon-a-time Siam has become the hottest destination in the world. In the past ten years, the number of tourists has tripled. Not coincidentally, the country boasts the fastest-growing economy in Southeast Asia, itself the fastest-growing area in the world. Last year, to celebrate the 60th birthday of the revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the government enticed, with elegant ads and well-phrased brochures, a record 3.5 million tourists to the kingdom. This year the number promises to surpass 4 million, or three times as many as visit neighboring giant India.

Bangkok alone is breaking world records with its facilities. One of its 17 five-star hotels, the Oriental, is acclaimed by Institutional Investor as the finest in the world; one of its more than 11,000 restaurants is registered in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest in the world; and one of its 63 discos is among the world’s three biggest. Here, in fact, is a travel agent’s dream: first-class services at Third World prices, exoticism crossed with elegance. With the Thai baht tied to the declining dollar, Thailand has come to mean the “Land of the Free” in more ways than one. Yet at the same time, the sinuous grace of the land is matched by its bilingual efficiency (a visitor at Bangkok’s spanking new airport can go from touchdown to taxi in roughly 15 minutes).

Nor is Thailand afflicted with many of the tensions that have brought down paradisal Asian escapes like Sri Lanka and the Philippines. On the map, the kingdom is ringed by countries that sound ominous: the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic and the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma. Yet the land itself, for all its cyclone-cycle coups, is a pocket of relative calm and one of Washington’s surest friends: the more the government changes, the more the monarchy stays the same.

Suddenly, then, Thailand has been thrown into the spotlight like a freshly discovered starlet. Thai restaurants have become the trendy’s choice from Kansas City to Tokyo, and the newly crowned Miss Universe is a Thai (though a resident of what Thais call their 74th province, California). SPORTS ILLUSTRATED posed this year’s splashy swimsuit issue on Thailand’s beaches, and a new Orient Express is scheduled to start its luxury runs from Bangkok to Singapore in less than two years. As fast as Thailand has come to Hollywood (there are scores of Thai restaurants on Melrose Avenue alone), Hollywood has come to Thailand (shooting across the political spectrum, from The Killing Fields to Rambo III). So giddy is the world’s romance with the smiling kingdom, in fact, that some people fear the country could lose itself in the lights, or turn into a synthetic version of itself.

Thailand’s dance of the seven veils begins in Bangkok. The capital is a crowded, polluted, traffic-choked mess of some 7 million people. It is also a lyrical place where it seems almost natural to spend a morning in a walled compound full of temples, an afternoon shopping for sapphires, silks and lacquerware in an air-conditioned arcade, an evening dining in spicy splendor along the Chao Phya River, and a night on Patpong, the most freewheeling bar strip in the world. Pleasure becomes business in a city that is both sedative and stimulant. At first light you can ride along the back canals around the Temple of the Dawn, where saffron-robed monks paddle from river house to river house collecting food; in the morning you can lose yourself amid the chapels, bejeweled Buddhas and murals of the 60-acre Grand Palace, in the midst of which, atop a golden altar and dimly glowing in the dark, sits the Golden Buddha, the mysterious spiritual heart of the city. Everywhere Bangkok glitters with lavish monuments to its faith: the Marble Palace, the Golden Mount and the Golden Buddha, made of 5.5 tons of solid gold.

For shopping, the eastern “City of Angels” has already begun to eclipse Hong Kong and Singapore as the bargain basement of the East, its low prices beaten even lower in a minuet of smiles and shrugs and bartered murmurings of “Mai pen rai,” or “Never mind.” Temptations are ubiquitous. Stalls line the main streets of the city from morning to midnight, hawking $10 “Rolexes,” 80 cents pirated cassettes, silk ties and suitcases and noodles; river markets assemble impromptu on the canals at dawn; and 40 shiny department stores sell everything from computerized horoscopes to tiger cubs. In Bangkok, moreover, high standards and high prices part company: 100 business cards, laser-printed on the spot, go for $6; 300-year-old Buddhas can be bought for $200.

For dinner, one could sample a different Bangkok restaurant every night for 30 years and still not exhaust the city’s repertoire. Nor are these mere holes-in-the-wall. Many are landscaped garden restaurants with pavilions strung with lights and lotus ponds at their center. Dinner at such a palace will cost perhaps $8 a person. As for postprandial appetites, they are taken care of in a night world as treacherously bewitching as any on earth — one winking neon blur of bars and discos and imperial, four-story massage parlors.

Those who shun such metropolitan diversions tend to escape to Chiangmai, the cool northern town in the hills with something of the impenetrable allure of old China. Here one imagines the ghosts of opium warlords in the nearby Golden Triangle, or catches the sense of Viet Nam as one floats along the Mekong. Other, less adventurous souls simply sink into one of Thailand’s seaside dreams: Pattaya, the “sea, sand and sin” city just 90 minutes from Bangkok; or Phuket, a Tahitian strip of bungalows along the emerald-green Andaman Sea that is home to Club Med and a host of other beach resorts; or, for the bargain-seeking pleasure lover, the Crusoe simplicity of Ko Phangan, an island free of electricity, where beachside huts go for as little as $1 a day. Travel from one idyll to the next is a tropical breeze: long-distance buses come with hostess service and in-ride movies, while even more expensive trains will whisk passengers across the country for less than $10.

Thus Thailand is becoming an interlocking network of imported dreams. Men from the gulf have turned parts of Bangkok into a pirated version of a hookah- and-hooker Arabian Nights fantasy; Japanese visitors fill the golf courses, serene in the knowledge that a week of putting, together with planes and hotels, will cost less than seven days on a course at home. And many Westerners trek into the hills around Chiangmai to live for a few days with the local tribes, sleeping in huts and savoring , if only from a distance, the village opium den.

Inevitably, some people fear that all this profit cannot come without a loss. The paradox of beauty is that it will not be left alone; it begs, almost, to be compromised, homogenized, packaged or roughed up. And Thailand has certainly been industrious in marketing its smiles. By now, 77 companies offer hill-tribe treks in Chiangmai alone, and Pattaya, a quiet fishing village just two decades ago, is a bloated red-light area studded with 256 hotels. Indeed, the metaphor of selling out is given flesh by the embarrassing statistics of Thailand’s sex trade: perhaps 250,000 women in Bangkok alone respond to the siren call of a business that goes hand-in-hand with tourism. And the get-rich-quick promise that tourists embody has also led to shadier enterprises: Thailand is already famous for its pickpockets, smugglers and heroin dealers.

Yet still there is a sense of self-possession, and even stealth, about the kingdom that suggests it will not easily fall hostage to the people it attracts. For perhaps the most alluring attribute of Thailand is its simple ambiguity, the merest hint that its designs are always subtler than any visitor’s perception of them. The Thais like to remind foreigners that theirs is the only Asian country never to have been colonized or occupied by a Western power, and even if this reflects nothing but the culture’s gift for co-opting foreign influences, it also suggests its facility for remaining just outside the foreigner’s reach. Thailand’s charms are so real that it is hard to tell the extent to which they are being exploited; and Thailand’s magic is so supple that its source remains a secret known only to itself — and, perhaps, the gods who dreamed it up.