How Not To Get Murdered In Thailand

Copyright

How Not To Get Murdered In Thailand. 2014 All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in any form, in whole or in part, without written permission from the author.²

Introduction

 When people purchase guide books for places where they intend to vacation, most seek out 101 rundowns of the most interesting things to see and do in that place.³ In fact, books on where to stay and what to experience whilst on holiday are seen by many as just as essential as toothbrushes and boarding passes. Indeed, having traveled extensively, and usually on a shoestring budget, I personally hadn't gone anywhere until a recent visit to Egypt, without a battered Lonely Planet guide in hand. 

 However, when it comes to Thailand, one doesn't just find book stores and e-book stores stocked full of rundowns of the country's most spectacular beaches and scenic hotspots. Rather, survival guides for dealing with ladyboys and wildcard go go girls often sell just as well as more conventional travelogues. Thailand, after all, isn't just a holiday destination. Rather, while cities like Ayutthaya and Sukhothai might resonate with as much historic and cultural vibrancy as Tangier and Cairo, Thailand dared in the twentieth century to marry that ambiance with the very best and worst of twenty-first century modernity.  

 The result? A sweltering capital city of cool, biosphere-like shopping malls, and towering Asiatic sky scrapers; yet, one with no real cultural center. Instead, Bangkok is to many people most famous for places like the Nana Entertainment Plaza, arguably the world's largest stand-alone sex complex. Likewise, although officials have in recent years attempted to sell the coastal city of Pattaya as a wholesome family vacation hotspot, it only takes ten seconds spent in the middle of Soi 6 to realize why most westerners really make their way there.

 Thailand, in effect, is just as much a Las Vegas halfway house of bawdy debauchery, as it is a world class travel destination. A humid nexus of East meets West, where Soi Cowboy enchanted westerners set down every day in order to unbuckle belts and cheer over cheap beer.

 Seldom discussed, however, is the increasingly out- of-control dark side of Thailand: one which bears witness each year to increasing numbers of tourists and expats being drugged, robbed, assaulted and even murdered. In fact, in July 2014, police on the popular Thai holiday island of Phuket published a list of 47 foreign nationals who had perished on Phuket since the beginning of January.

 This book will therefore attempt to expose not often talked about dangers associated with travelling in Thailand, ranging from hundreds of tourists every year being gunned down, robbed and poisoned, to much less sensational scooter crashes.

 As a note, however, due to recent events in Thailand, chapters 3 and 4 will deal specifically with practical, one-size-fits-all advice for first time travelers to the country, in regard to the present coup, protest, and visa situation.

Why We Travel

 Boarding a plane to Bangkok in April 2009 and leaving the rough unease of Glasgow was, when I think about it now, supposed to mark the start of a new era in my life.⁴

 Goodbye, I was going to say to airplane trails perpetually blanketing the sky over the Clyde. Adieu, I was going to to say to the homeless alcoholic outside Queen Street Central train station, midway through his Gizezabreak-Big-Man! twice-daily routine. And, yeah, it's been great, hasn't it? I was going to lie to Chloe and Liz at work, as they would no doubt take it upon themselves to issue me with a leaving card, signed by everyone. I wasn't, after all, just planning a holiday. Rather, I'd spent ten years in what I'd been told throughout my childhood was 'the real world'. A place of work, but also unlimited potential. And yet all that I'd come to realize in ten years playing by the rules was that the real world is far from as advertised. 

 In reality, life in any urban center anywhere is like being stuck on a treadmill, stuck on an uphill run setting. The real world has teeth and an insatiable appetite for tax, rent, student loan repayments, and a thousand other essentials such as food and subway tickets which always seem to leave everyone penniless just before the next pay day. 

 Like thousands of Europeans, North Americans, and twenty somethings from Down Under, I'd therefore decided to drop everything for a while in order to go travelling. I can either stay here and start getting depressed, or I can go somewhere else and start feeling better about myself, I'd simply thought to myself one day.

 This being the case, six months in South East Asia, would, I hoped, be just enough time to recalibrate my inner compass. Not to mention, of course, do all kind of self-exploratory hippie things: full moon parties, elephant treks, and iconic Wat visits Indeed, charmed by books and films like Alex Garland's The Beach, I imagined places like Thailand as matchless paradises, where I could lose myself scootering down empty roads bordered by golden Wat-studded mountainsides, before flirting with pretty French girls in neon-lit beach bars.

 In fact, planning to base myself predominantly in Thailand, I for all intents and purposes expected to arrive back in bonnie Scotland fresh, reinvigorated and quite possibly even markedly enlightened. What I didn't expect was to come home fretting about whether or not some of the people I had met and traveled with would actually make it out of the country still breathing.

 Indeed, I learned very quickly after arriving that many of the rose-tinted expectations that I had had about the country had been incredibly naïve. And that underneath the paradisical veneer of tropical beeches and jungle punctuated with ancient temples, Thailand is actually a very dark and belligerent country. Moreover, although the person I left the Thai Kingdom fretting about in 2009 did in the end make it out of the country relatively unscathed, I have since come to discover that hundreds of other people every year aren't so fortunate.

 In July 2013, 51-year-old American tourist Bobby Ray Carter was stabbed to death outside a karaoke bar in Krabi, due simply to him having refused to stop singing. The following August, U.S. business man Nick Springer was drugged and abducted from his home in Chonburi, in order to have his 'soul cleansed' after he attempted to have his ex-girlfriend's name removed from documents detailing her as a majority share holder of his then business. Then, in December, South London tourist Stephen Ashton was killed during 2013 New Year celebrations in Haad Rin when he was caught in the crossfire of a gun fight between local gangs.

 Of course, many people argue that bad things happen everywhere. However, the above deaths, druggings and abductions are but the tip of a macabre, and in many cases quite gruesome iceberg.

 Indeed, each month, tourists from around the world are drugged, robbed and murdered in Thailand, and although the fact is rarely publicized, the country overall is host to almost ten times more murders involving firearms each year than Mexico. Moreover, with Thai police regularly pegging inordinate amounts of obvious murders as suicides, many tourists' 'accidents happen everywhere' dismissal of just how dangerous Thailand really is, stems just as much from a conspiracy of silence in regard to the matter as it does most such tourists' naïvety.

 That said, when it comes to the crunch, many travelers to Thailand don't actually want to surrender that naïvety. Backpackers armed with the delusion that they are traveling for personal growth (and not just future bragging rights) want 99 budget travel tips, single guy's guides to Bangkok, and rough-guide reassurances of the cheapest and cheerfullest places to bed down in Ko Pha Ngan. Similarly, less budget-conscious travelers want spa and restaurant guides to accompany them on excursions about the country, not 'it could never happen to me' inventories of other travelers' misfortunes. 

 However, it is precisely many people's holiday-brochure first impressions of the Thai Kingdom which leave thousands of foreigners every year open to being robbed, extorted, assaulted and, more commonly than many might presume, murdered in the first place.

  Of course, no one can argue against Thailand's spectacular natural beauty, and the kaleidoscopic surreality of its markets, bazaars and lambent night life. Nor, for that matter, the lure that is the country's perceived affordability.

 However, hundreds of tourists really do lose their lives in Thailand each year, principally through foul play. And the fact that this subject isn't more openly discussed only facilitates the continuation of this trend.

 The following chapters will therefore attempt to furnish people with a preliminary appreciation of such incidents' regularity. Moreover, this book will investigate the reasons behind why such incidents rarely make national or international newspaper headlines. More importantly, however, this book will offer practical, tried and tested guidance, on how to avoid falling victim to such incidents in the first place.

 Travel, after all, has long been known to broaden the mind. But it comes to something else entirely when travel can also significantly shorten one's life expectancy.

Arriving In And Exploring Bangkok

  When I first met Bangkok, neither I or the city itself really knew what to make of each other.⁵   You live here? the taxi driver, with whom I had negotiated what I thought was a reasonable fare, asked as we pulled away from the gleaming futuristic geometry of Suvarnabhumi International. Obviously he wasn't used to picking up newly-arrived internationals equipped only with a small rucksack. 

 No, I answered, noticing his grin widen as he offered his hand and welcomed me formally to Thailand. That this grin was more sharkishly delivered than sincere didn't really bother me though. I'd arrived late and wasn't going to argue; even if, as I'd read about, I was about to be fleeced in toll-road charges. Instead, I watched as the knot and twist of what seemed like a hundred elevated motorway sections finally morphed into a single freeway illuminated by bill boards and road signs, and initially the city impressed me.

 Unlike Glasgow or even London late at night, even the outskirts of this six-hundred-square-mile metropolis were a hive of traffic and commerce. Further, when the freeway that we were driving down wasn't bordered by another one, factories, refineries and manufacturing plants could be seen silhouetted against the smog and glow of a sea of street lights. Awed by such industries' scope, and impressed further by the fact that such could be accomplished in such suffocating humidity, I subsequently felt a stab of shame and pity for the majority of my chilly compatriots.

 In Britain, after all, the culmination of industry in the twenty-first century is our 24/7 supermarket culture. Moreover, whilst places like Britain outsource heavy industry and manufacturing, and are resultantly burdened with the cost of having to pay benefit checks to intellectually zombified out-of-work hoodlums, who spill out of places like Springburn each evening, Asia isn't just rising. Rather, it's burgeoning with development and enterprise.

 As however, the freeway finally caught up with the towering turn and overlap of Bangkok's monorail, we left glimpses of Asia's economic powerhouse in the making, and started to sneak down, instead, into Bangkok's downtown districts. In doing so, scattered stand-alone office buildings quickly became a claustrophobic squash of streets, and the headlight-lit arterial turnpike we were on quickly became a neon-embanked asphalt river: one teeming with pink, blue, and green and yellow taxis. Then, as we emerged into and started a half orbit around Bangkok's Indochina War Monument, I started to feel queasy with unease. Bangkok, if you like, was starting to appear too big for me.

 Turning back and circling for a second time around the Indochina War Memorial, the idea then started to flash through my mind that the nondescript guest house which I had booked might not actually be discoverable. I had, after all, booked it purposely because it was a significant distance away from Bangkok's infamous backpacker hub of Khao San Road.

 Khao San? the driver of my cab then asked, affirming my fears. As advised in an online forum, I had, however, printed a copy of my guest house reservation, complete with a Thai copy of the place's address. For a second time then, I passed this over, and pointed to the bob and swim of Thai lettering at the side of the page, just in case it hadn't actually been noticed earlier. Thankfully this seemed to immediately remedy the situation, and my cab driver bloomed into another one of his Cheshire Cat grins. This time though, I detected a sparkle of relief in the chance passing of his eyes, rather than any sharkism or insincerity.  

 Just a few minutes later, then, we were skirting one of Bangkok's highest buildings, ducking under the curve of more concrete monorail sections, and wrestling for a way forward