Big Drug Bust in Chiang Rai Thailand

"Soldiers in the northern border province of Chiang Rai have seized 500,000 methamphetamine pills and two kilogrammes of crystal meth, also known as "ice"." The street value was estimated at 150 million baht - that's about $5... sorry, $5 million.

OK, not earth-shattering news but the bust took place in the border town of Mae Sai, which made me smile as smuggling seems to be the town's main industry.

I was there a couple of years ago to do one of many tedious visa renewal trips. The no-man's-land buffering Thailand and Myanmar was a sleepy run-down place, unlike the one in Aranyaprathet which has spawned a whole casino industry.

Most borders seem to have a so-called Friendship Bridge which, ironically, serves to remind one of hostilities rather than comradeship. In Mae Sai the rather plain bridge spanned what can best be described as a canal and, rather like Venice, this narrow strip of water was flanked by buildings maybe 3 or 4 storeys high. As I ambled across I could see guys lobbing cardboard boxes across the canal. As there was a perfectly good bridge to cart them across I naturally assumed the said boxes were not going to make it into the trade statistics of either country.

One Myanmar border policeman looked on in disdain. Some things do not need translating and this guy looked dumbfounded at the sheer stupidity and hugely annoyed that it meant him doing some work. It was hot. Nobody wants to work when it's hot - apart from smugglers.

So, the idea of slinging a few kilos of speed across a lazy slither of water isn't that unlikely. Whatever happened to the nearby Golden Triangle?

When it rains, it pours

To paraphrase the opening line of Apocalypse Now, "Aran... Shit!" It's that time again when I have to dip my toe outside of Thailand just to set foot inside yet again. A pointless exercise that, perversely, earns far more money for Cambodia than Thailand. But that's not my problem - my problem is steeling myself from the coming assault. I can cope with the children carrying parasols. "Free?!" I beam a smile "Free, OK!" They don't understand much English but they know that 'free' means an empty outstretched hand. It works.

The visa touts are more persistent but in a world of scams and lies just keep walking and lie. "I have a visa from one of your scamming friends, thank you." Is far too complex a sentence but makes me feel better. "Cambodia visa stamp. Quick. No long waiting! This way!" I keep on walking... smile and lie and walk. The visa to get into Cambodia officially costs US$20 - the actual price being whatever they can take off people - but the actual border stamps are free. The scam is to tell foreigners that they can just sit in no-man's-land for a few minutes and all will be done... for a fee. Except that walking the extra 100 metres reveals that there is rarely a queue for foreign visas. However, looks like some of the guys manning the Cambodian side must be feeling they live at the arse end of the border food chain so have started charging for the stamps. A mate of mine reported this back to me after his recent adventure.

Being in no-man's-land is always one big joke. It must be one of the largest bits of lawless land in the world, crammed with casinos and peddlers of alcohol and cigarettes. You could, of course, get one of the visa touts to get you some smokes as you wait idly for your visa stamps, except that they charge you double the going rate, which is about 10 Baht for a packet, that's under 30 cents. Even if you don't smoke, worth buying some to sell to your friends in Thailand. The actual packaging is an illusion designed to charge you more for popular international brands such as Marlboro, but once unwrapped the actual cigarettes are all the same.

The Cambodia visa scam seems to have moved up a gear. I figure the border guards are probably making more than I do, which is pretty impressive for a third world country. However, once into Cambodia the air is a touch more peaceful - the busy border market is on the Thai side as that's where the money is. I was offered a trip to the famous Angkor Temple and a young Vietnamese girl, so figured there must be just two types of tourists here. I can't believe a Vietnamese girl is going to be working in a Cambodian border town - Thailand or Singapore, yes, but here!?

I got my free stamp on the way out so was waiting to see what would happen on the way back in. Things were not looking good. A group of Asian tourists were shouting at the Cambodian guard who was safely shielded from the barrage behind his glass counter. It was hot, I could be standing here for ages before the UN sorts this out. They speak a bit of English: Vietnamese tourists doing the Southeast Asian trail. The guards want money for a splash of ink that by the sound of it should be free. "Ask them for a receipt!" I say helpfully. It worked - I jumped the queue as they were getting processed en masse. The UN wasn't needed and I got an appreciative round of bowing. "Enjoy Thailand."

Half my day's work was done and I drove off with my Thai friend. The horizon, however, looked bleak. As the sky turned to lead the rains descended. The windscreen wipers were overwhelmed by the waterfall so was safer to pull over and grab a late lunch. The rainy season has now started in earnest. Unsurprisingly, this coincides with the monsoon in India, as Thailand gets the trailing edge of India's weather patterns. It's at times like these that I feel justified in my dislike of the ubiquitous pick-up truck. The open back-side has some advantages over an estate or van for stacking boxes of beer or cramming Thai workers, but during the rains everything, and everybody, gets drenched. I need to pick up some furniture and try to calculate if better to abandon the project today and postpone it till tomorrow morning. My friend is adamant that this will pass and we'll get it all done by night-fall. The rain is deafening as it hammers onto the tin roofs.

The rain eventually eases a notch just below torrential so this is obviously a cue to resume our drive. The rains signal the end of some cycles and the start of others. Many fields of cassava had recently been dug up and lying fallow, waiting for a fresh crop to be planted once the rainy season comes to an end. In contrast, I saw many workers planting rice in the paddy fields. Much of the land around this area is without an irrigation system so the rains are crucial to avoid even more paddy fields being turned over to less risky products. The occasional break in the cloud cover shone bright beams of sunlight to reveal a lush emerald landscape below a petroleum sky.

The lack of irrigation is coupled with a general lack of drainage so that water-logging and mudslides are not unusual. The landscape here is fairly flat so there aren't the same serious problems as in the mountainous north, but sliding the car into a paddy field is not on our itinerary so we take a detour through the dirt-tracks rather than the slick and slippery tarmac roads. We see a cow standing in the middle of the road like a sentinel. Cows and buffaloes are not an unusual sight but a solitary beast parked there seemed slightly surreal. Driving slowly past it so as not to startle the creature (as it can do serious damage to a car) we noticed one hind leg was raised up off the ground, most probably nursing a broken bone. Cows are expensive and seems unlikely the owner would just abandon it but in its statuesque grace it showed no intention of moving so was probably safe to leave it where it stood, waiting for the butcher to arrive.

Our work completed and back in town I needed some food and a drink and headed for my local bar. People don't go out much when it rains. As scooters are the main mode of transport around town, arriving drenched from the rain and steaming from the heat is not the way to start a night out. However, Thais are a sociable lot and any break in the rain is a cue to drive around and check out who's hanging out where. But just as night follows day, so a power cut inevitably follows a rainstorm. A city plunged into darkness is an eerie sight, illuminated only by the searching beams of cars and motorbikes and the flickering of hundreds of candles quickly lit to ward off the darkness. A bar immersed in a candle glow may seem a romantic setting but without music or TV there is just the sound of subdued human voices, as if telling stories of import round a camp fire.

The glow of my mobile phone could illuminate the short path home, so long as the battery didn't drain away. But why hurry, there's always another beer and the light will come back soon... probably.

ASEAN Meeting Abandoned as State of Emergency Declared in Pattaya

I was going to avoid talking about politics here but, frankly, it is difficult not to in a country so politically unstable. Today, 11 April, the ASEAN summit being held in Pattaya has been abandoned as demonstrators broke through security barriers and stormed the Royal Cliff Beach Resort Hotel.

To help the bemused onlookers Thai protests are conveniently colour-coded. In this case the red-shirts support the Democratic Alliance Against Democracy (DAAD). Their gripe is that the government formed after the last democratic elections has had power taken away from them through undemocratic means and a policy of social unrest by the yellow-shirts. However, in this clash the yellow-shirts were nowhere to be seen but instead we had blue-shirts defending the hotel. Perhaps their yellow shirts were at the laundry and they switched colours.

You can follow the original story at Thai Visa Forum, as well as commentaries from some well-informed people (as well as some uninformed bias, but that's par for a forum). One thing that strikes me is how poor security was at the Hotel, which is outside the city centre and has plenty of open land around it to set up a decent barrier. This assumes the security services had time to do so as the summit was originally scheduled to take place in bangkok. Was this an exercise in security-stripping the summit? Who were the blue-shirts? This was not unexpected, as the red-shirts had successfully blocked central Bangkok just the day before.

Here in the village Bangkok, and Pattaya, seem a long way away. Most people here supported Thaksin and see these last few years as a way for the military and oligarchy to regain power by unfair and foul means. Another election is likely to yield a similar result and hence a return to demonstrations and riots. Ultimately this is a clash between town and country. But ultimately there will be no solution until the political forces accept democratic results, otherwise what's the point in having elections?

I Want to Be White

One strange thing in Thailand is that everybody wants to be white. Thais are generally a proud people and wouldn't want to be anything other than Thai – except perhaps for being a white Thai!

Adverts are filled with whitening creams and lotions, whitening soaps, a variety of talcum powders, UV blockers and so on. It is often difficult to find facial or body products without some whitening agent. The Thais in the adverts are also chosen to have the fairest possible skin, with no doubt some digital enhancement to make them even paler. So where does this come from?

I've asked a number of Thais as to why they are so obsessed with being white: nobody really knows! They just know it looks cool, it looks sexy, it's what they all want to look like. Now, this is great for white expatriates as it dawns on them that Thais love fair skin, however ugly they might be in their own country. But it would be a grave mistake to then assume that Thais want to be white because they want to be white westerners! But as this trait seems to have been so thoroughly enculturated that nobody can give a conscious reason why they do it, one has to look a bit deeper.

One theory is that this is all about class. The situation was identical in England a century ago. Being pale was a sign of being wealthy. There was no need to go out in the sun when you could bark orders to your peasants or be busy making money in a bank or stock exchange, or even be running the Empire from a cosy desk. In contrast, anybody who worked outside, whether as an agricultural labourer or builder or market trader, was bound to become darker skinned as a consequence of being out in the sun. Sure, sunshine may be a rare sight in the UK but cloud cover doesn't stop all that UV coming through.

But suddenly, in the 1960s that whole class distinction flipped completely around. As agricultural work diminished the new drones were office workers, and they were more likely to be irradiated by fluorescent lighting than sunshine. A suntan became the new status symbol, showing one was wealthy enough to lie around in the sun of Monte Carlo or Bora Bora. This is still the case today. In the past I tried to buy presents to take back to Thailand during my visits to London only to be struck by the fact that one can't buy whitening creams in the UK. Yes, they do exist in specialist cosmetics shops for Asians but not in general stores. Looks like the same company will produce identical products for different parts of the world and in some of them add whitening agents and in others tanning agents!

So, back to Thailand! Most people here are slightly tanned in colour. It is pretty easy to tell the difference between the natural skin colour of, say, an office worker, compared to the much darker hue of a farmer. It is also easy to see how much whitening has been applied in a desperate attempt to become even whiter. So is it all a class thing like Victorian England? Possibly.

However, whilst casually reading some old Thai poetry – as one does – I came across a scene in which a Thai princess was applying whitening powder to make herself more beautiful. Being a princess she also had some ludicrously expensive powder mixed with real gold so that she would be both fair and glowing! Now, this goes back some 300 years and hence I suspect has nothing to do with trying to be a white westerner. But a quick look at a map of this region of the world would show that there just aren't any fair-skinned races nearby... apart from in China.

Historians have shown that the peoples in this part of Indo-China migrated here from deeper inside the Chinese mainland. Although Thailand does not share a border with China, it is only a very thin stretch of Myanmar that separates the two countries. Indeed, the northern city of Chiang Mai is closer to this Chinese border than it is to Bangkok! Trade between Thailand and China goes back many centuries and many wealthy families here have Chinese-Thai roots.

So, perhaps the Thai obsession with being white is just a class thing, or perhaps it is an unconscious desire to emulate the Chinese, or even both rolled into one. Whatever the true origins of this, Thais will continue to buy skin whitening products in the hope that they too will become the fairest of princesses.

Missing Breasts

I'm a breast man myself. Thighs are good too but hard to compete with a succulent breast. However, I've often experienced that breasts go missing!

We have chickens and turkeys and every so often this daily source of fresh eggs becomes the source of our main meal. They're pretty quick on their feet once they smell death and it takes some skill to catch, gut and fillet a whole chicken. Thais throw nothing away and consider offal to be a delicacy. Our dogs and cats can also sense death and loiter around expectantly, usually to be disappointed with just a few bones at the end of the meal.

Well, a whole chicken is usually enough for a coconut curry and a big pot of spicy aromatic soup. As the Thais gnaw the flesh off some bone or chew on a particularly tasty bit of liver I'm left wondering: what happened to the breasts?

I chanced upon the solution to this on one particular evening. I was feeling hungry and the children often eat before the adults – so I joined the kids. Thais take pride in being able to swallow blisteringly hot food and chuckle at the inferiority of foreigners who can't handle their chillies. However, this isn't due to some genetic mutation but is purely cultural. On the whole, children too don't like overly spicy food (and love the Italian food I make, but that's another story) and are slowly weaned onto it. So there I am, sitting around with the children, a big pot of steaming rice, some sweet chilli dipping sauce (it really is hard to get away from the chillies!) and a plate of soft white breasts. They give it to the kids!

How sweet, I thought. Except that, to the adults, breasts are just tasteless white flesh and they'd much rather tuck into the wilder flavours of internal organs. Perhaps I should eat with the kids more often!