WHY do you seem to love returning to Thailand?” my friend Kaycee Crisostomo of TVI asked me in a chat. He was reacting to the fact that about a month after I spent my birthday week in late September in Bangkok, there I was again spending the long weekend in Krung Thep.
It was also coincidental that I left Manila on Sept. 23 right before a big typhoon hit, and here I was departing for Bangkok just as another powerful weather disturbance was coming.
It was not difficult to respond to Kaycee. I cited five reasons: 1) it was the closest foreign “port” I felt at ease visiting (this used to be Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s but things have changed there); 2) the food is really, really good even for someone like me who avoids spicy food like a plague; 3) it’s great for shopping whatever your budget is; 4) I love the airport and the skyways and the mass public transport systems; and 5) the Japanese bookstore Kinokuniya on the third level of Siam Paragon is heaven to me and the UCC coffee shop attached to it is the next best thing to purgatory.
Number five aside, it’s really number four that is what in my book gives Thailand a five-star rating. If you take out tiny Singapore from the 10 Asean countries (since it’s a class apart) there’s no doubt that Thailand beats everyone else when it comes to the items I’ve listed in reason number 4.
‘No Filipino tourist who is observant will miss how different Thailand is from the Philippines — or greater Bangkok from Metro Manila.’
No Filipino tourist who is observant will miss how different Thailand is from the Philippines — or greater Bangkok from Metro Manila. And no Filipino tourist who is observant and honest will fail to conclude thus: “napag-iwanan na tayo.”
It wasn’t always the case.
Like Thailand, we were an agricultural country that sought in the 1950s and 1960s to bring development to the countryside. We both had insurgencies, and the military has played a crucial role in our politics — in their case it still does. We have had governments known more for their corruption than for their performance, and foreign observers have often questioned our dedication to the principles of democracy and even the free press. Of course, we’ve had far more natural calamities than they have had but for others everything is about the same. Their one clear advantage in my book is the fact that Thailand is part of the Asian land mass, making logistics less problematic, and from Europe is a much closer entry point to Asia. And is totally different, too, culture wise.
But in the late 1960s and 1970s I think it can be said that Thailand lagged behind us, as did even tiny Singapore. But counting out Singapore (which I repeat is in a class all by itself) Thailand soon was at par with the Philippines in many respects, and is now way ahead if the main airport, the skyway system and the BTS (our LRT-MRT above ground system) and MRT systems (their underground system or what we call a subway) are to be the gauge, as they are to me.
Napag-iwanan.
In 1983, when I took my first ever trip abroad (to West Germany!) as a 19-year-old “studentin-fuhrer,” as we were called by our hosts from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, we boarded a Lufthansa flight from the Manila International Airport which had tubes attached to planes, only to land at Don Muang in Bangkok where we had to go down the stairs and walk to the terminal. Was I proud that we were “better off!”
Forty years later that terminal (now NAIA 1) is part of our Manila airport complex that is congested and poorly planned, while Don Muang has been complemented by the much larger and ultra-modern Suvarnabhumi airport — which you can access from the city center by skyway or even the airport train line of the BTS system.
Where did we go wrong? Am sure we all have a thousand and one answers.
But the bottom line is there’s no more appropriate description to use than this:
Napag-iwanan.
