Postcards from Thailand

It’s been a very pleasant day. I had lunch at my favorite riverside restaurant – stir-fried chicken with cashew nuts, button mushrooms, spring onions, water chestnuts, onions, and a few dried chillis. It was a bit overcast and there was a pleasant breeze. Not too hot.

Meanwhile, in Bangkok, the army was advancing on the Red Shirt protesters.

The army seemed to exercise a lot of restraint. Only a handful of people have been killed. (Only?) No doubt the press will focus upon the Italian photographer. They always do. Every death is a tragedy.

Some of the Red Shirt leaders handed themselves in to the police just after lunch. (A few others fled.) There were impassioned speeches, and many of the rank-and-file Red Shirts said they’d fight on.

In response many of the Red Shirts went on the rampage. The Stock Exchange, department stores, a TV station are on fire. Protesters have destroyed ATMs and ‘phone booths in their rage.

From 8 p.m. there’s a curfew in Bangkok. That’ll mess up business tomorrow. (If you want to buy pig intestines to make sausages you need to be at the market around 3 or 4 a.m..)

The saddest comment (for me) was from a close friend, who sent a text: “What has happened to my country?”

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Telling the time in Thai is a little … weird. Things start quite simply. Counting the hours from 1 a.m. you have:

tii 1 (1 a.m.)
tii 2 (2 a.m.)
tii 3 (3 a.m.)
etc.

(“Tii” means “strike” or “beat” and refers to the watchmen’s marking of the hours throughout the night. In my moobaan a security guard still makes the rounds every hour through the night on a bicycle striking a bell.)

When you get to 6 a.m., things go awry:

6 mohng chaaw

then:

mohng chaw (7 a.m.)
2 mohng chaw (8 a.m.)
3 mohng chaw (9 a.m.)
etc.

So 6 comes before 2. Seriously strange.

This pattern continues up to midday:

thiang (12 p.m.)

Then the pattern changes again:

baay mohng (1 p.m.)
baay 2 mohng (2 p.m.)
baay 3 mohng (3 p.m.)

And in the late afternoon, yet another pattern (just for a couple of hours):

5 mohng yen (5 p.m.)
6 mohng yen (6 p.m.)

(“Yen” is the Thai word for “cool”, reflecting the cooling as the sun gets low in the sky.)

And then another pattern:

thum 1 (7 p.m.)

but then:

2 thum (8 p.m.)
3 thum (9 p.m.)
etc.

and finally midnight:

thiang kheun (12 a.m.)

All this time-telling complexity probably explains why a certain fugitive from justice had 26 watches, including 9 Patek Philippe, 2 Audemars Piguet, a Cartier, a Chopard, a Rolex, a Breguet, and 3 Vacheron. Total value: 10 million Baht – over £200,000 at today’s exchange rate.

Unfortunately for the criminal concerned they have all been seized by the state.

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“Last night another soldier, last night another child
No one seems to worry, no one sees his mother cry”

When I was a child I used to hammer nails into pieces of wood and tell people I was making a rifle, a nuclear bomb, whatever. What I should have told them was that I was making a bomb detector. If I had, I’d have been a very rich man by now.

The GT200 bomb detector was described by Professor Hood of Bristol University as being “a piece of plastic with a car aerial sticking out of it”. It’s been known since 2002 that the devices are useless, when they were marketed under the name “MOLE”; a double blind trial at the Sandia National Laboratories showed they were totally incapable of detecting explosives. Yet Thailand has spent more than $20 million on these devices.

Soldiers in the South have long complained that the devices didn’t work and have repeatedly failed to detect bombs, leading to widespread injury and loss of life.

The device has also caused misery for hundreds who have been imprisoned for being “insurgents” based upon the device’s readings (source: Working Group on Justice for Peace).

Following a warning from the UK government earlier this year some tests were carried out on the device in Thailand. It was absolutely conclusive that the GT200 is a con, an evil fraud.

Prime Minister Abhisit banned the purchase of further devices.

[Cartoon from The Nation newspaper]

Yet, on 18 February, the Thai Army’s Chief, General Anupong Paojinda, in defiance of all evidence and logic, said that the devices were effective and that they would continue to be used.

The same day there was an explosion in Pattani from a bomb that the GT200 failed to detect. 13 people were injured.

And today two more soldiers were injured in an explosion from another bomb the GT200 didn’t detect.

“Can you hear the mocking laughter from the ones that gain by it
They’re not in line for the bullets, they’re the ones who started it “

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Thailand isn’t usually associated with big game hunting. There aren’t wildebeest or giraffe roaming the central plains. The few remaining wild elephants, tigers and gaur are highly elusive, confined to the depths of the forest, protected in national parks. However, in Chiang Mai there is a new sport, hippo hunting. But let me begin at the beginning…

It is said that if sleeping were an Olympic sport, the Thais would win, hands down, every time. Thai people have an innate ability to sleep anywhere, any time. Oft has been the time that I’ve been white-knuckled with terror as a crazed minivan driver has been weaving in and out of traffic at high speed on the Asia Highway whilst the passenger next to me has been in the land of nod, his or her head falling on my shoulder. It’s therefore not surprising that security guards are often caught snoozing. Unfortunately, one such guard was supposed to be keeping an eye on a sick baby hippo (a one month old female) in intensive care at a zoo hospital in Chiang Mai. Whilst he was asleep the baby hippo wandered off. Footprints show she headed towards a large forest area which forms part of the zoo grounds. More than a hundred people – zoo keepers and volunteers – have been searching for her, so far to no avail. It is thought she is unlikely to survive if not retaken quickly.

Update (8 December)
After a week searching the baby hippo was found dead, less than 100 metres from the hospital.

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A couple of years ago a then Deputy Prime Minister decided to lead a raid against Pantip Plaza (a large shopping mall specialising in IT equipment and software) in the interests of suppress vice and intellectual property crimes. This is a place where sellers come up to you, grab your arm and ask “Want to buy dirty video?” If you want a pirated copy of the latest Windows software there’s no need for such an indignity, you just need to look at the comprehensive displays. The Minister’s raid was a tad unsuccessful: only a single pornographic VCD and a couple of bags of marijuana were found. Doubtless the vendors had been tipped off about the impending raid and the illegal material spirited swiftly away.

Counterfeit goods are freely available in Thailand: it’s far easier to by a dodgy copy of Microsoft Windows or Office than to buy the real thing; stalls lining Sukhumwit road openly sell fake Calvin Klein and Adidas sportswear alongside counterfeit pills designed to put a smile on a man’s face and a spring in his step; fake car parts and pharmaceuticals abound. Despite the dent in Microsoft’s profits and the risk of the sick taking worthless (or positively harmful) pills, what little has been done about the problem has been largely ineffective.

Now that America’s US Trade Representative has started rattling Thailand’s cage about intellectual property rights the government has responded with a raid on Patpong (an area famous for its sleazy nightclubs where women, in the absence of male companionship, perform strange acts with ping-pong balls) where this is a well-known for its night market stuffed to the gills with counterfeit goods. About fifty officials from the Commerce Ministry raided the stalls of the night market, seizing fake items and arresting the vendors for selling pirated goods. The vendors weren’t too happy:

[Picture from Thai Rath newspaper]

About 200 vendors threw stones and bottles and attacked the officials with wooden sticks.

The officials weren’t too happy, either, and fired their guns into the air.

Yet another nail in the coffin of the Thai tourist industry.

And we are told that such raids will be repeated every two days from now on.

***

As an aside, I just wonder if American companies are really losing out from piracy in Thailand and other developing countries? The price of genuine designer goods here is way beyond the means of the vast, vast majority of the population. The designer companies aren’t actually losing out on sales, and nobody is fooled into thinking that the fakes are genuine so the companies’ reputations aren’t harmed. In fact, the profiles of the companies are raised by the sale of counterfeits. Eventually, when people become affluent enough they will want to switch to the real deal. Until then Uncle Sam is simply shooting himself in the foot.

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