An American in Asia: His Quest for Cosmic Truth (or at least a Decent Espresso)

 

Is Thailand Safe?
Where are you and who have you annoyed?

Occurrences of Key Words in News Stories according to Google
	Phuket Gazette	Pattaya Mail
Gun	61	330
Pistol	32	159
Knife	31	212
Violence	17	274
Murder	96	223
Assault	12	198
*Searches were conducted by entering the search code, "keyword site:NewspaperHomepageAddress"

Depending on who you ask, Thailand is a safe and civilized place to spend a luxury-filled vacation, or it is still very much a part of the 'wild east' frontier. In reality, the Kingdom is a mixture of the two, and "location is everything" as the realtors are fond of saying.

On one hand parts of the country are certainly civilized and over the last decade, five-star hotels have been popping up like mushrooms in the major tourist destinations. Yet these very locations are still subject to all the dangers associated with the mixing of relatively affluent visitors from well-regulated, law abiding countries and the locals, who are only loosely subject to laws that are easily bent if the appropriate palms are greased.

Corruption is status quo here on all levels. The national government has led with a bad example which some of its seedier citizens cheerfully follow. Yet, some provinces are beginning to pursue an appearance of safety that is prerequisite to bringing in big tourist dollars. As in any country, the ultimate degree of danger and the possibility getting help varies depending on what neighbourhood you're in.

Outside of the capital of Bangkok, Thailand's most popular destinations are Phuket and Pattaya in that order. These two destinations serve admirably to illustrate two ends of the safety scale. While Phuket attracts more upmarket visitors and Pattaya has a reputation as an adult male fantasyland, actual international visitor numbers are nearly the same, hovering between four and five million per year, depending on how many tsunamis we've had lately.

As a sort of rough comparison, we can take a look at the local papers for each destination, the Phuket Gazette versus the Pattaya Mail. A Google search of the papers back as far as 1997 (1998 for the Gazette) reveals some telling numbers.

In the table above, we can see the violence quotient is much higher in the Pattaya paper. The words "gun" and "pistol" each appear five times more often than in the Phuket paper. The word "violence" appears seven times more, and "murder" and "assault" are 16 times more likely to show up in a search of the Mail.

A picture of a big beetle on Nicole Richie's face, totally unrelated to this story.

Now, this data may be slanted a bit by the respective editorial policies of these papers. It is probable that in upmarket Phuket the editor of the Gazette has a larger number of affluent hoteliers among his advertisers who would be less than pleased by sensationalistic accounts of tourist deaths. Meanwhile, the Pattaya paper may cater to the larger number of miscreants, boozers and a-gogo aficionados who demand a certain level of visceral detail in their morning read.

Yet even a cursory read of each paper's most recent issue strongly implies that Phuket is relatively safe while Pattaya is a den of iniquity.

As reported in last week's Phuket Gazette, an all-night funeral vigil in Phattalung province, south of Phuket, erupted in gunfire when a group of southern Thai locals took exception to another group's northern Thai accents. Six men were hit with .38 caliber bullets, with three listed as critical. The police have brilliantly narrowed the list of suspects down to "someone who was attending the funeral vigil." The case is expected to be solved sometime this side of never, since any money the victims ever had was spent on booze for the wake.

Only two other Phuket incidents were reported and neither involved tourists. A Thai newspaper publisher was assassinated by two teenagers on a motorcycle, and an angry monk beat a man with a stick, leaving him a head wound requiring 14 stitches. The incensed monk (pun intended) apparently attacked the man because he was feeding the dogs that hang around the temple, and he was tired of cleaning up the resulting mess.

Meanwhile, up in Pattaya, the Mail reported that the Thai wife of a New Zealand native hired two gunmen to knock him off in traditional Thai style: from the back of a moving motorbike. The hitman has yet to be found, but the police are trying in their own inimitable way. The paper reports that a search of his home was fruitless and, "Witnesses told officers that he had been back home after stabbing someone but had gone back into hiding just a few hours before police arrived. Police now believe that he is hiding in the Pattaya area, and believe him to be with a girlfriend." Wow. The guy is busy shooting and knifing, and he still has time for a girlfriend.

The recent Songkhran Thai New Year celebration did not always bring out the best in Pattaya people. Two local men were shot several times by a Thai woman driving a pickup. Also during the celebration, a British national took exception to being doused in the traditional Songkhran water-fight, as he was holding a baby at the time, and punched a water-pistol wielding Norwegian in the face. Police caught up with the Brit and booked him for assault-while-protecting-a-baby, apparently a punishable offense.

Pattaya police officers were themselves the object of assault when they tried to close a bar in a nationwide alcohol ban during the recent election. Enraged, and probably drunken, bargirls successfully drove off the patrol and disappeared before backup arrived.

Alert officers averted a potential crime when they stopped two men on a motorcycle and relieved them of an unlicensed .38 pistol and three bullets. A 19-year-old Thai man successfully murdered himself with the help of a rope and lastly, a man was murdered by a bolt of lightning as he rode a motorbike. Mother Nature is still at large.

While Phuket comes out as a much safer destination and Pattaya reaffirms its reputation as (in the words of Obi Wan Kenobi) a "wicked hive of scum and villainy", Pattaya's dangers have made it a logical choice to host Cobra Gold, a US-backed joint military exercise with some of its allies. Year after year the exercise takes place at a nearby military base and Pattaya is nightly flooded with servicemen out for a good time and a bit of extracurricular combat training.

In the final analysis, while both destinations have their attractions for visitors - Phuket with its beaches, islands, hotels and bars, and Pattaya with its hotels, bars, bars and bars - visitors should be alert to their surroundings. They should also be aware that, like any country, danger tends to concentrate itself in local areas while, on the whole, most places are safe for travelers with at least two sets of eyes on either side of their heads.