Miss Manners

Benjamin Franklin said "Fish and houseguests stink after three days." The Thai Tourism Authority says that the average tourist spends just three days on Phuket. You figure out if there's a connection.

Visit the swimming pool of any hotel and sit next to the inevitable bimbo who's removed her bathing suit top to tan her glands. Listen to the staff as they pass by, you'll here two phrases repeated over and over: nakriat and mai suphap. "Ugly" and "Impolite". Listen to the younger male staff and you'll learn how to say "I wouldn't touch 'em with a ten foot pole."

And foreign men come to Phuket with the idea that any woman here is for sale, and they go around playing grab-ass with somtam vendors and souvenir sellers and bank tellers, generally making themselves as welcome as four-day-old carp.

The ways we annoy our hosts are legion, but so are the ways in which they offend us. There once was a fashion for wearing the American flag in Asia, on everything from T-shirts to hats to pants. They even used to put it on motorcycle seat covers. Sit down on the Thai flag and see what happens, but try explaining why they shouldn't sit on your flag, and you'll be met by honestly uncomprehending smiles and stares.

The most common complaint among residents and tourists is that farang are constantly taken for suckers by the local population. WE have to pay twice as much as THEY do to visit the Gecko Training Camp or Bamboo Waterpipe Factory. Every time we leave our house somebody tries to get us to invest in a shrimp farm or rubies from Burma or a few hours of quality time in a cheap hotel room. An honest Thai lawyer, government official or bar girl is, if you can believe the letters to the editor in this and other papers, as rare a commodity as a Thai driver who knows how to use his turn signals.

But the truth is that the sneakiest, slimiest, most low-down dirty rotten scoundrels in the Kingdom are all farang, and their victims are farang as well. Phuket seems too be a giant scum magnet, drawing riffraff from every continent, most of them here because their rap is so lame that back in the real world any three-year-old can see right through them. But here in Adventureland there's a never ending supply of starry-eyed neophytes running around, clutching huge wads of hard currency and all googly over the first sex they've had in years.

These dopes read an ad for cheap condos on the back of a magazine and decide that Thailand is one of Asia's new Little Tigers, and they're going to grab a handful of tail and go along for the ride. While they are still scared of any of the natives, except the ones swinging naked from a chrome pole over the bar, they are willing to invest their life's savings in an octopus farm because some white guy they never met before says that octopus is a delicacy in Japan. He takes their money and disappears, The Gravy Train turns into the Death Railway and they go home on an economy class ticket to bad-mouth Thailand for the rest of their lives.

And having ten pages of Type O visas in your passport doesn't make any of us immune from being taken by a fellow round-eye. Horatio answered a newspaper ad for construction foremen to build a new marina in Hong Kong. Horatio has been resident on Phuket for six years, working the oil boats, twelve weeks at sea and six on shore per shift. He was overjoyed at the prospect of getting off the boats, and made an appointment by phone to meet a man in the lobby of a medium-range Bangkok hotel.

The interviewer turned out to be a fellow Brit, and after an hour's discussion the chap told Horatio he had the job. To celebrate he invited Horatio to tour Patpong with him. The last thing Horatio remembers is eating a hamburger that his new boss bought for him; he woke up thirty-six hours later face down on his hotel room floor with a splitting headache and soiled knickers. Gone were his passport, air ticket, wedding ring, eleven thousand baht in cash, all the liquor from the honour bar and a copy of Sawasdee Magazine.

His countryman had done a job on Horatio that any bar girl could have done without bothering to place an ad. The fax and phone numbers on the guy's business card turned out to be in the hotel where Horatio met him, and in a bit of whimsy, the mailing address was the Temple of The Dawn. Horatio borrowed money to get back to Phuket, and his wife never believed his story.

And it's not only strangers who pose a threat. Two friends invest in a fishing boat and for one season do well taking Texas oil men out after the billfish, then suddenly the business sinks beneath the waves, the boat is repossessed, and the two friends go around the island for the next five years calling each other crooks. So-and-so has a successful restaurant, packed with bus tours even in low season, but every third guy you meet says so-and-so owes him money and pleads poverty to avoid the debt. Betsy comes with Jake on a yacht out of Catalina, Jake meets a girl from Buri Ram and while Betsy is ashore shopping one day Jake and the boat disappear, never to be seen again. Betsy's stranded on the dock with the clothes on her back, about two hundred baht and a plastic shopping bag full of melting ice cream.

The best, and perhaps only defence against being taken advantage of on Phuket is poverty. Mel lives in a small house on a small inheritance, and asking him for money is like asking Bob Marley if you can borrow his comb. He buys his cigarettes one at a time, and has no fear of thieves be they named Bruce or Banjong. Still, even Mel is careful here, because birds of a feather may flock together, but turkeys were made to be eaten.

© Steve Rosse. All rights reserved by the author.