Welcome to Thighlandia, LannaWorld and Splatkran

30 April 2001

When the Thai economy hits trouble, the government turns to tourism. It happened in the last crisis in the early 1980s. With agriculture slumping and industry moribund, the economic planners seized on services. They sent 200,000 Thai workers off to the Middle East, and doubled tourist arrivals in 5 years.

As the prime minister said a few days ago, tourism is quick, cheap, and easy. The ingredients are already there. Sun, sea, sand, smiles, culture. Some of these spare resources haven’t even been sold yet. With better marketing, the returns will jump. Twenty billion baht more from Chiang Mai. Ten more from Phuket. And another twenty from everywhere else. All by this time next year.

Amid this enthusiasm, it’s difficult to detect words like "control" or "consequences".

The consequences are not a matter of theory or prediction. The evidence is there for anyone who wants to look. Thailand’s main tourist product is the beach resort, with sea, sun, sand and the other S-word which the tourist planners seem so reluctant to talk about. The development cycle is clear from the experience of 40 years.

Stage 1. Start with a place of outstanding beauty which attracts people because it is drop-dead gorgeous. Impose absolutely no controls. Allow get-rich-quick entrepreneurs to encroach on the beach, blow up the rocks, scatter garbage, and pour concrete everywhere.

Stage 2. The resort is now popular but rapidly losing its natural charm. Add large quantities of sex and comfort. Build large luxurious hotels. Import lots of girls.

Stage 3. By now the natural beauty is totally obliterated. The seafront is an essay in bad architecture. The hinterland is a shanty town of beer bars. Develop the remains as a male fantasy theme park. Add anything with testosterone appeal — big motorbikes, shooting ranges, go-kart tracks, boxing rings, archery. Bring in more and more girls (and boys, and children). There you have it: Thighlandia. Then stack it high and sell it cheap.

You can travel round Thailand and see this development cycle in action. Pattaya is long into stage 3. It is very, very hard to imagine that 30 years ago Pattaya was a series of pretty bays of astounding beauty. Phuket is hovering on the borderline between stage 2 and stage 3. The island has become a building site. Patong is spreading like a stain. The hills behind the beaches are being systematically concreted over with hotels and apartments. The interior is filling up with all the testosterone stuff — shooting ranges, go-kart tracks, big bikes.

Hua Hin is on the edge between stage 1 and stage 2. The architectural assault on the beauty of the beachfront is complete. Over the last year, Patong-isation has started, and the old fishing village is filling up with girls, bars and the trappings of Thighlandia.

Thailand’s second tourist product is the hill town offering a mixture of mountain scenery, old culture, and exotic peoples. This also has its own development cycle. The first visitors are attracted by nature and adventure. They climb the hills, paddle the rivers, visit the hill peoples, experience the temples. They generate little revenue, but they create a reputation. At stage 2, people arrive who want to experience the place, but also want to buy some of it and take it home. A temple carving. A hilltribe necklace. A video of the elephant ride.

As the numbers of visitors increase, the original appeal of nature and adventure is swamped. The temples are buried by high-rise hotels. The treks are too crowded to offer any fantasy of adventure. What’s left is selling things to take home. At stage 3, the place is transformed into an exotic theme park with a huge specialty store. The hill peoples and other "natural" attractions are arranged like a zoo. The "traditional native products" are manufactured on industrial principles, and sold through an ever-spreading flea market. Then add some of the bits of Thighlandia for good measure. Welcome to LannaWorld.

Thailand’s third tourist product is the festival. Mostly these have been marketed domestically. But in the last few years, the tourist authority has started turning these into export products.

Originally Songkran was a subtle mix of two festivals found all over Asia. The first is an intimate rite of blessing by pouring water. The second is the world-turned-upside-down. For one day only, the hierarchy is upended, and social constraints are removed. Both these festivals have cultural meaning and social purpose. The rite of blessing brings people together. The day-of-misrule is an opportunity to release tensions and adjust hierarchies.

Songkran today has become a water fight. It’s exhilarating and great fun. But in essence it’s a blown-up version of a paintball battle, a real world experience of a videogame splatfest. The underlying principle (as with battle simulations and arcade wars) is the exercise of violence (bang, bang), relieved of all its nasty consequences (blood and death). The rite of blessing has disappeared. The drama of misrule has been lost. Welcome to Splatkran.

The current enthusiasm for tourism is more than Thaksin’s dream of a quick fix in a bad year, a ya ba pill for the economy. Last year, the World Bank produced a report on Thailand’s economic prospects after the crisis. Shorn of all the formal language, the report said: everything else is hopeless, turn Thailand into a theme park. Recently the tourist authority announced its ambition to raise tourist arrivals to 20 million people in this decade. Over the last 20 years, the number has risen from 1 million to 9.6 million. The proposal now is to double that in a handful of years. That means another Pattaya, another Phuket, another Patong, another battered "Rose of the North", another Splatkran.

Realistically, this has gone too far to stop. But since the consequences are so easy to see, some controls might seem sensible. Or else TAT might have to change its current domestic slogan, from "Go, or you won’t know", to "Go, or it won’t be there".