The Guardian [25th June 2005]

On the edge of Bangkok’s seedy Arab quarter, which squats between the stations of Nana and Ploenchit on the Skytrain, some magnificent steel and glass palaces have sprung up in recent years. Most are five star hotels, but Bumrungrad merely looks like one. With a Starbucks, an Au Bon Pain, a MacDonald’s and a food hall in the foyer, free Internet access, top quality accommodation in private rooms, this complex does not fit the stereotype of a Third World hospital; indeed, it far exceeds what most of us are used to in the First World – but then that is the idea.
The business plan is simple and brilliant: provide world class medical services to Westerners and other wealthy foreigners at a fraction of the cost they would pay in their own countries. Americans in particular are attracted by the proposal to have the heart by-pass operation or the laser eye surgery or the chemotherapy – or merely the annual executive check-up for over fifties – in an exotic Southeast Asian location with the option of convalescing on a nearby tropical beach afterwards at, roughly, twenty percent of the costs stateside (airfare included). The drugs and the medical care are of equal standard to anything in the West and the service is – well, charming and efficient as only Thais know how. Not surprising, therefore, that Bumrungrad has come to symbolise both the achievements and aspirations of latter day Bangkok.

A still younger and more telling symbol is the Skytrain itself, known generally as the BTS: Bangkok Transit System. No wonder the hospital is a short stroll away, for all serious service and retail industries cluster, if they can, around this vital artery, to the extent that the centre of today’s Bangkok could be defined as twenty miles long and a half mile wide: it follows the gigantic elevated platform as it twists and turns through the city. Had your eyesight fixed in twenty minutes at Bumrungrad’s Eye Laser Refraction Center and feel like taking a tour? Step on the BTS at Nana (you will be about fifty feet above the famous red-light district of the same name; deaf mutes sell T-shirts from the stalls below).
If you take the On Nut direction you will see the city opening out into some fine new residential districts very popular with Brits and Japanese (you may also change to cut across town on the state-of-the-art underground metro at Asok). At On Nut itself you can enter a magnificent Tesco Lotus from the station without descending to the street (if you prefer Carrefour there is a massive branch just over the road).
But perhaps you are after authentic brand names at a discount (Hong Kong Chinese and Japanese shop here exactly for that reason: the same goods at less than seventy percent of the price at home). Take the train to Central Chitlom, also accessed directly from the Skytrain (you need spend only minutes out of the air conditioning), where the merchandisers have catered to Western tastes in clothes, computers, kitchen appliances and interior design. If it is sartorial excellence you need, all the noblest fashion houses of Tokyo, Milan, Paris, London and New York are represented either at Gaysorn or across the road at Zen which boasts an ice-skating rink on the eighth floor.

The Skytrain will even take you all the way to Mo Chit where the 8000 stalls of Chatuchak weekend market spread out in a medina-like labyrinth. Chatuchak (abbreviated to “JJ’s” by those who know it well: it used to be spelled “Jatujak” in English) has changed its spots in recent years. Once an Asian flea market, it has been infiltrated recently by local talent trained in New York and London and the elite academies of Bangkok; even the humble orchid vendors have learned to cultivate exotic varieties not much seen in Thailand until recently (the magnificent blooms, often cunningly supported by hidden wires, have a reputation for dying young without issue, however).
Enough for one day? If you are still on your feet, there are any number of shops and buildings accessible from the frenetic and hip Siam junction, including a Marks & Spencer and the amazing MBK building: not so much a department store, more a multi-story facade for a vertical shanty town of retail booths which sell anything from computer parts to SIM cards, to clothes, to travel gear, to gold chains, to Thai fast food.
Most likely, though, you are here to cram as much fun as possible into your precious annual vacation. No doubt you will be off to the islands and beaches in a day or so (much of Phuket is still being rebuilt after the tsunami, but Ko Pangan, Ko Tao, Ko Samui and the almost unspoiled Ko Chang were not affected and remain as welcoming as ever), so how to celebrate the first days of freedom from the humdrum?

If you have a few evenings to spend in Bangkok, the possibilities are pretty much unlimited, from go-go bars to the very respectable Bangkok Opera where the vastly talented S.P. Somtow stages both European classics and brand new Thai productions, to the gorgeous transvestite cabarets. Those who love the frenetic bar-disco-DJ model will feel instantly at home at clubs which live up to their names: Sin (JBL sound systems, European DJ’s mixing up hip hop, R& B & funky house); Narcissus (very kitsch); Lucifer; Hard Rock; Q Bar (modeled on a New York lounge club); Bacchus (hyper cool wine bar: it could be in Kensington or Hampstead).
If, on the other hand, your tastes are more traditional and you would like to avoid the restaurants of the big hotels, some very fine cuisine of every nationality is on offer. For up market Thai in exquisite setting you cannot do better than Baan Kanita on Soi 23 Sukhumvit; also on Soi 23 is Giusto’s where owner Fabio Colautti flies in white truffles in season and boasts an extensive cellar including some excellent Sicilian reds; Le Banyan on Soi 8 is owned and run by two Frenchmen who have perfectly replicated the pressed duck of the world-famous Tour d’Argent in Paris. Or perhaps you are curious about Bangkok’s young wealthy elite (called HiSo in both Thai and English) and would like to rub shoulders with a few at Bed Supperclub on Soi 11, where you may lounge on a bed to snack on sesame tuna tartar on avocado salsa with soy mustard sauce, or dine at table to avoid spilling the wildly popular crab cake with smoked salmon and roast bell pepper broth: like the menu, the service is suave in both English and Thai.

Try not to miss an evening drink at the open-air bar at the Dome on the sixty-fourth floor of State Tower: the view rivals that from the Peak in Hong Kong.
Those who have not kept up with Southeast Asia’s permanent cultural revolution may be a tad surprised by this new, trendy and frenetic face of Bangkok. Perhaps you visited five or more years ago and remember the cooked food stalls at every curbside, the saphron-robed monks, the women from the floating market in their sampans, the appalling traffic jams, the girls in black tank tops who called out from makeshift bars in disused parking lots: what happened? Well, actually, nothing. They are all still here.
Most of what I have described is not so much a city as an archipelago of elevated islands joined by a high-tech causeway. One must descend to earth to experience the rest: pollution and gridlock, temple bells and hawkers’ horns, a haunting dirge sung by a blind minstrel through a speaker on a strap around his neck while a monk with a rolled umbrella passes by, aromas of green curry, lemon grass and ripe durian: as the locals sometimes joke, there are three seasons: hot, very hot and very very hot. While we have been viewing the city from above, under the Skytrain vendors have been selling every kind of local cuisine, designer rip-offs, cut & sew services on street-corner machines, fortune telling by Tarot or palm, lottery tickets and, of course, sex.

So do Bumrungrad and the Skytrain represent an incomplete makeover or a profound change of direction? Economists and fund managers would dearly like to know the answer to that question, but in Asia the either/or mindset (good/evil; with-us-or-against-us) is usually seen as a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition. To a Buddhist, contradictions only exist in a mind which has been forced to cultivate them.

For example, many young Thai women dye their hair every colour under the sun, sport tattoos and may even pierce their bodies in private places with silver jewellery; but, watch more closely and you will see them dutifully raising palms to their foreheads when they pass one of the Buddha shrines which appear every hundred yards or so throughout the city; get to know them and you will find that they belong to a traditional extended family, are extremely obedient to their parents and very conservative in many of their views (even the bar girls usually hold to a Buddhist code which they partially suspend during working hours).

Can such a wildly disparate society possess any sense of direction? Does history provide a guide to the future?
It was India, not the West, which first brought both international trade and prostitution to Thailand, as well as Buddhism. The Thais took what they wanted from those Buddhist and Hindu traders and gave it their own earthy, superstitious and good-natured twist. Similarly, successive Thai kings managed – through subtlety, concessions and cunning – to resist the land-grabbing gambits of the British and French during the colonial period, whilst taking those bits of the new age that suited them (like India, they loved the railway but rejected the muscular Christianity).

Now there is every sign that capitalist democracy is being processed here in the same way. Indeed, some of the most agile Thais are already preparing to move on. Many are paying for their children to learn Mandarin rather than English as a second language and modern Chinese culture is starting to spread as its commercial influence increases (there were three quarters of a million Chinese tourists in Thailand last year, out of six million foreign tourists in total).
If you reach deep down into the Thai psyche you will find a reference to the time when ancestors from the North, fleeing Han marauders, arrived at Siam’s stupendously fertile plains and found contentment: nye nam mi pla, nye na mi kow: fish in the river, rice in the field: it is a formula for plenty which every child learns. Many developments in Thai history can be seen as stratagems to maintain or retrieve that level of contentment. Railways from the British, high tech hospitals and sky trains from international consortiums, night clubs from New York, tattoos from Japan, truffles from Italy, a new kind of tourism from China: so what? The formula may vary from epoch to epoch, the sense of well-being itself is what counts. As they say in these parts: sabai sanuk: feel good, have fun.