Video of Thong Nai Pan Yai During Pandemic

Take a look at this video clip of a traveller walking down the beach at Thong Nai Pan Yai. It was shot in 2020, at the height of the covid-19 pandemic, when there was no vaccine available. It was the darkest hour for many in the world – stuck at home, fearing they or their loved ones would catch the disease; and, stuck at home wondering if they would be able to pay their bills. 

How this man got to Thailand we don’t know. Why he is unable to say the words ‘coronavirus’ or refer in any other but in a most oblique fashion to the deadly epidemic in Thailand and throughout the world is telling. He wants to have a good time travelling, and that is what he is doing despite the world health crisis. He seems surprised there aren’t any bungalow resorts willing to accommodate him or serve him. The pandemic has taught us to avoid such people because they will most likely give you the virus, since their personal liberty trumps everyone else’s health concerns. He calls it ‘global nonsense’.

He doesn’t deny covid exists but his attitude clearly shows he lacks human empathy. He talks of the loss of business, and the hardship for the locals caused by the lack of business. He doesn’t know much about Koh Phangan or Thailand. Tourists do not enrich the locals unless they have their own business. Wages for waiters and cleaners are so low that many of the jobs are taken by illegal Burmese immigrants! 

As he walks down the beach, he sees devastation. Candle Hut Resort is a shell of its former self. Vegetation is growing through the shower floor of one bungalow. The swimming pool is brown and full of trash. Wood is rotting, paint is peeling. The place is a deserted ghost resort. 

Dreamland Resort is closed. Flip Flop Pharmacy has the smell of cooking. Nice Beach Resort shows signs of being cared for. Here we have a clear list of those businesses owned or rented by outsiders who abandoned their businesses when the flow of tourists stopped. And a list of those whose owners are active in their businesses and have stuck around. 

The ramshackle businesses didn’t want to pay for a caretaker; or they paid for a caretaker who did nothing. All the other staff have been dismissed, no doubt without any furlough payments. It must be cheaper to repair Candlehut Resort after the disaster than to maintain it during the crisis, or there was zero contingency money available. Businesses like Candlehut Resort have been raking in money for 20 years and they can’t shut for 18 months without going to wrack and ruin. That is poor economy.

Anyway, the man liked the sand. He knows a lot about sand it appears. He is correct in identifying the sand as being fine and powdery like the sand in Haad Rin. He is wrong about nearly everything else.

 

Not Just Chicken and Rice

One of the most common and popular dishes in Thailand is chicken and rice, otherwise known as ‘khao man gai’. It is a dish that is found in Vietnam, Singapore, the Philippines and Malaysia. Each country has a slight variation on the dish. However, for the true chicken rice aficionados it has to be prepared by a Hainanese chef to be an authentic khao man gai.

Hainan is a large tropical island belonging to China in the South China Sea, on the other side of the headland to the east of the Gulf of Thailand. There has been a long history of emigration from Hainan to Thailand. Many years ago Hainanese immigrants bought their special chicken rice recipe to Thailand where it quickly became popular and eventually became regarded as a Thai dish. Today most casual foreign observers imagine that khao man gai is a traditional Thai dish, but it isn’t.

Real Hainanese chicken rice is made from Hainanese chickens, especially chickens from the Woen Sang region of the island. Traditionally older birds are used as they produce more oil and make the dish more flavoursome. A whole chicken is steeped in sub-boiling temperatures in a pork and chicken bone stock. The stock is from a master stock that is continuously reused by topping up with water. This is the Chinese preference for a master stock that is no longer easy to find (often for reasons of hygiene) in Singapore and elsewhere in Asia and South East Asia.

The oil from the chicken is essential to khao man gai, so much so that the literal translation of the Thai phrase is ‘rice, oil, chicken’. The best Thai khao man gai dishes are made by Hainanese chefs ideally. They also use free range chickens. The dish is served with a garnish of cucumber, coriander and sometimes chicken blood tofu. There is usually an accompanying bowl of chicken broth. The sauce that is poured over the dish is made from ginger, chilli, garlic, soy sauce and vinegar. In Thai the sauce is called ‘tauchu’.

Although lots of Hainanese people made their way to the Samui Archipelago, they are mostly naturalized Thais who have lost their Chinese cultural heritage over the generations. It is thus far from certain that any of the Chinese / Thai found in Thongsala can be regarded as Hainanese master chefs capable of making the finest khao man gai. However, you get a good plate of the dish at the small local restaurants in Walking Street in Thongsala as well as at Pantip Market. Typically, a dish of khao man gai in Thongsala costs 40 Thai Baht. It is cheap but delicious food. Sometimes even the cheapest dishes have a fascinating history and made by certain chefs can be considered special cuisine.

Khao Man Gai in Thong Nai Pan

The only place to buy khao man gai in TNP is from a Thai lady on a motorbike. She comes around 1pm - 1.30pm every day and does the village and the main road in Yai. It costs 50B. The main dish comes in a box and you get a small plastic bag with the chicken broth.

Are Tourist Figures Up or Down?

The simple answer is that no one really knows. All tourists staying at both hotels and private villas should be registered on arrival. Thus, the question should be easy to answer. However, the custodian of tourist figures is TAT (Tourism Authority of Thailand) and they are famous for being far from transparent. Their agenda is to promote tourism, increase revenues; not to publish accurate records.

Any Thailand watcher will have noticed that most stories in Thai Visa and elsewhere have quotes from industry figures, anecdotal comments from hotel owners, but few verifiable facts.

There are figures available on the official TAT website (https://marketingdb.tat.or.th/en/web/guest/tatwebportallink)  if you follow the link in the footer. These show arrivals to all the main international airports in Thailand. The caveat is that they only display the last 2 days compared to the same day last year. For 1st and 2nd January 2020 arrivals are actually up 3.9% on 2019. On 1st January 2020 51,901 people entered the Kingdom of Thailand at Suvarnabhumi Airport. So should hotel owners, bar owners, tour operators etc. be worried?

Well industry bigwigs such as TAT (Tourism Authority of Thailand) chief Yuthasak Suphasorn thinks so (https://thethaiger.com/hot-news/tourism/tat-chief-blames-high-baht-for-drop-in-tourists-to-thailand). On June 29th 2019 Suphasorn claimed the previous 3 months had seen a drop in tourist numbers. More recently, Thai Visa published an article (https://forum.thaivisa.com/topic/1141495-phuket-facing-worst-tourism-crisis-in-three-decades-half-of-hotel-rooms-empty-in-2020/?utm_source=newsletter-20200103-1246&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=news) claiming industry experts expect a 20% drop in tourism in Phuket in 2020. Articles such as these are designed to generate comments below the line for Thai Visa Forum and for industry Brahmins to put pressure on the government.

The comments below the line invariably pick up on the same remedies - lower the value of the Baht, change the visa system, reign in the con men and the overcharging taxi drivers and stop making new regulations to inhibit tourism such as banning vaping, enforcing licensing hours, and making life difficult for ex-pats with more burdensome requirements for reporting their whereabouts and income.

All of these things impact tourist revenues. In the past the upswing in tourists from China has off set falls in numbers of European tourists. Indian tourists are also cited as being the new cash cow. Those with just the briefest knowledge of Chinese tour groups and Indian tourists will know that the situation is not that straight forward. For a start those on tours tend to spend most of their money buying the tour in their own country and may well not add much to the local Thai communities where they visit. Moreover, bar girls and others who work in the demimonde find such tourists economically small fry.

On the ground anecdotal evidence abounds. Thong Nai Pan in Koh Phangan had periods during the high season for the summer holidays in 2019 where not a soul was to be seen, the bars empty, the dive boats left at their moorings. People complain in Phuket that hotels are virtually empty but room prices are high. The grizzled veterans of girly bars claim the night economy is not a fraction of what it once was.

Common deflection strategies include mentioning the increased competition from Vietnam as a holiday destination, the trade war between China and the USA, and the impact of Brexit. These are clever ruses to avoid dealing with the Thai Baht that is ridiculously high - getting only 30 odd Baht for one British Pound is profoundly off putting, especially as Thai businesses work on a model of increasing prices every year. And then there is the junta continually changing the rules. Visas are waived and then required. Where you can renew visas is a constant question asked. Confusion over travel insurance abounds, and what the government insurance policy actually provides. Hey you might as well go to Vietnam. Despite having a communist regime, they seem more in tune with the requirements of tourists.