Roadside stands selling Roxy logo bootie shorts and fake Oakley sunglasses clutter the sidewalks.
Dogs meander around enjoying patches of sunlight. Tanned men and women sell fresh squeezed juice from carts.
This isn’t a weekend at Huntington Beach pier; it’s everyday in Bangkok’s Sukhimvit Road.
For a country that used to buy logo shirts off visiting servicemen to resell in outdoor stalls, Thailand’s come a long way in the knock-off department.
And with the U.S. dollar still doing better than the Thai baht (not to mention the buying power of the euro over there) picking up an Orange County name is appealing to many farangs (foreigners).
That’s not the only enticing aspect of Bangkok. With brightly painted taxis patrolling the streets and air-conditioned trains running above and below ground, the relatively compact big city is more accessible than much of traffic-clogged Southern California. Not to mention the appeal of spas on every corner offering massages and beauty treatments for prices in the tens of dollars instead of in the hundreds.
But the instant-sauna weather and the general stench of a crowded city that fancies fried entrails was enough to send me to the beach. And with more than 2,000 miles of coastline,not to mention the outlying islands,there were plenty of soft, white-sand beaches to choose from.
Few were more beautiful than those of Phi Phi islands, off the coast of Phuket. The two tropical islands are so known for location roles in the movies “Jurassic Park” and “The Beach” that my Thai-born tour guide jokingly dubbed himself Leonardo diCappuccino. While there were no dinosaurs crashing through the jungle, there were monkeys and iguanas and eels, oh my.
But perhaps the most beautiful part of Phi Phi: the people. Much of the island was wiped out by the 2004 tsunami that,as locals described it,took the buildings back out to the sea.
Many cities in Phi Phi and Phuket are still rebuilding what once was, starting with the hotels and the temples. Many families are still living in makeshift shacks fashioned of corrugated metal.
But those were the same people praying for and raising money for the victims of the Myanmar cyclone. The two countries share a border, and the residents of Thailand feel a compassionate responsibility for their neighbors. Some Thai people said it was for the simple reason that they had been through disaster before and survived, and Myanmar’s people had not. But others said it was just the way they had been taught,to take care of others before themselves.
That’s something I wish more Americans could knock off.
