To Hell and Back

Well, it certainly felt that way when I renewed my driving licence last week.

Because it was just a simple licence renewal, I made the schoolboy error of assuming I had everything, and that this would be straightforward, and off I went with my missus to the licence department out by The Regent School in fairly high spirits.

On arrival, they told me I needed a residence letter from immigration in Jomtien. I said ”look, here’s my one year visa, surely that’s enough”.  No. It’s never enough when someone else can get some Baht out of you.

So we had to come all the way back to Jomtien immigration, where I sat for a while, slowly collapsing under the crushing weight of real life.

I admired some of the efficiencies in the immigration office, such as the incredibly patient assistants and volunteers, who have to deal with – I’m sorry to say – some incredibly stupid foreigners, some with extremely bad attitudes.

After a half hour wait, and just before I got up and switched the TV off for them so they could work better, undisturbed by the rubbish blaring from it, I was dealt with, and told to come back the next day for the paper I needed.

So, the next day, back to the immigration I went, got my paper, no problem, and off I went to the licence centre again, where, after a long hot wait, I had to sit a colour blind test and a pedal reactions test that I still don’t quite understand.

We then spent an hour reading the Thai equivalent of the Highway Code, which was a useful refresher of road signs for me.

Unfortunately the other 5 people with me were not native English speakers and they spent the hour fanning themselves or stifling their yawns with it, or using it to hide them sending covert SMS messages.

Meanwhile the people in the greatest need of a refresher of road signs, road dangers and etiquette, the Thais, were all sitting watching a dopey dumbed-down soap opera style informational video.

And then, finally, we were finished.

But not before some old foreigner idiot had sidled up to various officials and given them 20 baht notes as tips, which I thought was misguided, embarrassing and inappropriate. No wonder so many Thais have such a poor impression of foreigners.

And then, the only bright spot in 2 days of being trapped in Administrative Hell, I discovered the new licence is valid for TEN years, not five, as I had expected, so I don’t have to go through that again for a decade, assuming I haven’t been deported or killed by then.

Posh Pattaya

  Following my comments about “5 Star Pattaya” in my last column, I thought I would go and look at the few genuinely posh areas in the city.

Apart from the one pre-eminently upscale district in Pattaya – the Royal Cliff/Sheraton area of Pratumnak Hill, it seems to me that there is only one other major new high end tourist area, developing along Pattaya Beach Road from Central Mall to the Dusit, which contains Central Mall and the Hilton, the Holiday Inn, Amari, Northshore and many boutique high quality hotels, bars and restaurants including Mantara, wj\hich are all firmly established in that area, gradually clustering towards the Dusit.

In Central Mall the city now has a first rate Bangkok style, international standard shopping mall for high enders to unload their wallets in should they ever actually arrive in Pattaya. 

Some expats and tourists worry that Pattaya will build over its sleazy heartland, but there is too much palm grease and too many kickbacks at stake to allow the city to become entirely a 5 star resort, and this is the main reason why Walking Street and other bar areas will never be completely eradicated by high end developments.

There simply isn’t enough money in that for those who feed on the beer bars, the go go bars and discos, and I suspect a sudden adherence to planning legislation and zoning would kick in if those interests were ever seriously threatened.

Mind you, as I have said in the past, Walking Street is in less danger of going upmarket than downmarket, as it turns into a lower class Khaosan Road, with increasingly poor quality street entertainment and teenage gangs of bad break dancers sprawling in the dirt and fag ends as they try to tough guy dance in the middle of the street. Or the small guy (I won’t say dwarf) who dances around like a maniac much to the bemusement of Russian 7:11 boozers and other gawkers.

But that’s for another column.

Corruption – The Root of All Evil

Widespread, tolerated, carried out on a massive scale, and at all levels, it seems corruption will never be completely eradicated from emerging economies such as Thailand’s, although I think it is one of the biggest problems underlying many of the festering political issues in the country today.

Because it is so widespread and everyone is at it, nothing much changes from administration to administration, and individuals who should be doing their jobs for the good of the country are sidetracked in the search for personal enrichment.

The results, such as the recent airport scams, make you realize how out of touch this voracious mentality is from the real world.

And it is Thailand that suffers, not just from bad publicity, or the actual theft of the public’s money, but because many Thais refuse to pay taxes, not wanting to see them appropriated by officials. That means less money is collected for the public purse, and there is less to spend on schools and health and funding developments for poorer Thais.

And it means further corruption is tolerated by those who have themselves benefited from it previously, which may account for why people are not prosecuted more for it. Only when a result is required for political reasons do cases go to conviction.

Many of the massive, well organized scams have gone uninvestigated or unpunished. Think of the recent school milk scandal, the huge longan (dried fruit) scandal of a couple of years ago, the CTX scanners at the airport, the duty free scams (and much else in that rotten place), the substandard tinned fish scandal a few months ago.

There are so many of these scams that it would be difficult to know where to start. It would be impossible to investigate them all and prosecute the wrongdoers as the court system would collapse, the jails would be bursting and the wheels of state would grind to a halt.

If ever there was a Thai political party that was serious about stamping out corruption, and prosecuting offenders, I am convinced it would do well at the polls, and Thai culture, politics and the country would be wealthier, stronger and more respected because of it.

Contact me at pattayatodaypete@yahoo.com