One of the first things you see when you arrive in Bangkok is a poster. "Thailand", it reads at the top, and underneath are four boxes showing weather forecast symbols and dates. 1997 shows a thunderstorm, 1998 heavy rain. By 1999, sun is peeping through the cloud. And the box for 2000 shows the beaming sun usually stuck over Malaga on a weather map. In big capitals along the bottom it reads simply: "INVEST NOW!"
You barely notice the poster at first, too distracted by the exotic chaos of the city, the monks and the tuk-tuks and the temples and the smells you at first assume are the drains, and later realise are in fact the food. But by the time you leave, the poster has come to read more like the country's national mission statement. Travel agents and travellers love to coo about the mystical holiness of Thailand, but Thailand is actually much more interested in money, and will do almost anything to make it. And if Westerners were honest about it, that is precisely why they come here.
For those of us who don't fully grasp global economic complexities, Bangkok is like an idiot's guide to the tiger economies. From a hotel balcony high above the city, it looks like a gleaming first-world forest of hi-tech skyscrapers, emblazoned in neon with the names of multinationals. Down at street level, the shiny hauteur gives way to an anarchy of dust and rubbish and food stalls and stinking slums - but the slums aren't sultry ponds of lifelessness, they're frenzies of industry. It is a bewilderment of enterprise - clothing sweat shops crammed in next to computer shops, then a jewellery emporium next door to a store selling safes - and the traffic is a judder of gridlock and mayhem, steered by drivers in face masks, cheeks smudged with oily pollution.
Bangkok lies along a river, and from 6am this takes on the appearance of the M25. The water churns with boats ferrying the city to work, and office girls in short skirts, old women with groceries, young monks and startled tourists all leap as the vessels come careering on and off the landings, navigated by nothing more than a man on the bow whistling instructions to a driver who can't see a thing. There is a glorious and universal disregard for order - it is as if there are no rules as long as you're making money, and as if the entire city is on speed.
Which isn't too far from the truth. Amphetamines are abundant in Thailand, as is political corruption; the latest scandal to emerge during our stay were photographs of the prime minister with one of the country's leading dealers in speed pills. If a spirit of enterprising lawlessness accounted for Thailand's manic growth before the tiger crash of 1997, it is making a more orderly recovery difficult, and the city is tangled in poverty and confusions of desires. You can't move for temples or monks, and devotion to the King is extravagantly traditional - but after a rush of first-world wealth, Bangkok's profit impulse is so strong you can almost taste it in the air. And to judge from the tipsy grins that spread across the tourists' faces as they pile off the planes, it rather looks as if they have.
"You've just got to be hard," the woman in the hotel foyer informed us through pinched lips. She'd arrived from Yorkshire with her husband that morning, and straight off they'd gone shopping. She showed off her fake Prada handbags with grim satisfaction, while her husband talked us through the details of their haggling strategy like an angler reliving how he landed a shark. They'd not slept yet, but they'd been straight to the market; other activities on their itinerary were to get suits hand made by one of Bangkok's million tailors, and to bag some cheap jewellery. They'd dropped by the King's Palace ("very interesting") but not stayed long; they'd like to have seen some temples, of course, but time was short, what with all the shopping to be done.
They had also found time to have a look at Patpong, Bangkok's red light district, home of the internationally renowned ping-pong shows. If there is one thing even cheaper in Bangkok than a tailor-made suit, it's sex, and the streets around Patpong are clogged with tour buses depositing middle-aged tourists curious to go and see go-go girls eject ping-pong balls from their vaginas. It is an odd phenomenon. Thais may be in a state of some confusion about their morality, and their dual enthusiasms for Buddhism and vice may be puzzling. But Thais have nothing on the Western tourists who'd turn the telly over if EastEnders got too steamy back home, but who flock cheerfully to Patpong for a cocktail and a Kodak moment.
To the north of Patpong and the grand tourist hotels lies the Khao San Road, where the backpackers of South East Asia congregate, and their numbers have swelled to such an extent now that the Khao San Road itself has become a kind of sightseeing attraction for tourists. What was a cheap and cheerful dusty strip of budget hotels has ballooned into a rowdy clamour of shops and bars servicing the backpacker economy. So there are rucksack stores and sarong trolleys and a thousand internet cafés and travel agents and women braiding hair, and the travellers heading out of Thailand casually flaunt their tans and their confidence at the nervier, whiter new arrivals, who can soon be spotted anxiously buying up the traveller uniform of sarongs and sandals.
They come from all over the world, and the conversations in the cafés are all about how cheaply they're hoping they can live when they get south to the islands. Travellers like to consider themselves a different breed to tourists, but they are alike in at least one respect. The new backpack arrivals can't contain their excitement either, at the thought of how little money they're going to have to spend.
And the Thais, of course, can't contain their excitement at how much money they're going to get out of all these Westerners. Until relatively recently, visitors to Thailand tended to be sex tourists or travellers, but the collapse of the Baht has encouraged everyone else in between to make their way here, and the impact of mass tourism on parts of the country has been sudden and dramatic.
Less than a decade ago, the island of Koh Samui was a backpacker's private idyll of empty white sands and simple beach huts, undeveloped and largely unheard of in an average branch of Thomas Cook. If Bangkok was a mildly suggestive byword for vice, Koh Samui was the very opposite, but backpackers in beach huts are notoriously unextravagant, and it hasn't taken the island very long to refashion itself into a more lucrative commodity. If couples from Yorkshire will suspend their normal behaviour and pay money to see a ping-pong show, it can't have been hard for Koh Samui to work out what Western men would pay for a fortnight of tropical sexual favours.
"Hello, welcome! Where you from! Come, come!" is the fetching shriek that follows every tourist who makes his way through Koh Samui's main resort, Chaweng. The strip that runs parallel to the coconut-lined beach is a concrete and neon row of bars, each one fronted by a collection of beautiful, nubile, glamourous young Thai women, all executing a convincing performance of uncontrollable romantic desire. "Come, come!" they beckon prettily, staying just the right side of insistence, thus ensuring that the effect is girlishly charming rather than sluttish. And come the men do, with faces full of wolfish delight at the joy of this amazing arrangement which lets them make believe that they are sexually appealing.
The system is straightforward enough. Every bar and club in Chaweng, with a tiny handful of exceptions, employs "bar girls". If you call them prostitutes, everyone looks shocked and slightly offended. It is their job to entice customers to the bar, and the bar will pay them a small cut of the price of every drink the customer buys. The girls swoon charmingly over the men, who can grope and fondle them, sit them on their lap, and bore them to tears with conversation; wisely, the girls have come up with an inventive deterrent to the latter by playing endless games of Kerplunk with them instead.
The men enjoy the happy fantasy that these women are not prostitutes at all. That said, of course, if any of the men would like to take a girl off and have sex with her, all he must do is pay the bar about £4, and take her away. He then agrees a price with the girl for sex - but a more popular arrangement is not a one-off transaction but instead the beginning of what the men laughably refer to as a "relationship". For the duration of his holiday, the girl becomes his "girlfriend".
And so Chaweng is a resort town full of largely fat and unattractive European men driving around on mopeds with beautiful young women on the back. They are not doing anything sordid, they will tell you, like paying a poor, third-world prostitute to have sex with them. They are having a relationship! They buy lots of things for their girlfriend, of course, and generously give her money "for her family", but it has nothing to do with money. And the men strut about, beaming like little boys at Christmas, effortlessly able to enjoy the delusion, and having the time of their lives.
There are a lot of men in Koh Samui. An astonishing number, actually, and the ones too embarrassed to enter into the "girlfriend" pretence during the day generally find themselves able to suspend disbelief by 3am, after 14 pints, so the clubs are full of alluring freelance girls dancing hopefully. Their stamina is prodigious, and their smile never fades, although many of them are assisted by small pills which the Thais call Yabba, a kind of nuclear amphetamine which, if smoked in silver foil, will keep you going forever.
There are other things to do on Koh Samui besides pay women for sex. There is elephant trekking, and diving, and there are waterfalls to visit, and temples to see, and all the bars show European football on TV, and the restaurants screen movies you can watch while you eat. If you didn't manage enough shopping in Bangkok, you can buy more fake designer watches and bags and clothes, and you can haggle to your heart's desire, bellowing and waving your arms about over a matter of 10 or 20 pence, and the Thais will accommodate all these activities smilingly. You can get so drunk you drive your moped smack into an old woman's kebab stall, and she will smile gracefully and wave it away as nothing as she inspects the damage. And you can do all of this at a cost so small, it makes you feel like a king.
What you cannot do, of course, is ever know that a smile on Koh Samui is real. The smiles on the faces of the Western men mauling bar girls are real enough - but even if you never grope a bar girl, never invest in a "girlfriend", never crash your moped into an old woman, never scream at a shopkeeper over 20 pence, you would have to be supremely thoughtless or arrogant to assume that the Thai smiling at you is smiling because he or she likes you and not your traveller's cheques.
People come to Thailand because it makes them feel rich - and, just like rich people, most of them behave badly. But, also like rich people, they can never trust the motives of others' friendliness. This doesn't appear to bother too many Westerners here, it must be said. But if you don't care to feel like a whore's client for a fortnight, you might come to find it bothers you a lot.
The practicals
British Airways (0345 222111), Qantas (0345 747767) and THAI (020 74999113) fly direct to Bangkok from London. Expect to pay around £500 for a direct flight. Cheaper flights mat be available through a consolidator, such as Trailfinders (020 79383366), Quest Worldwide(020 8547 3322) or Bridge the World (020 79110900). There are 14 flights a day from Bangkok to Koh Samui with Bangkok Airways - buy tickets from teh airport on 00 66 425029 for around £50. More info from www.tourismthailand.org
