Business as usual in Phuket as sex tourists return

January 28, 2005

Patong - It is midnight at Patong Beach and the tourists - almost all men - are out in force. They spill out from bars on Bangla Road, a stretch of pubs, girlie bars, strip shows and flirting Thai women.

Just over three weeks after the tsunami, tourism is starting to pick up in Patong, the so-called cash register of Phuket.

But on the beach and in the bars it is a particular type of holidaymaker who have decided not to cancel their trips and instead support the Thai economy, so reliant on tourism. They are not families and rarely couples, but single men.

This is partly to do with sex tourism, which accounts for 5 per cent of Thailand's gross domestic product. As usual, plenty of older male foreigners are to be seen hand-in-hand with Thai women. The strip bars are reporting little downturn in trade since the tsunami. Even the transvestite cabaret and gay bars are business-as-usual.

"Yes, we are just as busy as before the tsunami," said Toto, a drag queen.

Other men who either stayed or did not cancel their holidays in Phuket, where hotel occupancy rates have plummeted from 100 per cent to less than 20 per cent, are not here for the sex tourism but have visited Thailand many times and know people here.

Amel Alispahic, 28, of Cronulla, arrived a week after the tsunami. Having once visited Thailand nine times in a year - he works for Qantas - cancelling did not cross his mind.

"I'm not like the other tourists who see disaster and want to get out of the country," he said, as the music of AC/DC thundered outside the Kangaroo Bar.

"A Thai person told me, 'We don't want you Australians to leave. If you go we have nothing to live for'. They respect us more for not running away, not having fear."

An Australian hotel owner, who only wanted to be known as Sid, said bookings had started to pick up again, and his hotel was now half full.

"Before Christmas there were more families than single blokes, now you see a lot of single blokes floating around and the families are gone. But it is the families that normally stay in the hotels on the beach, and they are the ones that have been hit."

Down the road, propped on a bar stool, Thomas Ferguson, 35, from Scotland, said he too was a regular in Thailand. He was due in Patong on December 28 but stayed in Bangkok after the tsunami and then went to Koh Samui, an island off the unaffected Gulf of Thailand coast. But the nightlife there, he said, was "rubbish".

"I'll be honest with you," he shouted over the music. "It's the cheap drinking and the good nightlife that I like here."

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