Word: chiangmai
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...Thailand DEA agents and consular officials based in the northern city of Chiangmai said the U.S. should seriously consider shutting down an antidrug program. Reason: official corruption had gone so far that heroin was sometimes being transported in Thai police vehicles or even army helicopters, making the program a joke. The embassy, however, decided to live with the problem because it could see no alternative...
...Travel section, contributor Pico Iyer takes you to Thailand, the "Land of Smiles" as well as this year's hottest new tourist destination. Iyer spent several weeks exploring the Asian jewel, from the cool allure of the hill town of Chiangmai to the seaside resort of Pattaya to the thriving capital of Bangkok...
Those who shun such metropolitan diversions tend to escape to Chiangmai, the cool northern town in the hills with something of the impenetrable allure of old China. Here one imagines the ghosts of opium warlords in the nearby Golden Triangle, or catches the sense of Viet Nam as one floats along the Mekong. Other, less adventurous souls simply sink into one of Thailand's seaside dreams: Pattaya, the "sea, sand and sin" city just 90 minutes from Bangkok; or Phuket, a Tahitian strip of bungalows along the emerald-green Andaman Sea that is home to Club Med and a host...
...pirated version of a hookah- and-hooker Arabian Nights fantasy; Japanese visitors fill the golf courses, serene in the knowledge that a week of putting, together with planes and hotels, will cost less than seven days on a course at home. And many Westerners trek into the hills around Chiangmai to live for a few days with the local tribes, sleeping in huts and savoring , if only from a distance, the village opium...
...this profit cannot come without a loss. The paradox of beauty is that it will not be left alone; it begs, almost, to be compromised, homogenized, packaged or roughed up. And Thailand has certainly been industrious in marketing its smiles. By now, 77 companies offer hill-tribe treks in Chiangmai alone, and Pattaya, a quiet fishing village just two decades ago, is a bloated red-light area studded with 256 hotels. Indeed, the metaphor of selling out is given flesh by the embarrassing statistics of Thailand's sex trade: perhaps 250,000 women in Bangkok alone respond to the siren...