Word: thailander
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...This poor man's Thailand boasts four dazzling but desolate white-sand beaches, each sparsely dotted with shanties where locals sell water, fruit and French fries. Victory Beach is a two-minute walk from a backpacker-hotel cluster known as Weather Station Hill, where $2 rooms abound. The adventurous can hike 3 km south to Independence Beach. Sokha and Ochheuteal beaches on the south shore offer bungalows for rent and are somewhat more commercial, but not by much...
...Chez Claude's is required dining in Sihanoukville. A mixed green salad with grilled shrimp and scallops and an entrée of lemon and garlic trout cost a pricey (for Cambodia) $13, but I would have paid that just for the hilltop view of the Gulf of Thailand. Be sure to prearrange a ride back to your guesthouse if you go at night because there's little traffic on this pitch-dark stretch of highway...
...saffron loiters idly beside a Bangkok noodle stand, cradling a bowl stuffed with money. It's a dead giveaway. Real monks don't loiter when they beg. Real monks keep walking. It's part of the patimokkha?the monastic vows. But Thailand is teeming with phony monks. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fraudulent holy men roaming the country's roads and markets, bilking people out of cash, food and other donations. And that's just the beginning of Thailand's rogue monk problem. In recent years, real monks have been caught embezzling, selling and using drugs, seducing parishioners...
...battle against a rising tide of scandals engulfing the Buddhist clergy, known as the Sangha. Buddhist scholars say wayward monks make up only a tiny minority of the country's 300,000 clergymen. The damage they're doing to the faith, however, is so severe that Thailand's Supreme Patriarch, Somdech Phra Yanasangworn, appealed to the government last December for help to "save (Buddhism) from this serious crisis...
...crisis long in the making. According to Sulak Srivaraksa, a social critic and Buddhist activist, its roots lie in the rise of materialism and state control of the religion. Both began in earnest half a century ago when Thailand started fervently pursuing Western-style development. The military government employed slogans such as "work is money, money is happiness." Those messages were antithetical to Buddhism, which teaches that suffering is quelled by rejecting material desires. In its constitutional role as protector of the state religion, the government began co-opting the clergy into supporting its new consumer culture...