Gay Boy Thailand

Somewhere in the cobra swamp

I went with Farang S to the Foreign Correspondent Club of Thailand yesterday. It is a club for journalists and other nosey people. The topic was the new airport in Bangkok and what is wrong with it.

People went up to the microphone and said things like “I am John Smith of the BBC and I have a question….”.

I introduced myself as Silom Farang of Gay Boy Thailand, the blog.

Just kidding. Nobody asked me what I did there. Farang S is not a journalist either. The club is open for anyone.

Two speakers sat on stage. The first was an engineer who was a member of the board for the new airport. The other guy was the journalist from the Bangkok Post who broke the news about the cracks in the runway a bit too early. Thaksin was still in power and didn’t want to hear anything negative about Thailand’s new national pride. The journalist was fired.

So what about the cracks? The worst case scenario, said the engineer chap, was that they had to dig up the runways and redo them. That would take three years. The best case scenario was that a bit of patching here and there on the surface would be enough. A middle scenario was that they have to inject expensive chemicals into the foundation for the runways.

Why is the airport cracking up? They don’t know yet. One suspect is the sand filling that is used under the concrete. The sand had to be a particular and expensive type to drain the water correctly. If someone cheated by using ordinary sand the airport is screwed.

We can look forward to the airport saga to entertain us for months and years to come.