I often write about the bad sides of Thailand and sometimes when I look back at past posts I feel as though I am, at least in part, becoming one of those jaded expats that is always bitching about Thailand. At least that is how it could appear to anyone that reads my blog. So I just want to state yet again that I absolutely love living here and I take the good with the bad. All Places in the world have good sides and bad sides and I think the good very heavily outweighs the bad here in Thailand.
One thing that is always heavy on my mind though is that the Thai government seems to always be messing with visa policies in an effort to attract "the right kind of tourists" where as about a decade ago they basically had an open-door policy of stay as long as you want to and spend money here.
But this was before every little thing that happened ended up online I guess because these days there seems to be an awful lot of bad that is ending up online about both government officials abusing their positions, and also foreigners that are doing really stupid crap that might add fuel to politicians' fires about restricting entry to the Kingdom more than they already do.
The first story comes from Phuket and Karon Beach more specifically. Two yet-unidentified tourists can be seen walking down the street at 2:30 in the morning, seeing a guitar lying on a scooter, then coming back shortly thereafter to steal the guitar and ride off on their own scooter.
According to the guitar owner, he had only been parked there for about 5 minutes and returned to find the guitar gone.
Understand this folks: Thailand is NOT a high trust society. This is not Japan or Dubai where you can just leave your stuff sitting somewhere and come back later and it is all going to still be there. There is a reason why almost all houses have loads of security bars on them after all. These sorts of thefts are extremely common and it is very possible that if it had not been these two foreigners, it would have been someone else that had stolen the guitar. Based on the look and size of the guitar, it appears to be a cheap mini-guitar and that leads me to think that this could even be a case of someone intentionally leaving it there as a setup specifically so it can be stolen so that the person can get a bunch of followers on Instagram or some dumb shit like that.
Whatever the case is, the fact that it was two foreigners who are most likely drunk driving a scooter with no helmets doesn't do much for the impression of foreign visitors to this country.
There are already widespread calls to reduce the standard tourist visas from 60 days to 30 days and I don't really see how that is going to prevent wayward guitars from being stolen. It's not like after 40 days or so visitors tend to start stealing things.
The second story also comes from Phuket where two tourists on rental scooters arrived at the airport, one of them didn't even have a shirt on, and then proceeded to go park the bikes at a part of the airport where no one is allowed to park at all, get their belongings off the bikes and then just leave the bikes there.
This hit Thai social media and the gaslighting was immediate. There were calls for further restricting entry to foreigners and for security staff to be more harsh on "farang" (farang is just a colloquial term for foreigners, mostly white foreigners) as the implication here is that had these been Thai people, that the security would have been all over them but since most security doesn't speak English they are afraid to approach the farang.
I doubt that is true, based on the lack of any sort of people or vehicles around I think this was just the middle of the night.
This is a special sort of selfish asshole though either way because now the owner of these rental scooters has to come and collect them on his or her own and likely pay some sort of fine. Police have indicated that there has been zero repercussions for the two foreigners as they have already left the country.
I think it would be relatively easy to track down their names based on their flight and then blacklist them from re-entry permanently.
To me, I think that all of these sorts of things should be handled on a case-by-case basis and not make some sort of broad changes that are going to hurt everyone just because of a few jerks. Limiting visas isn't going to stop this sort of thing anyway and I believe that is a fool's idea to think that it might.