A Journey into Thailand’s Separatist South, Part Two: Inside the Border’s Violent Den of Sin

Journalism , Politics , Thailand , Travel , War Dec 29, 2018 No Comments

The Cityline bus from Kota Bharu takes an hour and a half to cover fifty kilometers and stops with a start fifty meters from the border. Rantau Panjang is alive with activity characteristic of border towns the world over: roadside stalls sell satay and soft drinks, trucks and vans tear about with scant regard for their cargoes, two steady streams of weary humanity flow in and out of the country on either side of the road. But compared to Thailand’s other land borders, which I have come to know well over the past couple of years, this one does strike one as different. It doesn’t take long to work out why. It’s the cognitive dissonance that comes with following signs that say “Thailand” behind a row of men in white jubahs and women in full niqab. I’ve got a feeling I’m not in Kansas anymore, and certainly not on Khao San Road.

Rantau Panjang’s sister town is Sungai Kolok, the sort of place that passes, in this part of the world, for a den of sin and iniquity. It’s where Kelantan’s pious come to shrug off their piety in well-hidden bars and dubious massage parlors. “How sweet life would be,” Lawrence Osborne writes in The Wet and the Dry, “if one could, at all costs, avoid Sungai Kolok. One could grow old and happy and hale without Sungai Kolok.” Motorcycle taxis lie in wait on the other side of immigration, their owners shark-like, grinning. But as is often the case in places such as these, where a dearth of tourists has paradoxically inculcated a laissez faire attitude towards their custom, a mere shake of the head is enough to dissuade the men, and is perhaps even welcomed as a convenient excuse to retreat into reverie and one another’s cigarettes.

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Matthew Clayfield

Matthew Clayfield is a journalist, critic and screenwriter.

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