Having done a lot of swimming in my time I was very comfortable with my Speedo wearing ability. I was quite confident on my ability to hold my own going into our trip to Thailand. Oh, how wrong I was!
When you go on a big trip it often gets to the point where you need to take a holiday from your holiday. That is what we headed to Thailand for and that is what the Thai tourism industry is banking on. Tourism certainly is big business there: according to the yellow bible (South East Asia on a Shoestring Lonely Planet) Thailand received 13 million foreign visitors in 2006.
From my experience, all of them like wearing Speedos. In the two weeks we spent lazing on Thai beaches (Koh Tao, Koh Phi Phi and Phuket) I was inequitably found out as a tin-pot dick-togg wearing pretender incapable of smuggling a budgie with any semblance of dignity.
Maybe, the lack of coconut and baby oil on my skin contributed to my incompetence. Maybe it was that I was loath to spend entire days frying myself in the sun.
Either way I just couldn’t compete with a dizzying multitude of European men wearing skimpy, high-cut, multi-coloured slug huggers all with clapt-out bog-catcher arses.
Not to be outdone, the women get amongst the skimpfest as well. It seems Thailand is the place to get your boosies out. And age is no obstacle, in fact it seems the older, more saggy and wrinkly they are the more likely they are to have their bits out. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great. I’m just too prudish to get amongst it.
With tourism being such a massive industry many of Thailand’s beach areas are super developed and westernised but it is still a great place to unwind from the rigors of Asian travel. It also provides the ideal setting to put your sun and skimp skills to the test against some really stiff competition.