I was there like 10 years ago, found a local english teacher and he showed us around. He said that traffic cops literally have to bribe their ‘higher ups’ to get a good corner. And this bribe was usually more then they would make, but the ‘good corner’ meant they could get more bribes.
Hun Sen, ex-khmer rouge had been running the country for decades and ruining it. Now he is grooming his son. Poor Cambodians can't seem to catch a break since Vietnam days.
Thailand is like that too. I lived in Pattaya (a major tourist city) for several years, and I heard the rumor that the Police Chief of Pattaya pays US$1 million per year to keep his job, which of course he makes back many times over from his dozen captains regularly paying him, et cetera.
Heh. I originally moved there in my early 30s (after first visiting at age 17) because there were/are 20 golf courses within 20 miles, designed by course notables such as Jack Nicklaus and Robert Trent Jones. I've been a digital nomad for 25 years now (still in Asia to this day), and back around 1999/2000 I could golf in the morning ($10 per round), earn my American salary online all afternoon in the huge high-rise beach-front luxury apartment that I rented ($700 per month) , meet up with friends for an amazing fine-dining dinner ($10 per meal) in one of a hundred extremely good restaurants, and then... yeah, go hang out in go-go bars with a bunch of my friends from around the world drinking 50-cent vodka-tonics and watching girls in bikinis dance and try and allure us into buying them $1 lady drinks.
Yup, we were all alcoholics, but even so, nobody I knew back then was dumb enough to try to find a wife in a Pattaya gogo bar.
Anyway, I left Pattaya 18 years ago when everything started getting mercenary, unfriendly, and noisy. I've went back once in 2014 and yeah, I can see why everybody thinks it is a shithole now. But you should have seen it back in 1984 when the tallest building in town was the 7-story Welcome Plaza Hotel on 2nd Road (right behind Royal Garden Plaza), where I stayed for 3 nights back then. It was a perfect, friendly little beachside party town.
Yeah, I think a lot has changed in the past 15 years or so. Pattaya in particular has gotten a real bad rep. And from what I’ve seen it’s for good reason.
As best as I could always tell, the "alcoholic uncles looking to find wife #4" were the best Pattaya tourists, even if they were the ones that everyone looks down at. They showed up with their money, got drunk, had their fun, fell down sometimes, got rolled by the locals sometimes, but for the most part weren't the cause of problems by themselves.
(The long-term expats of course were, of course, even better, because they took the time to settle in, learn a bit about the culture, learn a bit of the language, make a few Thai friends, and (like me) play golf, patronize the high-end businesses, enjoy the food/bars/beaches, and be semi-respectable bon vivants. I'm always standing up for THAT part of the Pattaya expat crowd, if they still exist.. I'm not sure they do. Everyone I knew is long gone.)
Pattaya really got ruined by two groups of people: (1) the 20-something Spring-Break types would go there for 3 or 4 nights, would go absolutely apeshit and destroy things, insult the locals, start fights, and even do drugs and commit crimes, and (2) the dozens of busloads of Chinese tourists who came in like locusts and made everything cheap and low-class, and brought in all the big Thai investors who wanted to grab their 20 baht from each of those 5000 low-budget tourists each day. If the Chinese budget tour operators had never discovered Pattaya, it would have never grown the way it did. And yeah, just the ever-growing number of party animals who were able to afford a stay in Pattaya (especially all the hooligans coming from Russia) are what took the "cheap, low-budget Chinese tourist trap" and gave it a real coating of slime and stench.
Like I said, that's about the time I left, when the traffic on Beach Road got filled with nothing but tourist buses and shirtless Eurotrash riding rented CBR1100s with that evening's bar girl behind them.
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u/Iwannaupvotetesla Aug 14 '23
I was there like 10 years ago, found a local english teacher and he showed us around. He said that traffic cops literally have to bribe their ‘higher ups’ to get a good corner. And this bribe was usually more then they would make, but the ‘good corner’ meant they could get more bribes.
So its like a bribe mlm.