The generals who seized power in Thailand disrupted one of the country’s most lucrative industries — the go-go bars that were forced to close early because of a curfew.
Now the junta has lifted the curfew, giving a green light for Bangkok’s red-light districts and other evening activities to roar back to life. For the first time in a month, Saturday night freedom returned to the Thai capital.
“This is a party city, that’s why we’re here,” said Dan Moore, a 40-year-old visitor from England who had arrived Saturday morning and planned to stay up all night to celebrate a friend’s bachelor party. He had flown in, just like the 1980s pop song says, for “One Night in Bangkok.”
Moore’s group started the night on one of the capital’s most infamous red-light streets, Soi Cowboy, where they toasted the curfew being lifted.
“As for what happens the rest of the night? Who knows. This is Bangkok,” said the groom-to-be, another Englishman, who asked to be identified just by his first name, Darren, to save his future marriage.
Bars featuring pole dancers are by no stretch the only nightlife in Bangkok, but they are the most notorious. The lifting of the curfew on Friday was part of a more general campaign by the junta to “return happiness to the people” of this politically polarized country.
When the army staged the May 22 coup, saying it acted to end increasingly violent political turmoil, the generals’ first order of business was to impose the curfew. Initially set at 10 p.m., it gradually was eased to midnight, and already had been lifted in several of Thailand’s popular resort areas after complaints from the tourism industry.Then the generals withdrew the curfew all over the country.
Bangkok’s backpacker haven, Khao San Road, was packed Saturday night with many soccer fans saying they planned to celebrate the end of the curfew by pulling an all-nighter. One of them was English tourist Marc Ward, 31, who said: “We are so lucky the curfew’s been lifted,” nursing a 3-liter beer tower as he watched the passing parade on Khao San Road, a street lined with music-blaring bars, tattoo parlors and cheap guesthouses.
Critics, however, point out that the return of Bangkok’s nightlife — and the generals’ feel-good happiness project — is being carried out alongside an entirely different campaign. The junta has banned political protests and any criticism of the coup.
