Thailand: rainbow instead of red shirts

Thailand: rainbow instead of red shirts
While Bangkok is sliding from one crisis to another is planning a Phuket CSD for February 2011. Is it safe to book?

Whether tsunami, bird flu, yellow or red shirts - in Thailand it is used to crises. And so it is not surprising that already in Phuket the next Gay Pride is being planned, while in Bangkok, the city is still besieged by demonstrators.

On Thailand's resort island, the next CSD on weekends around the 26th Celebrated in February 2011, said Ulf Mikaelsson, the Swedish owner of Connect Guest Houses in Patong Beach. The Phuket Gay Pride, traditionally a parade on the Patong beach promenade, various parties, including cultural and sporting events, is the official calendar of the island and attracts many tourists from all over the world.

The Phuket Gay Pride 1999 took place the first time and it is now the only major CSD in Thailand. In Pattaya, the traditional parade on World AIDS Day by the police approved not have anymore, in Bangkok, the organizers divided and in Chiang Mai, there were last year for the first time a homophobic counterdemonstration (whose organizers had calculated the so-called Red Shirts, the Prime Minister Taksin Shinawatra, are close to the fallen and for few weeks now part of Bangkok lay completely paralyzed).

On Phuket conquer an entirely different climate, makes it clear the former Cologne scene Reiner Horst Büchel. Three years ago he moved because of the "Love and the weather on the holiday island. "Here we remember nothing of the protests, but by television and by anxious calls from Germany," he says. Also homophobia he had never seen: "I miss not much here except my very close friends."

Even in the capital, the scene can hardly shake the way by the events. The most famous of Bangkok disco scene, the DJ Station on Silom Road, opened in spite of some few hundred meters from the protests every night their doors.