I received the following story in my email a few days ago. I loved it and hope you all feel the same. If you’d like to read more by this author you can take a look at his blog “Because There’s Air Conditioning In Internet Cafes” which is a diary of his travels in India and to a lesser degree Thailand.

Spare a thought for the drunk tourists.

I was shocked when my wife was rushed into hospital on Koh Samui recently.
Shocked by the state-of-the-art ambulance. Shocked to find four medics
inside it. Shocked that all this was for Delhi belly.

The hospital was equally luxurious. We’d come from a beach-hut where a rat
lived in the toilet and ate our soap. So clean bedding excited us, AC made
us tremble and the five-course meal – I nearly fainted. At least I was in
the right place. I struggled to fathom this luxury; it’s hard to
concentrate with six nurses arranging your wife. I was forced to stand on
the balcony. I watched the nurses leave. And come back. Leave. And come
back. Like waves crashing onto the shore, leaving behind some medical or
housekeeping jetsam.

The epiphany.
Going for assessment we felt like adventurers in some futuristic
space-station. Dials flashed, machines brooded, staff ignored us with quiet
efficiency. Just how had this amazing place come about? It was no surprise
that Westerners filled each bed: busted heads, broken limbs, twisted
ankles. Sorry sights, self inflicted. That’s when it hit me. A beautiful
thing was happening.

The drunks of the world had made this amazing facility.

Drunk topless yobs crashing motorbikes. Girls in bikinis falling off
tables. Hairy louts with bad tattoos waking in agony, without the faintest
clue where they were the night before. It was these people that had made
this amazing facility. The drinking classes. That much maligned part of
society. Armed only with a complete lack of self awareness, a favourable
exchange rate and a travel insurance policy. They made all of it. It
seemed the ne’er-do-wells had done well.

Trickledown effect.
And all unsung, unlike your sanctimonious colleague getting you to fund
skydives, or celebrities fundraising for starving photo-opportunities.
Drunks: quiet heroes, funding amazing hospitals. Hospitals now the
government is now using to drive growth using health tourism. And the
trickledown effect? For your average backpacker, the trickledown effect
involves bodily fluid and legs. But there’s more than that. In Koh Tao,
every third or fourth shop is a doctor’s surgery. And every surgery’s
window promotes the same best selling services:

Wound dressings
Pregnancy tests
Blood checks.

A succinct summary of the backpacker experience – get drunk, fall over, have
sex, fall over again – but also of just how much medical training and
infrastructure now exists, benefiting average Thais. Drunks have achieved
what the G20 couldn’t, what politicians discuss only because Bob Geldof is
glowering.

Is this the answer to world development? Take a poor country. Export some
drunks. Wait. Wait. Bingo! You’ve got world-class medical facilities,
we’ve exported our idiots, everyone’s a winner!

Maybe not. Getting obnoxiously drunk all the time is not cool. But, next
time you happen to be walking down the road on some Thai island and have to
step over a comatose girl in a bikini, while tonight’s conquest vomits down
his shirt, don’t tut. They’re helping make the world a better place. And
they don’t even know it.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Check out these similar posts:

• Thailand Medical Insurance
• Health Care in Thailand
• Phuket Airplane Crash’s Regretting | Flight OG269
• My Surgical Experience in Thailand
• When Will Thailand Tourism Rebound?
• TAT And American Tourism
• Gullivers Travelers Tavern | Khao San Road