In Pattaya

THERE are food blogs, and there are food disaster blogs, which document culinary experiments that turn out badly. But how about the experience of eating well while disaster rages all around you - kind of like Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burned?

This is a post that belongs in that genre.

It’s about the regional summit that I covered in Pattaya last weekend, which disintegrated in a most unceremonious fashion after the venue was stormed by red shirt opponents of the Thai government.

(In fact, wearing red T-shirts and waving clappers and banners, they looked a lot like Man U fans, except their banners screamed, “Abhisit get out”, “Thailand needs real democracy too” and “Help me please, UN”. A sport and a show of an altogether different kind.)

Several Singapore journalists and myself arrived in the little seaside town of Pattaya, two hours by car from Bangkok and essentially a hive of sun, sand and sex. (Indeed, by nightfall, there were foxy looking Thai girls everywhere and our three-star beach hotel had a number of dolled up receptionists and waitresses with surprisingly deep voices.) There were more signs in Russian than in Thai. But I digress.

Diplomatic summits of any sort, as journos who cover these things know, follow a tightly-scripted routine of dinners, meetings and press conferences, interspersed by the all-important grip-and-grin handshake shots between leaders.

At the start, this one didn’t appear to be any different, although we knew that red shirts had been staging mass demonstrations in Bangkok and had vowed to move them to Pattaya during the four-day summit involving Asian leaders and ministers from 16 countries. I thought it would be a little like all those activists at the periphery of APEC and G-20 Summits - a bit of a colourful sideshow to the main event, a couple of obligatory tussles with police thrown in.

My first day in Pattaya did not suggest anything to the contrary. The town was best described as quiet, with the odd smattering of sunburnt European and Chinese tourists. No red shirts in sight. The regional leaders had not yet arrived, only the ministers.

At the start of the day, we were bused efficiently from our hotel to the summit venue - a sprawling resort complex - 5 minutes away. The organisers had turned part of the convention centre there into a media centre, so that was where we went.

A year ago, covering the same summit in Singapore, I had a group of Chinese and Taiwanese journalists complaining bitterly to me about the food. The media centre then was just one floor of the RELC and the food section consisted of a couple of hot trays of dishes.

Arriving at the Pattaya convention centre, I could see why these journos - veterans of past Asean summits - had been so aggrieved. There was food everywhere. Outside the media centre was a lavish buffet spread of hors d’oeuvres, finger sandwiches, cakes and all manner of delicacies that appeared to be constantly replenished from morn till night.

The dining hall, serving lunch and dinner, was similarly impressive, with cooks actually frying up pad thai on huge hot plates or carving roast ducks in front of us. The best thing was the desserts. I have often felt that — barring the Japanese — the Thais are that rare Asian culture which has poured its heart and soul into creating the sweetest and  most gossamer-light of confections. (Desserts are not exactly what jump to mind when you think of Chinese, Indian, Malay or Korean food.)

My highlight of Day One: A wondrously delicate Thai dessert of coloured mung-bean threads and coconut milk called Salim.

Day Two was when some heads of state began arriving, and it was then that the trouble started. Several hundred red shirts had massed outside the entrance to the resort. They had arrived in lorries and buses from Bangkok, managed to push past security cordons, and the area outside the gate was a sea of red.

A colleague and I followed other journos in rushing up from the media centre in the basement, to the lobby of the convention centre, where we had a bird’s eye view of the action through the glass walls and doors. Hundreds of riot police in full gear and soldiers were watching and waiting, and the entrance was barricaded.

The red shirts were in a good mood, chanting and singing, and later dancing — loudspeakers blared a jaunty pop tune for them to gelek to. Nothing much else seemed to be happening so my colleague and I eventually went back down to the media centre, pausing along the way at the buffet spread to stack some tongue-tingling Thai fish cakes onto our plates.

Later we learned that the red shirts had dispersed after issuing their demands in the form of a letter to the Asean secretariat, calling for the Thai PM and several of his advisors to resign.

Day Three and the red shirts were back outside the summit gates by noon. Their demands had obviously not been met and some violent clashes with blue shirt supporters of the Thai government elsewhere in Pattaya that morning had evidently upped the ante.

In the first sign of escalating tension, my colleagues and I were no longer bused directly to the summit venue, but taken to an unidentified building where we were met by several Thai officials, who took us in an unmarked truck through a side entrance of the resort, via circuitous route around a couple of tennis courts.

When we arrived we saw that the numbers of the red shirts outside the main gate had swelled to the thousands. The summit hung in the balance – the morning meetings between various heads of state had not taken place because of road closures that prevented certain delegations from getting into the resort. The buffet tables outside the media centre were still groaning from the weight of all that food, and journalists were taking advantage of that as they plotted their next move.

What followed in the next few hours was the stuff of action movies, albeit with some farcical elements thrown in. I had gone to the hotel where the delegates were staying, some 300m away from the media centre, for two press conferences, at the end of which I got a text message from a colleague saying that the red shirts had broken into the media centre.

From the lobby of the hotel where I was, I could see a swarm of red shirts making their way over. Hotel guards were preparing to lock and chain up the hotel doors to prevent the red shirts from getting in. They did so in what felt like slow motion, with some arguing among themselves, and before long, these demonstrators were pushing against doors that had not been properly secured, and then flooding the lobby.

I decided not to wait to find out what would happen next, and like many staff and delegates, turned and ran for cover. I dashed into a lift along with several Thais and an Indian official, who was nice enough to let me into the Indian delegation’s suite. The news on TV was showing footage of the fracas at the convention centre minutes ago, but of course nobody could understand what it was all about because it was in Thai.

Suddenly I got a newsflash on my mobile: The summit had been cancelled. I called a colleague at the media centre who told me it was safe to go back; the red shirts were cheering and celebrating but essentially leaving the media to do their work in peace, he said.

Apparently a state of emergency had been declared in Pattaya. Inside the media centre, though, as journalists banged away at their keyboards and photographers transmitted their photos, everything felt quite normal. The electricity was still working, the broadband was still going at full speed and they were still serving food.

No one was chasing the media out and preventing them from transmitting their images and stories. I went to the dining hall to grab some lunch, although I really didn’t feel like eating. I bypassed the spread of curries and fried rice, shovelled some fried kway teow onto my plate and worked my way through it as fast as I could. There were only two other journalists eating in the hall and no one really wanted to linger.

In three hours, I filed my story, packed up and left, walking back from the resort to my hotel because there were no more taxis available. The red shirts had all cleared out, but hundreds of soldiers were still sitting desultorily around the compound.

I really have to tip my hat off to the Thais, though, for making the best of a terrible situation and being hospitable right to the end. Two soldiers, after seeing me walk around in circles trying to navigate my way towards my hotel, were kind enough to walk me back.

And guess what? Wire reports showed that the resort even went ahead with the gala dinner that it was supposed to serve the heads of state — who had by now fled in helicopters and military airplanes. In place of these guests, they invited soldiers, summit staff and reporters.

To quote the Associated Press: "As soft piano music drifted through the hall, the casually dressed diners sipped red and white wine and enjoyed a meal that included shrimp sate, lobster, chicken with cashews and a dessert of candied water chestnuts in coconut milk. ‘The hotel charged us. We have to pay anyway,’ said Suhat Sungchaya, who was tasked with helping organise the dinner for the ministry. ‘So that is why we decided to invite the people behind-the-scenes.’ "

The Thais have their work cut out for them trying to fix deep-seated social and political problems at this critical state of their democracy, but my experience showed me Thailand is not called the Land of Smiles for nothing.

They are a good-hearted people with a gentle, refined spirit, and I wish them well.