MANCHÁN MAGAN'stales of a travel addict
WHAT IS THE true Bangkok hotel experience? My first night of a recent trip to Thailand was spent cradled in an iron-sprung bed in a cheap dive on the Khao San Road, swapping travellers’ tales with other wanderers.
The second night I was a guest of the Mandarin Oriental on the banks of the Chao Phraya River and the sudden juxtaposition between one world and another made both seem surreal. In the former, shorts, sandals and backpacks were practically obligatory, while in the latter they were prohibited after 5pm.
It was while walking across the vast swathe of marble beneath glittering chandeliers to the Oriental’s reception desk that I realised quite the lengths elegant hotels must go to woo the wealthy. Within minutes of my arrival everyone seemed to know me by name. There were 400 rooms and yet wherever I went I was greeted with platitudes punctuated by “Mr Magan”, aimed at making me feel cherished, which, shamefully I must admit, they did. The elevator operators knew, not only my name, but my room number, and one even insisted on performing a traditional Thai dance for me whenever I waited for the elevator. I don’t actually need a personalised dance every time someone presses a button for me, but it’s surprising how pleasant it can be.
Resorting to nostalgia seems to be a tried and tested way of creating luxury – evoking the ambience of a more decadent age. Nights in maharajah palaces, dinner in Raffles of Singapore: the wealthy relax in the presence of a bit of sepia and stylishly-clad servility. Even the Airbus A380 I flew on had been decked out by Emirates in walnut burr and nostalgic light fixtures. I’m as much a sucker for it as anyone else, only I can’t afford it, and have grown more wary since reading in Dreams from my Father of Barack Obama’s early experience in the New Stanley Hotel, a doughty colonial stronghold in Nairobi where he found it virtually impossible to get served as a black man by the white-starched staff.
In the Mandarin Oriental I sat on the old colonial veranda, alongside wealthy Asian industrialists, trying to summon up the eminent literary figures whose posteriors may have occupied these wicker chairs before me: Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene and Noel Coward. The hotel’s designers and publicists had conjured up the sense that we were following in their footsteps, drinking our sun-downers from the very glasses they might have used. Even in my room looking out over the River of Kings buzzing with rice boats, barges, junks and hot-rod boats with “long tail” propeller shafts, a leaflet reminded me of Joseph Conrad’s description of his arrival here in 1888: “In the light of the crimson sunset, all ablaze behind the golden pagodas, I made my way to the Oriental.” There was a heady sense of romance to it all.
But of course, Conrad didn’t come to this air-conditioned high-rise, but to the one-storey building on piles that stood beneath it – where Somerset Maugham recovered from malaria and which was advertised as, “comfortable quarters for gentlemen of the sea”. The 135-year-old wing in which the Authors’ Lounge is situated is wonderfully atmospheric and has none of the overt sumptuousness of the high-rise. This is part of its charm. There are still four original suites there fashioned with Thai silks, teak and Victorian-style bathrooms.
Attempting such idiosyncratic style in a standard five-star hotel is daring, as wealthy tourists tend to be reluctant to accept anything beyond the standard definition of luxury. They want the same L’Occitane soaps, Liberty fabrics and Grohe showers wherever they go.
In marked contrast to this, the genuine luxury hotels of the Victorian era – the Copacabana Palace in Rio, the Mena House in Cairo, or the Baron in Aleppo – had a modest grandeur, a shabby, lived-in gentility that is far from the ostentatious perfection demanded by today’s five-star guests.