I love the annual polls in which readers of the top travel magazines vote for the best cities, best hotels, best islands and best airlines. Most of the time I tend to agree with them, but occasionally they do throw up a surprise or two. The ones worth noting are those done by Conde Nast Traveler magazines (UK and US) and Travel + Leisure magazine. I find them far more reliable than the rather ridiculous World Travel Awards, which has so many categories that it is almost impossible NOT to win an award
Anyway, the results of the Travel + Leisure magazine poll have just been released. And it should come as no surprise to Thailand lovers that Bangkok has been voted the world's best city for 2008. Oh, how wonderful it is to think that the city of traffic jams, gogo bars and glittering temples managed to jostle out snobby Sydney and Italy's ever-so-classical Florence and Rome to the top spot.
Less exciting for fans of Thailand is that not one of our islands managed to make it into the list of top ten islands, which was won by the Galapagos Islands and Bali, followed by silly Hawaii.
Come off it! Who on earth goes to the Galapagos? A few tortoise lovers, I believe. And I mean only a few. After all, thanks to the rantings of Charles Darwin, 97% of it is a national park. Obviously the readers have yet to taste a watermelon shake or experience a beach massage on Phuket. But my island did sneak in as the second best island in Asia behind the perenially over-rated Bali and just ahead of Penang in Malaysia, where the beaches are as clean as a Cairo sewer.
Switching my allegiance back to my country of birth, I was delighted that a South African hotel was once again voted the best in the world - the Singita Sabi Sand at the Kruger National Park. Yes, we do have truly great hotels in South Africa, matched in my book only by those in Thailand. I guess its no fluke that the two countries in my heart have the best hotels in the world!!
The US-based magazine's readers voted Singapore Airlines grabbed the best airline award again. There's never much doubt about that one - the clever devils from that island state somehow always manage to stay ahead of the pack. Singapore Airlines was followed by Emirates, Thai Airways and Cathay Pacific.
The results were complied from votes by magazine subscribers in an Internet poll which went live between January and March.
Top 10 cities :
1 Bangkok, Thailand
2 Buenos Aires, Argentina
3 Cape Town, South Africa
4 Sydney, Australia
5 Florence, Italy
6 Cuzco, Peru
7 Rome, Italy
8 New York, US
9 Istanbul, Turkey
10 San Francisco, US
Great to see Cape Town in third place and my beloved New York City making the list, but I would find a spot there for Amsterdam...
After all the hullabaloo about former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's accumulation of wealth, one might have expected him to head up the list of Thailand's richest men. After all, he did own the country's biggest mobile phone network before his fall from grace and went on to buy the Manchester City football club while in exile.
But Thaksin is not the richest by far. The country's wealthiest man is Chaleo Yoovidhya. Never heard of him? Well, maybe you know the product that made him an estimated fortune of 4 billion US dollars - Red Bull. Yes, the world's favourite energy drink is a Thai invention. Second on the list is another purveyor of beverages - the Chang beer boss Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi at US$3,9 million. In fact, of the 40 richest people in Thailand named by Forbes magazine, eight of them got rich through food and beverages, a record for any country. The names have remained fairly stable for years, a sign that the businesses were set up decades ago and continue to be run by the same families.
Although Thaksin comes in at only 16th place with a net worth of 400 million dollars, this is still 100 million up on last year. And there is still the prickly little matter of the two billion US dollars frozen by the Thai authorities. That's the fortune he made from the 2006 sale of his telecoms company to Singapore. Put that back on his balance sheet and he returns to the super league. In fact, he can start thinking of hob-nobbing with the beverage barons.
