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I am starting this thread as I wait at Suvarnabhumi airport for my flight back home after another exhilarating visit to the Kingdom of All Carnal Indulgences. It was perhaps my 70th or 80th such visit, maybe more. I started coming more than 30 years ago and have to have averaged at least 2 trips per year. Over those 30 years I have metamorphosed from a starry-eyed backbacker too self-assured to pay for sex into a crushed-by-life old faun resigned to having more money than I will ever be able to spend on sex with the time and stamina I have left. But it was not just me who changed. So did Thailand. In so many ways, mainly for the Thais themselves who went from a poverty rate of 70% of the population in the 1980s to less than 7% currently. This is a major, major societal shift with broader change manifestations than the diminishing availability of the cheap sex young partners we farangs grew to love Thailand for and with our stepped up presence induced some of the very vanishings we will come to miss. This thread will serve to record my and other BMs' memories and reflections on Thailand as it makes the ultimate transition from an upper middle income economy (currently) to a high income one in the 2030s (World Bank projection). So much of what endeared us to Thailand has been and will continue to be lost in that transition. And I am not just talking about the sex. By chance during this just-finished trip I came across at the Canterbury Tales bookshop a Thai-authored book in English called "The Vanishing Face of Thailand" which I bought on the spot because the title matched the tag I've used for a few of my threads here at LBR: "vanishing Thailand." The book is more narrowly focused than my feelings of "vanishing Thailand" as it covers only areas of traditional craftmanship being lost to modernity. Moreover the book was published in 1993 which is only a few years after I started coming to Thailand, so it means that face of Thailand was already vanishing before I showed up. But the book's broader message remains valid even more today: with more education and social mobility, Thais are no longer bound to traditions with heartfelt dedication and acceptance of the hardships that go with it. So, according to the book, in the 1990s craftsmen stopped bothering to spend a week's labor to make a single Thai-God papier-mache mask or a month to make a hand woven cloth with intricate ancestral patterns. I think we can extrapolate the "loss of craftmanship" to the Thai sex workers who when I started mongering here eagerly sought farangs for open-ended GFE LTs, which is no longer the case... In the coming posts I will focus on specific "vanishing Thailand" developments and urge all BMs to do the same. For now I will post the pic of the book that inspired me to start this thread. I read it from cover to cover and in the end left it in my Pattaya hotel room, so chances are it will make its way back to the Canterbury Tales, a wonderful bookshop labor-of-love that I am afraid will soon become part of my "vanishing Thailand" and I will miss it dearly. Rom