"Bent Jensen" <kongaead@my-deja.com> skrev i en meddelelse
news:9a3bbfb0.0506161804.66451aa3@posting.google.com...
> "Steen Johansen" wrote ...
>
>> De rigtig billige er ikke på nettetEks Atlanta Sukumvit soi 2 350 Bath
>
> Jeg tror, Atlanta er nedlagt som hotel og lavet om til lejligheder.
> Bent
Bangkok's original hip hotel
Duncan Campbell revisits the Atlanta - an oasis of cool in the 70s and a
style classic today
Saturday April 9, 2005
This was a journey not only down Lane Number Two - the English translation
of the Thai, Soi 2 - but a trip down memory lane. I had last been in the
Atlanta Hotel in 1971 and had memories of it as a place that offered me room
on a sofa in reception because they were full up.
My memory was of a lone hotel at the end of a dusty road in the heart of
Bangkok. We were amazed at the luxury of it - a swimming pool! Running
water! - after months of travelling in India and Nepal. At night, people
hung around the pool, drank beer, smoked exotic cigarettes and planned their
journeys to Vientiane or Penang.
The street is now crammed with condominiums and outside the Atlanta is a
large sign declaring "Sex Tourists Not Welcome." The rules of the
establishment are spelled out clearly inside: "The Atlanta does not welcome
sex tourists, sex-pats, bar-girls, rent-boys or catamites. The Atlanta is
sleaze-free. No exception. No discussion. No apology."
Founded in 1952 by a German adventurer, pharmacologist, boatbuilder and
munitions-manufacturer, Dr Max Henn, the hotel has managed to preserve its
originality and, even more re markably, its low prices over the years. You
can stay here for less than £10 a night and be comfortable, clean and safe.
Dr Henn, an anti-Nazi, who left Germany in the 1930s, originally operated a
pharmaceutical factory there. He married a Thai aristocrat, Mukda, and
turned the building, at the request of American friends, into a hotel
catering to US army cartographers. A swish and fashionable restaurant with
white linen table-cloths and waiters in white ties followed. It had the
first hotel swimming pool in Thailand, which had originally been a snake pit
that Dr Henn used for the snakes whose venom he milked for his remedies.
By the Sixties, it was used by American military personnel preparing for the
war in Vietnam and US General Westmoreland was a guest. Later in that decade
it became a rest-and-recreation stop for GIs and then a stop-off point on
the Hippie Trail before becoming part of a different trail. Henn himself no
longer ran it on a day-to-day basis and he died in 2002.
When Charles Henn, Dr Max's son, who teaches at Birmingham Univerity,
re-visited the hotel in the Eighties he was shocked that it had been taken
over by "a rump of - mainly British, I'm afraid - lager louts", as his
friend, Charles Le Phoque, who handles publicity for the hotel, puts it. He
decided to reclaim the hotel. "Now we have mainly academics, writers and
families," said Le Phoque. "Scandinavians, Germans, Americans, some
British."
The reception area, where once I slept, is now the most photographed hotel
foyer in Bangkok because it has retained its period feel and black-and-white
chequered floor. There are a couple of large terrapin in a mud bath on the
way to the pool, named Archibald (after Cary Grant who was christened
Archibald Leach), and Doris (after Doris Day). Cabinets in the foyer are
crammed with books, both fiction and non-fiction, in which the Atlanta is
mentioned. There are no televisions in the rooms but there is a collection
of classic videos, a reading room for guests, a book exchange where you pick
up one book and leave one behind. The white table-cloths are gone but there
is the largest menu of Thai vegetarian food in the world - or so Le Phoque
believes.
· Duncan Campbell stayed at The Atlanta Hotel, Soi 2, Sukhumvit Road,
Bangkok. For reservations fax: +66-2 656 8123. Family suite for up to four
people from Baht 1,300 (£19).
|