Ben Reed’s War Tourist Dispatches #2: From Phuket to Bangkok

Another ceasefire between Thailand and Cambodia. Let’s hope it holds this time. Each time it breaks, the language hardens; each time it hardens, Bangkok inches closer to questioning the legitimacy of Phnom Penh. Peace, for once, is good news for me. I am not chasing war. I am chasing movement, terrain, and the simple pleasure of going somewhere new with a rod in my hand.

I left Phuket last week to cut across the country and eventually cross into Cambodia, looking to see things and to catch fish along the way. Thailand’s fishing has been romanticized to death by travel blogs and television. The images are real enough: men grinning behind fish the size of children. The detail they leave out is where those fish come from. Most are pulled from pay ponds and fishing parks, stocked to the gills with imported giants. Arapaima. Oversized catfish. Carp bred for spectacle.

I have nothing against that world. It is just not mine.

I prefer wild fish in wild water. They take you to places that are harder to reach and harder to read. There is a particular gravity to meeting an apex predator on its own terms. Thailand offers saltwater, too, but meaningful fishing requires pushing far offshore to escape decades of pressure. Freshwater is no different. Overfishing is real unless you are hunting snakehead, and if you are from Florida, you already know how unforgiving those fish can be. This is not bass fishing. If your presentation is off, they ignore you. Live bait does not guarantee anything. The most reliable trigger is intrusion; disturb a mother guarding fry, and she will come.

From the coast, I moved inland to Khao Sok National Park. Even without a fish on the line, it is a place that earns your attention. Sheer limestone cliffs. Jungle so dense it muffles sound. Rivers the color of weak tea sliding past rock and root. I went out on a guided trek and stayed on a small farmstead near the water, the kind of place where nights are quiet and mornings come with mist hanging low over the fields. Fishing was part of the plan, but it was not the point. Khao Sok reminds you that travel can still be physical, still a little inconvenient. That mattered.

I was skunked there. No monsters. Back in Phuket, I can usually scratch out a catfish or a snakehead, but this trip was about larger ambitions. They went unanswered. So I pointed myself toward Bangkok to see what the city would offer.

Bangkok was harder, which I expected. More people. More pressure. More debris. If you target catfish blindly, you end up snagging whatever history has settled on the bottom unless someone tells you exactly where to cast. No one did. I could have downsized and chased smaller species, but that was not the game I was playing. The biggest fish left in the river tend to congregate near Buddhist temples, where monks feed them for merit and luck. Those fish are off limits, and rightly so.

No fish in hand, then. Just lessons reinforced.