Club One Seven Chiang Mai question...

[Smiles]

Fair warning: "Off Topic (somewhat)"

There is a story ~ 2 stories actually ~ about Club One Seven Hotel some may be interested in.

The original 'Club One Seven' was not in Chiang Mai but in Patong Beach, Phuket.
In October of 2004 I was not yet living in Thailand but still working at my job in Canada (I did't retire until 2007) but visiting Suphot in Thailand usually twice a year on monthly holidays.
We had decided that on this trip we'd go for a week in Patong over the Christmas and New Year festivities. So, after some hunting, in October I booked room there, a gay hotel which was right on the great curve of beach at Patong named 'Club One Seven'. Both of us were expecting a great time together . . . it had been months before since wed seen each other, in February of 2004.

But it was not to be. In November I had a quite nasty accident at work ~ a great fall from a great height which left me very much worse for the where, and being told that the healing was going to take months rather than weeks. C'est la vie, but horribly annoying.
So after contacting Suphot about this disaster I cancelled the hotel booking as well as the flight.

A month later, on December the 26th, Patong Beach was hit by the Great Tsunami of 2004. The Club One Seven was located directly across the beach road. Imagine.

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By June 2005 I was well healed, and we took our holiday after all ... it included a week in Patong (in a hotel some blocks back from the beach).
Arriving there I was pretty impressed by the amount of infrastructure rebuilding which had taken place in just 6 months. The devastation on the beach road was well on the way to being what it once was.
We walked down the road to see what had happened to Club One Seven. But it was simply a shell of a building, covered partly with those green plant-protection nylon sheets blowing in the wind. Sad to see that, but always eerily aware that we would heve been there, except for my stupid fall from grace.

I heard later that the owner of Club One Seven started up his hotel again, this time quite far from the beach, but still in Patong.

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But thats not the end of it.

On this Board (back then in 2004 I was the owner/admin/and only moderator) there was a quite prolific and interesting member with the handle "Ajarntrade" ('ajarn' means 'teacher' in Thai).
On the day of the tsunami he was shacked up with his boyfriend and his boyfriend's friend . . . at the Club One Seven in Patong Beach.
He felt the initial earthquake, though its epicentre was a long way away and it was not a major deal in Patong, nor for himself.
But a bit later after that: The Deluge

Subsequently 'Arjarntrade' wrote a long and very detailed story about the day the tsunami hit. And he posted here on this Board for all to read.
I did a search for it after reading the OP regarding the Club One Seven Hotel in Chiag Mai ... never expecting it to still be here. But voila, there it was, still as stark a post that has ever been published on this board.

Originally I attempted to copy the whole thing into this post, but when I tried it I got this message: 'The text that you have entered is too long (27841 characters). Please shorten it to 15000 characters long.'
(I've never seen that instruction before.)

Here is the URL to read the Arjarn story from 2004, if interested.


https://sawatdeenetwork.com/v4/showt...hlight=tsunami


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The Club One Seven hotel seems to have prospered: they now have the original hotel in Patong (going strong?), a hotel in Chiang Mai, and one in Singapore.