Thailand Offers Tourists 'The Aids Attraction'
A hospice in Thailand offers morbid sightseers access to its Aids patients - dead and alive - for a fee…
You'd expect to find the dead bodies at the back of the hospital, not in the reception.
With some enthusiasm, my guide for the morning pointed out the mummified corpses of a few recent outpatients.
Brown and shrivelled, the eight adults and three children grimaced, their earthly forms still twisted and corrupted by the disease that had ravaged their bodies in life.
A three-hour train ride from the Thai capital Bangkok, Lopburi is famed for its monkey-populated ancient ruins.
The railway station makes a point of this and is adorned with resplendently kitsch eight-foot-high simian statues.
But Lopburi's other, more unlikely, tourist attraction is its Aids hospice: the largest of its kind in Thailand.
