For the last coupla weeks I’ve been on what we Americans call “vacation.” Which is a weird thing to be on if you already live in Thailand, because it turns out, what I did each night of my vacation is exactly what I do every night when I’m not on vacation, which is the thing every dude does when he comes here on vacation, only they do it for a 5 or 10-day stretch, and then they go back to their regular lives of slow suicide in their home country. But for this dog-eared whoremonger, the work-a-day weeknight’s festivities are the same as when on holiday. So the only way I can feel like I’m actually on vacation is to do my whoremongering in a different town, which is why I picked up my knapsack and hustled down to Pattaya last week, or Ptown as it’s colloquially known between myself and two of my friends. And I hoped it would also be a vacation from banging chicks. This life—this harem-having existence—is exhausting for a man my age. It’s a thing I found too late in life. I should’ve moved to Thailand 10 years earlier than I did. At least, I can say I found it eventually—this single man’s dream. At any rate, Ptown is now where I go to give my wang a holiday, as well as my mind. I know, it’s counterintuitive. Most go to Ptown to get their swerve on. It’s the opposite for this pudgy pussy pugilist. Ptown is now my sanctuary of celibacy.
I rolled in around 17.30 on Monday, which was a Buddhist sober holiday. That might’ve affected the evening’s festivities a tad. The Beach Road: empty. Soi 6: dark. Walking Street gogos: closed. A few joints were serving, eg if you were a hi-so Chinese mafioso, you and your family could polish off whole bottles of whiskey at a Chinese restaurant on the 2nd Road. The rest of us were SOL…except for the ganja shops that are now every 10 meters in Ptown. I picked up a pack of 5 gummies for 100 baht.
Many familiar landmarks are gone. The bowling alley on the corner of Central and the 2nd Road is a pile of rubble now. The massive liquor store that stood across from it is shut, and the space up for lease.
As you can see from the photo, the view from my hotel room was spectacular. And that rounds out the list of pros about the hotel. The toilet seat was broken. The sink already clogged. The aircon barely worked. On the first morning, I woke up with a scrape on my elbow (it looked like a rug burn) and was confused. The previous night was a sober one. How did I injure myself? The next morning, I figured it out. The sheets were so course, I actually lost flesh rubbing my elbow on the mattress during the night. The staff were lovely, though. That’s another pro. In 12 years of going to Ptown, I’ve not found a hotel I’d visit twice, except out of laziness.
I wish I could remember where I read an article that claimed “Pattaya was back to normal” post-Covid. What a load of horse shit. 40% of the Beach Road is still shut. Nearly half the 2nd Road is dark, and also dug-up. It looks like they’re putting in new underground flood run-off apparatus. There are signs of recovery, like new businesses on the Beach road, the re-opening of the seaside beer bar complex on Walking Street (without poles for dancing), and new restaurants. It was hard to gauge on Monday thanks to Buddhist lent. I had dinner in the beer garden and was home by 8, ate 3 gummies, watched a lightning storm out over the ocean, the perfect show for a gummy experience, was dozing when it made landfall right on top of my hotel (at least it seemed like that), fell asleep to the sound of pouring rain (shoutout to Skid Row) and woke up to what in Cali would be called “fog” but in Thailand is just 1,000% humidity.
The day after lent was markedly busier. On the suggestion of my buddy Lucky, I went for a steak lunch over on Soi Lengkee—a place called…I’m not sure. It’s either named The Grill or Hungry Panda—or both. They had 3 cuts of steak for 495b each. I opted for the Aussie filet in wine sauce with sauteed mushrooms and a glass of Shiraz-Cab for 240. On a scale of 1 to 10 of steak in Ptown, it was a 9. On a scale of 1 to 10 of steak in LA, it was a 5. After living in TLOS for 12 years, I really enjoyed it.
On my way back to the hotel I swung by Cigarista for a Cuban Romeo y Julieta and got a bottle of Shiraz from Villa, which I enjoyed in my hotel room whilst watching the sun go down. Out on the street, things were markedly busier than during lent, but still quite quiet for Pattaya standards. I’d say Ptown is at around 1/5 its normal tourist capacity. There’s no traffic at all on the roads, in spite of lanes closed down for construction. It’s safe to say Pattaya is back, though not “to normal,” at least not yet.
Soi 6 is rammed with girls. I’d guestimate around 600 of them. 600 on The 6—all 6s, unfortunately. Here’s a list of the Soi 6 bars that are open, from east to west: Thai Rose, Goodfellas, Corner Bar, Saigon Girl, O Bar, King Kong, Love Missile, Click, Hollywood, My Friend You, Smoke and Mirrors, Soho, Sexy in the City, Exotica, UD Bar, Tomcats, Rosy, Foxy, Playgirls, Poison, Candy Bar, Desire, Spider Girl, Hero, Lisa, Ruby, Lolo, Lust, Butterfly, Kawaii, Where Angels Play, Chili, Illuzion, Lollipop, Horny Bar, Baby Cool, Flirt, Hot Shots, Wicked, Smoke and Kisses, Playpen, Sweet Bar, NightWish, Toy Box, Red Point, Cooters, Screamers, Sand Castle, Lucky Love, Passion, Avarice, Wrath, La La Land, the two karaoke bars, Halifax, and Aom One Stop Bar. Mama’s Italian restaurant is also open, as is the Queen Vic and a coffee shop halfway up the soi. Tornado Bar—the one just down from Corner Bar—a Soi 6 staple for years, has closed. It’s been replaced by an as-yet unfinished gogo called Wild Things.
Soi 6 2022 is chock full of pseudo-locals—dudes who’ve been in Thailand for 6 months or a year or two years and act like they were born here. Lots of foreigners make up the team of NightWish Group managers in charge of their slew of bars. All pseudo-locals. There’s also a contingent of fiercely territorial regulars who regard strangers with the cautious viciousness of rabid soi dogs.
Current closed bars are: Mods, Offshore, Pussy Club, Utopia, Seduction, Envy, Dolls (with open sister bars on Walking Street and LK), Maggie Choo, Nature Bar, and Wet Six. I’d call that a pretty good recovery post-plandemic. I just wish there were hotter girls on The 6. But that’s a problem all Thailand redlights have these days. Tinder and Onlyfans have claimed a huge chunk of the hotter prospects in TLOS. I hit The 6 at 19.00 and was on a baht bus by 19.30.
Walking Street was a different story, thank Buddha. I wandered onto WS without a plan. I just wanted to see what the place looked like mid-recovery/rebranding/resuscitation. Judging by the number of places selling weed, it might be apt to rename the town Ganjattaya. It’s hard to walk a block without passing through a thick cloud of maryjane smoke.
My first stop was Fahrenheit because I knew places like Sapphire didn’t open till 21.00 and because 12 years ago, it was the first WS gogo I ever visited. There were quite a few lookers, and I was just getting settled-in when someone shouted “Sev-EN!” from the stage. She was a former gogo dancer at King’s Castle in Patpong. When her rotation ended, she came and sat with me for a bit, telling me how she likes Pattaya so much more than Bangkok. I asked her if it was because there are more customers. She said yes, but also because of the beach, the laid-back party atmosphere, and her circle of friends. I half-jokingly told her if she wanted some extra cash she could swing by my hotel before work tomorrow and then moved on to Dollhouse to catch up with my friend Tony, who manages the joint. I counted three hotties onstage (my standards are unfathomably high, I should say). Tony said business was good, and improving with each passing week. His boss had to shut Electric Blue and Beavers because the landlord across the soi wanted stupidly-high rent. They moved the former bar upstairs above Dollhouse where the old XXX Lounge used to be. Both joints offer a 50-baht draft Tiger, which immediately brought flashbacks to when Electric Blue Patpong raked in customers by the boatload with it’s 50b Chang drafts. It’s economics 101—outsell your customers by undercutting their prices. It’s a concept Thais never grasped. Speaking of the Dollhouse owner, he also has a couple restaurants over on Pattaya’s “dark side” (Route 66 and Paddy’s) and in a week or so will open a gentleman’s club—Dollhouse Darkside—nearby.
Next I hit Sapphire, my former favorite (and everyone else’s, I think) Pattaya gogo. There were 24 girls onstage…none I’d barfine. Back in the day, Sapphire had the hottest girls in Ptown. Now their roster is more…diversified. Currently, the best-looking girls work at Pin-Up, a joint that downsized its customer capacity during the lockdowns and now can’t seat everyone. It’s a good problem to have, I guess. I made two laps in there before giving up on finding a seat.
But back to Sapphire. A decade ago, when I went in there regularly, I started reading the palms of the bar staff. Thais love that kind of stuff, and I can fake my way through palm-reading based on some blog I read in the 90s, and at the time, it endeared me to the ladies and earned me some clout among the girls there. Today, it’s a tedious slog. The servers line up 10 deep to have me spout horse shit about the next year of their lives. It’s like mental sandpaper. I did half an hour of palm reading and bailed after barely glancing at the stage and not seeing any hot girls. And yes, I’ll continue to go back there on every Ptown visit, because going to Sapphire is like going to church on Easter. You just gotta do it.
Again, out of habit, I hit up Peppermint—a place I’ve fond memories of from a decade ago. They’ve redone the place, and the air-con ain’t great. One or two hotties. Then I want to Pin-up where I couldn’t find a seat. A girl I used to bang—Som—works there but I didn’t see her. Windmill was equally crazy. I had to squeeze into a seat, and was gently harassed by two dancers and a waitress for the 60 seconds it took to down my draft beer. Then I backtracked to Dollhouse because I forgot to go upstairs to Electric Blue. I didn’t stay long, but there was lots of nudity up there, and goings on that you’d expect from an 1800s Paris brothel. I’ll leave it at that. And then I grabbed the baht bus back to my room.
On Wednsday, after doing my digital nomad job I made a beeline for Buddy’s Hot Dogs, a new small establishment between Sois 4 and 5 on the Beach Road. I got two chilidogs and a side of fries, and thoroughly enjoyed both. The pork dog was fat, juicy, and flavorful. The bun was soft and perfect. The chili tasted home-made, with pinto instead of kidney beans, green chilis, and ground chicken. My only note would be that cheese belongs on a chilidog. None of the dog dens in Bangkok understand that either. Maybe it’s not cost-effective. Afterward, I grabbed another bottle of Shiraz for later and trucked back to the hotel for a nap. After again watching the sunset from my room, I tried out Soi 6 again. I saw one girl I’d barfine, but I can’t remember which bar she was in. I made one lap up and back, and again gave up, making my way to the beach road to grab the baht bus to Walking Street. Two ridiculously hot hotties passed me on a motorbike, and I actually jogged after them for a bit, starved as I was for female hotness. A few moments later I passed them on the songtaew. They’d stopped on the Beach Road, ostensibly to hit the beach.
On Walking Street, the Tourist Police mobile station was up, for the first time in three years if memory serves. Speaking of cops, they were out in force in the gogos, ensuring that no girls went topless before 9 pm, in yet another example of stupid, arbitrary, senseless laws in Thailand. While in Dollhouse, I bought a drink for a tiny, fit blonde. I guestimated her age at around 18. Turned out she was 30. It’s amazing how young an Asian girl can look if she hasn’t had kids yet.
On a side note, masks are pretty much over in Ptown. Zero tourists wear them, and around half the Thai population put them on indoors but everybody seems over it. I wish Bangkokians would follow suit.
From Dollhouse, I jumped a mototaxi to LK Metro, swung into the Dolls gogo there, followed by Sugar Sugar and Lady Love. The latter offered 79b Tiger drafts. Every bar I checked out was rammed with girls and customers, and foot traffic on the Soi looked very close to preplandemic normal. So yes, some parts of Ptown do look “normal” again, thank Buddha.
On Thursday I headed back to BKK, sad to leave Ptown for the first time in years. Back in Patpong, the mamasan I pissed of still looks for ways to harass me. She’s taken to trying to blind me with her laser pointer from a distance as I walk down the soi, I suppose because I can’t hear her insane cursing from that far off. The ebb-and-flow of tourists is increasing onPong. More large groups and couples appear nightly and are becoming something of a norm.
Compared to Ptown, Pong’s not as fun for me anymore. I mean yes, all my friends are there. I love hanging out with Earn, Beer, Pu, Tong, Sai, Bpai, Nan, and Yah at XXX Lounge. I enjoy talking with Saa, Mint, and Noey in Black Pagoda, and Som, Ice, and Praew in King’s Castle. And Mew, Joy, and Catgirl at Bada Bing. But sometimes you wanna go where only one girl in Fahrenheit knows your name, which is why Ptown’s going back on my regular vacay schedule going forward.
And that’s all the monger that’s fit to ponder for now, friends. Check back next Sunday for another summary of red-light events. In the meantime, you can read more about Bangkok life on my Substack: https://bangkokseven.substack.com/
Redlight videos and slide shows, including the companion for this post, can be found at https://www.youtube.com/c/BangkokSeven
Follow me on Twitter @BangkokSeven for daily pics from the redlight, and until next time, keep your balls warm, your beer cold, and cheers to another week above ground in the greatest country on Earth: Thailand.
Pro Tip Post-Script: Thais don’t know how to walk in public places. It’s a country-wide problem. Dodging them in the mall is like a VR video game. I don’t know if it’s their Buddhist ideal of not thinking of the future—literally 5 seconds in the future when they’ll collide with someone on the sidewalk—or if they freeze up when they see a farang but once they’re on a trajectory, they can’t change it. In the West, people devote a portion of their brain power to not walk into someone on the street. In LA and New York there’s an unspoken rule that walking lanes imitate driving lanes so foot traffic can flow easily. Not so in Thailand. In Thailand, a girl will stop in the middle of a narrow walkway to stare at her phone while a dozen people get clogged up behind her. A dude will walk straight at you with cars passing by you on the left and a homeless person laying on the ground on your right and you’ll be forced to choose between them. Ironically, in 2022, after decrying the cuntery of foreigners who don’t wear masks when among the paranoid Thai public, not wearing one would actually make it easier to walk around because Thais will dive out of your way to evade you.
