Pattaya Life

If I am being honest, I did nothing of any significance in Pattaya. This is nothing I feel bad for, as I had sort of planned on using Pattaya as a place to rest and say goodbye to Asia, but it makes for boring blog posts. Basically, every day I did this, or some other variation with remarkable similarity:

10am- Wake up in total darkness courtesy of wooden shutters. Turn on light and remember I am in the shittiest hotel on earth. Listen to maids talking in Thai.

11- Walk outside past the lady who glares at me for not leaving my key with her. Realizing they probably have an extra my money is in the nastiest smelling sock on earth. Camera is behind the fridge covered in boxer shorts.

The walk basically consists of me walking past a few markets, drunks, a million foreigners and Thai on scooters, dillapitated stores and stands selling durian fruit. The heat is strong and the broken assfault magnifies it. There is the occasional palm tree and street side offering shrine with smoking incense and orange Fanta.

When I get to Walking Street, which is parallel and closest to the water things get interesting. Imagine a boardwalk anywhere with restaurants, activities, bars, and men soliciting Jesus or Blink’s Fry Dough. The decorations are loud and tacky and the place is full of trash, and disgarded food. Street food is prevalent.

The difference between Walking Street and, say, the Hampton Beach boardwalk, is that the restaurants are full of prostitutes on break, the activities involve prostitutes and various themes, the bars are basically show rooms for prostitutes, and the solicitors are advertising prostitutes, or at least a bar that has prostitutes.

12pm- Eat lunch at one of the little alcove restaurants. Listen to old American and British men laugh with their Thai “girlfriends.

12:30- Buy a bottle of fresh mandarin juice for maybe 50 cents. They are ice cold and probably one of the best things about Pattaya.

1:30- Rent a chair and umbrella at the beach. Wave away women selling fruit from their head, men selling sunglasses, children selling bracelets, so on and so forth. Go swimming. Catch hepatitis as soon as I go in the water. Apparently there are two beaches in Pattaya and I picked the bad one. Watch as a man from Africa who is sitting next to me has no will power and proceeds to buy EVERYING that is offered to him. At one point he had a few vendors lined up.

4- Walk back to the hotel. Watch the news or advertisements for beer bars and go-go bars. There is a channel dedicated to expats in Pattaya. While most of the expats I have seen in Pattaya creep me out, I am aware that I am in an area that exists basically only for the sex industry and that most of the people I see are NOT actually living here and are a poor representative of the community. The man on the show is interviewing owners of German, Mexican, Indian restaurants. There was some functioning celebrating the royal wedding.

6- Walk back through Walking Street. By now a few girls populate every small bar. Many of these bars are open air. One enormous bar actually spins. There are usually a few ladyboys there. Men are now outside promoting and being obnoxious and aggressive. Walk all the way to the end of the main drag. Be accosted every couple of feet by young guys trying to sell me suits, Zippos, brass knuckles with a taser at the business end, knives, sex, everything. Buy and drink half a dozen orange juices.

7- Eat dinner at a different restaurant than lunch despite that almost every restaurant offers the same fare of Thai / American / British / German / Russian. These same places existed also in Saigon and Cambodia. They are awesome in that they serve a little of everything. Once, I thought “what the hell” and got a burger that ended up being a round piece of meatloaf on soggy bread.

8- Walk along the beach past pimps and girls working solo. The general atmosphere of this place weirds me out. Even if prostitution is legal here these girls sitting under trees make me way more uncomfortable than the ones in the bars. Still, sometimes they call me sexy , even if they look at me funny when I say “why thank you!” and walk on.

10- Walk down Walking Street again and see the last of the few families that made the same mistake as me and thought Pattaya was a “normal” place getting the hell outta dodge. Watch the general fiasco as the giant halls full of small square bars fill up with men and girls and ladyboys. The prostitutes on Main-South in Worcester got nothing on the girls of Pattaya.

11: Walk through the tent markets and eateries around the area near my hotel.

11:30- Get drunk while watching the news.

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Worst Hotel Ever

The Russians and I hopped from the bed of the pick-up and said our goodbyes to Mary (or whatever I named her, I forgot) and her friend. Her friend, a heavily tattooed American gave some recommendations as far as places to stay that were either closer of further from the hotspots, depending on what we were looking for.

I found out shortly thereafter that what people in Pattaya are generally looking for, is sex.

I followed the Russians into a hotel run by Russians. Girls sat on a dirty couch and looked at me. The guy at the desk disappeared for a time and I listened to pumping techno for a while until I decided I wanted to try my luck elsewhere.

This was the situation: My bank card was sitting under my bed (or what was until recently my bed) in Korea. My cash was starting to dwindle. I was searching for a cheap motel that I could put onto a credit card so that I wouldn’t have to worry much about what would be the largest bill in Thailand.

No luck. Cash only. Apparently people don’t want others to know they were in a place like Pattaya. I walked over a mile down the only stretch of road near the coast that was barren of hotels. Occasionally I would pass these weird combo gym-hotels but I didn’t fancy the look of any of them. By the time I found a place I was covered in sweat, my arms hurt from dragging a couple of pieces of luggage, and I was frazzled and close to losing it after trying to avoid the constant rush of scooters.

I finally walked into a wide open room, asked for a room for the next handful of days. I was stuck behind a fat, bearded American biker guy as he waddled up the steps. I found my room, opened the door...

The room was actually quite large. That is all it had going for it. As I turned on the light a lizard scurried across the plaster ceiling. This is not a lie, nor is it even a slight exaggeration. My hotel room had a fucking lizard in it. The funny thing is that didn’t bother me at all. Grain and dirt covered bits of the linoleum floors. A bound menu sat atop a broken table. The menu, it turned out, was to some other hotel that had room service / a kitchen. I turned on the TV for a little background noise as I looked for the remote to the air conditioner. CNN was on and talking about some compound in Pakistan. I turned off the TV and headed out for some food.

I returned with a plastic baggie full of cellophane noodles, chili peppers, tripe, sausage, and vegetables bought from a vendor outside. It was delicious. The whole atmosphere of Pattaya that night was of a wild party. Foreigners shouted from scooters and in bars amidst bright TVs and the prospect of cheap sex, I could hear cheers. I was missing something maybe.

The bathroom was the worst part of the entire room, maybe even the worst part of Thailand in general. It existed on the same level as my bathroom in Korea in that the shower was not separated. The millipedes that sat dead in the middle of the tile should have tipped me off.

I turned on the shower found that the drain was clogged with all manner of black, mucky debris and that as the water level was raised, all of this shit just floated along the bathroom floor. I turned off the shower and tried to do some laundry in the sink and found that this water also drained into the same pipes and soon there was an inch of water on the floor and a bunch of gunk floating around. I did what I could and hung my clothing to dry on the balcony.

I then turned on the TV, popped opened a mini-bar beer and discovered that Osama Bin Laden was dead.

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Border Crossings and Riding in Cars with Russians

Pattaya, Thailand

Sometimes when you are on the road, traveling for a long time you hit a wall.

I hit the wall in Thailand.

A tuk-tuk brought me to a back-packer guesthouse in Siem Riep, Cambodia. It was early enough for me to be barely awake and also miserable, but it was already hot and humid enough for me to be drenched in sweat.

Further, the place was jammed and there was really no room for myself or my two rolling-luggages, backpack, or camera bag and I basically just stood red and wet in the middle of everything like I was totally fine.

At some point a big old bus came rolling up and we were carted on. A girl around my age, who happened to be quite large, sat in front of me until the driver made a big fuss about her size and made her sit on the tiny, fold-out seat at the front to the bus.

The bus went to the Thai border. Here we were let out at the most grueling border crossing I have experienced thus far in my life.

To begin with, the bus dropped us off in a cluster-fuck of traffic. All around were trucks, freights, cars, motorcycles laden with all manner of luggage and goods. Once past all of that, we had to stand in line at a check point. While waiting and sweating profusely, I exchanged a few hundred US dollars and the bulk of my remaining Korean Won into Thai Baht. It was sad to part with the won.

Once through the checkpoint, I had to drag my luggage somewhere close to half a mile, over curbs, broken sidewalks, through groups of people and chickens (seriously) to the other side. It was a sort of no-mans-land, I guess. Here, I waited in line again, this time with sweat pouring into my eyes as I passed into Thailand.

Once my passport was stamped I was pointed through some doors, hollered at to walk straight and take a left, hollered at again that I went the wrong way, and hollered at again to find the right bus. The bus company tasked with getting me from Cambodia to my randomly chosen destination of Pattaya, Thailand, apparently ran several routes.

So, I sat or stood and perspirated for a time underneath the awning of a little market. Some people tried to eat ice cream before it fell onto their shirt. A guy with long hair was talking about doing a work camp, I thought about chiming in about my camps but remembered that it was too hot and I wasn’t in the mood to talk to anybody.

We waited an hour or so. Vans came, picked up the right people, and were then bouncing on the dirt road to such places as Bangkok or Phuket. I fell into conversation with the large girl from the first bus. For the sake of not calling her “the large girl” I will call her Mary, for no reason. I do not remember her real name.

She told me that she was returning to Pattaya from vacation, that she was staying there for a couple of months trying to soak up the experience, and that I should shadow her until we arrived. So I did.

When our van finally arrived the driver and his little buddy were dismayed when they saw my rolling luggage. They argued amongst themselves and then started shouting my way.

“This is too much!”

I stared at them and said something like “uhh ok.” I was wondering what the hell they expected me to do about it, and besides nobody ever mentioned an official baggage limit of the “White Rape Van Travel Bus Company” when they told me I must pay.

Here we go again, I thought.

He then quoted me 90 baht, around $3. Mary said he was ripping me off but after getting taken for a $50 cab ride in Vietnam (twice) “ripping off” can become a relative term. So, we loaded into the van, a fuss was made of the size of Mary, and we were off.

In the van was a Russian couple, Mary, and myself. Mary made a comment about how nice it was that the van wasn’t crowded, then immediately after karma punished us all for something.

We spoke for a while, not really noticing that the van would occasionally stop at a corner or a checkpoint and somebody new would hop in. Mary was essentially on vacation. She had a friend who owned property in Pattaya and had set her up with a place to stay for a few months. As for what she did in real life, I don’t know. She said she was going to try and rotate between life in small town USA and Pattaya.

The Russians were on holiday for a few months and were, like me, almost at the end of the road: they had a handful of days in Pattaya and then were heading back. Somebody made a crack about the American having a lot of baggage for a vacation and I felt it necessary to inform them that I had been living in Korea for a year and had been unable to send as much home via cargo ship as I had hoped. I felt vindicated.

The bus could seat 11 comfortably. By the time we passed through the last armed checkpoint near the border, there were 15 people jammed in on top of the luggage. I was cut off from conversation and basically jammed into the window. The air conditioner basically became pointless.

It took us a long time to get where we were going and while the tropical trees and landscapes of Thailand were nice to watch, the general crappiness of the van became too much to handle.

After a few hours we were let out at a gas station where I met a ladyboy and ate a kind of cheese pastry and bought a water. Then, the Russians, Mary, and I waited with anxiety for the van to come and pick us up and worried if maybe it had left us.

It didn’t, and hours later we finally arrived in Pattaya.

The sun was sinking and that nervous feeling I get when I get to a place with no plan whatsoever was put to ease by Mary offering to get the Russians and myself to the main drag so as to find cheap lodgings.

My baggage became an issue again. In Korea there are taxis, Vietnam: taxis, Cambodia: tuk-tuks; in Thailand there are dudes driving pickups with a couple of benches in the bed. They wanted to charge us extra and Mary did not want any of that nonsense.

I did, but I was tired and hungry enough to where I was starting to lose grip on what was really going on. So, Mary called up her friend and soon I found myself flying through town in the back of a pickup with a couple of Russians sitting on cardboard boxes.

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