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From memory (at) blank.org Sat May 19 09:54:07 2001
Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 07:02:13 GMT
From: "Nathan J. Mehl, Road Worrier" <memory (at) blank.org>
To: memory (at) blank.org
Subject: Escape from the Sleazy Sex Dimension


So when we last left our heroes (ie: us), we had just left the Pirate
Software Zone, and were debating a trip into Bangkok's Little India. 

We never actually made it to Little India...got sidetracked by clothes
shopping, and after about 2 hours of wandering through an apparently
endless mall, we were quite happy to flag a taxi back to the hotel and sack
out for an hour before attempting to hit Patpong.

Ah, Patpong.  

To understand how deeply weird Patpong is, it helps to have some visual
context.  For all of Bangkok's reputation as an international pit of
depravity etc, it's really a pretty calm city, and there's basically zero
evidence of anything sex-related happening on any given street.  Moreover,
the Thais on the whole are pretty modestly dressed: even in the stupefying
heat of midday, the vast majority of Thais seem to prefer to go about
dressed in dark slacks or a full-length skirt, and some sort of
short-sleeved collared shirt.  Knee-shorts are popular but not thick on the
ground, and if you see a miniskirt or hotpants, it's pretty much a given
that you're looking at a European or Japanese tourist.  By and large,
Bangkok no more resembles New York's old 42nd Street than Ames, Iowa does. 
And then you turn a corner, and suddenly you're in the Sleazy Sex
Dimension.  It's a little disconcerting.

Patpong, of course, is Bangkok's infamous red light zone, contained mostly
on two side-streets (Patpong 1 and 2), just off of Silom Road.  But walking
down Silom Road, you can actually miss Patpong entirely, and in fact we
overshot it on our first attempt.  Silom Road is actually a very busy (if
touristy) nightmarket, and there's little visual indication from the main
drag that you're near the redlight district.  And in fact the nightmarket
extends through and around the go-go bars: trinket and foodsellers in the
middle of the street, bars on the sides.

The first bit we happened onto was by far the most disturbing, and is
actually a side-street from Patpong proper, where all of the bars are
catering to visiting Japanese salarymen.  Each bar had a small group of
women in filmy dresses outside of it, shouting "ohayo gozaimasu!" at the
top of their lungs to the small clumps of wandering Japanese men.  Each
girl had a number on her dress, presumably for easy ordering.  Miranda and
I were completely ignored here -- we were very much Beside the Point. 
(Later on I read in the Lonely Planet guide that non-japanese aren't even
allowed into those clubs.)

The twin main drags of Patpong were insanely crowded, partially with bar
patrons and partially with tourists poking through the markets and gawking
at the bar girls.  This would have been merely slow going, except that you
couldn't get more than about 20 steps without one of the various bar touts
stepping in front of you, shouting "free show! free show!", and forcing
into your face a sheet of paper describing the various entertainments their
bar provided.  The paper got to seem aggravatingly redundant after about
three encounters (of at least fifty), since every last one of them seemed
to have the exact same list: "pussy banana, pussy cigarette, pussy shot
glass, pussy ping-pong ball..."  And of course the bar touts were The
Sleaziest Men in the Universe, and had a nasty habit of actually grabbing
onto your arm with both hands and/or accidentally hitting you with the show
list.  Any curiosity I'd had about going into one of the bars vanished
after about 30 seconds of this kind of motivated salesmanship.

A few of the bars were actually located in the middle of the street,
alongside the market stalls.  The women sitting on the stools appeared to
be about to expire of boredom any time they weren't shouting at some likely
mark to come join them.

All in all, as an international den of sin and iniquity, Patpong was only a
success in the "banality of evil" sense.  Nobody appeared to be having much
fun, from the dancers to the touts to the sweating and crowded tourists --
a far cry from the cheerful sleaziness of, say, San Francisco's strip club
row.  (Of course, there the dancers are unionized. :)

The only apparent exception was the one gay side-street that we found. 
There were still barkers crying "show! show!" outside the bars, but instead
of creepy wizened touts, they were gaudily made-up transvestites and
fashionably dressed pretty boys, and if they weren't actually having fun
they were at least doing a much better job of acting like it, and there
were far more Thais and far fewer swarming foreigners.  I'm loathe to
generalize to Thailand from the states, but at least in the west the line
between "strip club", "sex club", and just a "really good disco" has always
been a little blurrier on the gay (male) side of the fence, and there
certainly seemed to be a great deal less of a put-upon feeling there.  And
the music from the bars was an order of magnitude better.  (Undoubtedly the
various children and grandchildren of Motley Crue can rest assured that
their college tuitions are paid for as long as there is one strip club
paying royalties anywhere in the world...dunno if the RIAA is collecting
here in Thailand though.)

Observation: the straight bars in Patpong could be greatly improved by
borrowing the touts from the gay ones.  (Then again, the presence of young,
good-looking men might ward off the scary, hungry-looking middle-aged white
guys who seem to be the primary clientele of those clubs.  A good thing
from my perspective, but perhaps not so good from a fiduciary view.)

After about 90 minutes of Patpong, we'd had quite enough, and pushed our
way through the crowd to find a taxi.  On the way out, we ran across a baby
asian elephant standing on the sidewalk with its handler, who was selling
bags of cucumbers to the crowd to feed to it.  I'm still not certain how I
feel about that, but he was probably having a better time than most of the
bar girls.

The next morning we had a great idea: a massage.  After some rifling
through the guidebook, we came up with the names of some likely-sounding
places, and grabbed a taxi there.  The massage was, in fact, wonderful: a
pair of young women with hands like steel pincers pummelled, twisted, and
generally abused us.  Unfortunatly, we ended up having to cut it off about
halfway through: we'd failed to communicate that we wanted only a 1-hour
massage (the default was 2), and had to leave just before they started
working on our backs in order to get back to the hotel by checkout time. 
But our legs were really, really relaxed...

Back to the hotel, pack like mad, and then to the airport: away from
Bangkok, and into Chiang Mai, Bangkok's second largest city, and the
gateway to Burma and the northern mountains.  

I like Chiang Mai a lot.  It's Thailand's 2nd largest city, but that turns
out to only be around 500,000 people.  It's a little large to be called
"charming", but it has a very relaxed college town feel to it: think
Seattle or Austin in the tropics.  (And in fact, Thailand's largest medical
college is here.)  Lots of open beer gardens, an old town area still
demarked at the corners by the ruins of the original city walls, and
several huge semi-enclosed day- and night-markets.  No bus service, but a
fleet of red pickup trucks with benches in the back, and several hundred
pedicabs.  We arrived and Miranda was immediately thrown into hotel
inspections for 3 hours; having seen enough hotel rooms now for a lifetime,
I spent them all reading in the various lobbies.  Once that was over (the
last, ever!), we checked into our room and poked through the nightmarket. 
As my stomach had finally started to cope a bit more gracefully with the
local flora (thank god), we had dinner at a little curry stand in the
market, which was blisteringly hot and extremely good.

Today we've spent so far poking through Chiang Mai's central market, which
is enormous: think Seattle's Pike Place Market stretched to about three
times the size, and encompassing several open air areas and half a dozen
warehouse buildings linked both at street level and by elevated walkways. 
The contrast to Cambodia is pretty stunning: even the meat areas are
scrupulously clean and not terribly odorous...actually the worst smell to
be found is from the piles of my new nemesis: the durian fruit.  (Which is
apparently in season right now...lucky me!  Miranda claims to have seen
warehouses full of the damn things when she was wandering on her own this
morning...this can only mean war.)

And that brings us up to the present instant, where, you will be stunned to
learn, I am typing away at an internet cafe.  (This one advertises "Hi
Speed!" access...128kbps...)  Our next objective is the city center and
perhaps an uninterrupted massage.  Tonight, we're getting a Thai cooking
lesson from 4:30pm to 10pm... I only pray it involves no durian.

Tomorrow we leave for Phuket, where we can begin to sunburn in earnest.

Off to the races,

-n