Phitsanulok, Thailand
16° 50' N 100° 15' E
May 13, 2006 11:30
Distance 345km

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charming

Text written in: English

Georgi:

1 green curry (vegetables undercooked)

1 book swapped - Marian Keyes' Is there anybody out there? for Kate Atkinson's Human Croquet.

Our Bangkok guesthouse is at the y-shaped intersection of two soi - narrow sidestreets in Thailand. At the smallest corner, there is a shrine, in which a daily offering to the gods is placed. Every day, as we walk past the shrine, I have a good look to see what the gods are being fed by the faithful.Considering that we walk to and from our guesthouse at least four times a day, I get a lot of opportunity to comment on the gods' fare.

And comment I do, enthusiastically and ongoingly, to Ter.

My comments have included, but not been limited to, the following:

The gods' food looks very nice today.

It seems that the gods like coke.

Oh dear, ants seem to have got into the gods' food.

Do you think the people mind if the stray cats eat the gods' food?

Ooooh! Look, the gods got prawns today!

When I addressed this last comment to Ter he finally turned to me and asked, "What are you going on about? What gods?

I had been chatting to him about this for three full days before he decided it might be worth finding out what I was talking about. And I thought that travelling would improve our communication!

Regardless, we are in perfect synch on other issues. Last night, we decided to do what every good tourist to Bangkok must, and pay a visit to a go-go bar. Although we were tired, we knew that with today being a public holiday, the go-go bars might not be open, so last night was our last opportunity to do this before leaving Bangkok.

I made myself look pretty (don't ask me why I thought I needed to wear lipstick to watch women inserting and removing objects from their vaginas, but there you have it), and we set off to try to find a taxi or tuk-tuk. Despite my earlier concerns about the "peskiness" - as the guidebook puts it - of tuk-tuk drivers, I was willing to give them a chance. Every evening, when strolling down the Khao San Road, we are assaulted from all sides by tuk-tuk solicitors offering to organise us transport to "Ping-pong show!", so I reckoned that if we were going where they wanted to take us, there would be less opportunity for attempted kidapping or gem scammery. How wrong I was.

We could not have been more clear to our tuk-tuk driver. We wanted to go to Patpong; the area famed for go-go bars. The driver even clarified whether we wanted Patpong "ping pong show" or Patpong "night market" so after confirming the former, feeling like horrible, dirty, exploitative, western pigdog sex tourist, I think I can be forgiving for assuming that we were on the same page. I was further reassured by his friendly enthusiasm when we said we were from South Africa, and he cried out joyfully "hakuna matata!"

We were delivered to the front door of a rather dodgy looking establishment, into which gray-haired yoda-like, but far more sinister, men in suits hurriedly tried to usher us for an exhorbitent fee. I had been expecting this, as it seems that no tuk-tuk driver is immune from commission scams. As we tried to disentangle ourselves from the Star Wars contingent, our driver even tried to spin us the all-too-familliar yarn that all the other go-go bars were closed, and this was the only one left.

We insisted that we would walk around for a bit before deciding what to do, leaving yodas and tuk-tuk drivers alike looking rather forlorn behind us. It turns out though, that we weren't in bloody Patpong after all. Just some go-go bar that wasn't even in the area. Numerous passing tuk-tuks stopeed to tell us that the way we were heading had no bars and no clubs, so when one finally told us where Patpong was and offered to take us there for the reasonable fee of 10 Baht, we gladly accepted.

This one even had the good grace to show us around the area before depositing us at his commission gig. "This way, boy bar, this way girl bar". Feeling way too sleazy to ask directions to another bar (turns out I'm not cut out for sex tourism, who knew?) we accepted the going rate, and entered a dark hole, pumping bad techno-pop.

We got the whole show. Any legend I'd ever heard about go-go bars was realised before my eyes. Cigarettes were smoked by vaginas, water was drunk and then coke was expelled (don't ask me how), ribbons, flowers, good Lord - razor blades, bottles were opened, pictures were drawn, bananas were shot across the stage and balloons were popped with a blow-dart. They really do it all.

At one point, a rather pretty Thai girl lost control of her ping pong balls and had to go rummaging among the audience's chairs for them. She was searching in altogether the wrong place, and berating some clients for hiding the thing, while it glistened near my foot, so I called her and nudged it in her direction with the toe of my shoe, fearing for the hygene of my toes. She, however, had no such compunctions, and popped the ball straight back in and went on with her act.

I have never felt particularly strongly about the exploitation of women when it comes to strip clubs, but this took things to a whole new level for me. There is nothing pretty about watching a woman put things up herself. It's like watching someone insert a tampon. It's not sexy, it's not aesthetic and there's no point to it at all beyond the shock value of what she's doing. I felt terrible for these young women who have to make a living out of such degrading acts. And I was very worried about the razor blades.

Tomorrow, we head on to sukothai, and tonight we meet Anton and Diricia, who I know from South Africa. It will be nice to talk to people who aren't in the service industry or con artists.

Ter

Day 4 No go-go

So much to say. Where did we leave off. Temples and scamming tuk tuk drivers. No more temples but lots of scamming tuk tuk drivers. We went to a go-go bar last night as is the want of most tourists in Bangkok. Who would have thought it would be so difficult to get there? Our tuk tuk driver promised us we wouldn't want to eat bananas in the morning if we went with him, so we went with him. Kidnapped I tell you. We are dropped off in front of some dodgy looking bar on a dark street with nothing else going on. An aged looking man beckons us to come in and our driver assures us we are in the right place. We boldly decide to look around. We find another driver who tells us we are not in Patpong but he will take us there. He warns us that there is only one go-go bar left in the whole of Bangkok. Fortunately he knows where it is. We agree and he whisks us off to the area he has promised. There are lots of sex clubs strewn around girls and boys who look like girls smile seductively. Or driver deposits us outside a dodgy looking building. An aged man (do men get more perverted with age, or is it business acumen)  beckons us in. The club is one of those horrible rooms  in a backdoor down a flight of stairs kind of places. The drinks are over priced and the audience is a mix of hustled backpackers and the really sorry end of sex tourists. Who would want to be a regular in a place like this? The show itself is tradgic in the extreme. The girls all look as if they would rather be somewhere else, which of course they would, but there is no attempt at professional duplicity, so the illussion is shattered from the start. The gave us everything, smoking cigarettes, flying ping-pong balls, razorblades (the most unsettling), darts and balloons (the most entertaining), A girl on girl thing which I think was suppossed to be a lesbian sex act but it was more like two cats cleaning each other.  We even had some hetro sex. A kind of rotating sexual display machine as two people move through as many positions as the can without removing the guys cock all in two minutes.  So we did what had to be done but for me it was sad and empty.

Friday
Today we went to the floating market. Another tourist trap filled with curio stores and over priced souvenirs. Going on the river was pretty cool though unfortunately we had to spend two hours driving to get there. Our hotel in Bangkok is five minutes from the river.  
Saturday
We left Bangkok for Phi-lok today which is forty mins from Sukhothai. For those that don't know there are some supposedly amazing ruins there. We took the train, not to much to say about the trip. We were given a rather bland danish to eat and Georgi tells me that squatting to wee in a moving train is 'complicated.' Tonight we are going for dinner on a river boat should be good will let you know. We are staying in the youth hostel which is rather delightful. It's all carved wooden buildings and bamboo hamocks. Promise to post pictures of everything soon.
Having a stunning Saturday Night.
Georgi:
Absolutely and completely charmed by our Phi-lok (as the locals call it) guesthouse. Rooms are nestled in a jungly garden amid disintegrating ruins of wooden houses on stilts with stairways leading up to nowhere and vines hanging everywhere. Rooms are filled with crumbling antiques, and floors tiled in marble. So happy after dull, functional holes in Bangkok.
And the people here are so nice. The tuk-tuk driver charged us fairly for our trip with no bargaining and took us straight to our destination - no kidnapping and textile factory madness. Hooray!

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Photos / videos of "charming":

These Gods! At the floating market Phitsanulok crumbling youth hostel Cute couply photo in youth hostel
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