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Back to Thailand 2001 Back to Home Page
In chronological order: Bangkok 1 - Pictures of Bangkok Ko Samui - Pictures of Ko Samui Ang Thong Marine Park - Pictures of Ang Thong Ko Taen 1 - Pictures of Ko Taen Chiang Mai - Pictures of Chiang Mai Loy Krathong - Pictures of Loy Krathong
This isn't a copy of an email, but I wanted to fill in the gap at the end of the holiday.
Cobbs, Pablo and myself took the night train from Chiang Mai back to Bangkok. On the train we were surprised that there was no attendant walking down the train selling beer as there had been on the train from Bangkok to Surat Thani previously. So I walked along and found that our carriage was right next to the buffet car, where I couldn't help but notice that the railway guards were necking whisky... I ordered 3 beers. The attendant spoke to me, "Next time your friends come and drink here!". The waitress added "Yes - singing and dancing!". No kidding.
I expect it was Loy Krathong, but the whole buffet car degenerated into a drunken party. There was a tinny stereo blasting out a mixture of Euro-disco and Thai pop, everyone in the carriage was singing along, drumming on the tables and the Thais were dancing in the aisles.
There were a 2 Germans (or so we thought) opposite, and of course we had to make sure we had more bottles on our table than theirs (the bottles are not cleared away, because the waiter counts them up to work out how much you owe!). We also arranged our first 6 bottles in a row of 5 and 1, of course. At the end of the evening, the "Germans" came over to chat - they were Norwegians after all. "We tried to drink as much as you but we couldn't."
The celebrations were closed down very quickly at 10.30pm, and we slept a lot better on that night train than the first.
Once in Bangkok we met up with the rest (they flew down from Chiang Mai) and took a nice hotel for our last night. That evening we were all sitting in a restaurant opposite the hotel, totally stuffed from our final Thai meal, everyone feeling pretty knackered. We were wondering what we should do on our last night. I knew what *I* wanted to do - 8 male friends, last night of a stag holiday in Bangkok - we MUST go to a SEX SHOW!!
Finally Matty said "Look, if we don't go, our girlfriends will never forgive us. They'll be expecting us to go - we can't let THEM down." So the 6 of us that weren't feeling ill set off. Our tuk-tuk journey to Soi Cowboy was something from Blade Runner - two tuk-tuks careering through rush-hour traffic for 40 minutes. 12 lane dual carriageways, blaring horns and thick choking petrol smog.
At Soi Cowboy we were dropped off at a car parking lot filled with hostess bars "Come in here boys!" - not what we wanted, and as there were very few customers we had to dodge lots of grabbing hands. We asked one of the hostess girls where to find "a ping-pong show", and she agreed to show us the way. About 200 metres down the road she tried to get us into two taxis and we got suspicious, especially as we had just had a tuk-tuk journey from hell. But we agreed to give it one last go - if we got ripped off again we would go straight home. She put three of us into the first cab, and me, Matty and Dean into the second.
As the bar girl saw us off, she handed me 40 baht, saying "your friend gave me this but I don't want money, I'm just happy to help". So I was given money by a Bangkok prostitute, not to have sex with her.
She was as good as her word, the taxi was exactly the amount she had said and we found ourselves at "Nana's Palace". This was a little ghetto of about 20 clubs crammed into a tiny cul-de-sac. Through twitching curtains we caught glimpses of girls dancing on bars, but it STILL wasn't quite what we were after... "The police have clamped down you know. But try the third floor..." Past some rusty buckets, up a darkened stairwell - and we were IN!!! The club was very similar to Level 3, and we got an excellent viewpoint from the balcony.
At the centre of the club was a little podium with 8 poles, and most of the acts involve 8 girls dancing around the poles doing themed dances, moving round every few minutes like musical chairs. We saw the body painters, the lesbian dance, and the beer sex dance. The girls all wear numbered badges, and if a punter fancies one of them for the night he takes the badge and the girl finds him when she gets off the podium.
A couple of the acts were more interesting and I learned that cigarettes can be smoked without risking lung cancer. I also had a banana thrown straight at me with no hands and as for popping balloons with a peashooter firing little darts, well that really takes muscle control.
The girls mostly looked extremely bored, and the dancing wasn't sexy - I swear some of them were chatting about Eastenders. It was more entertaining watching the punters, who were either disgusting drooling slimeballs or totally wasted and barely able to stand but unable to take their eyes off the podium. I'm not sure which category WE fitted into...
At 1.30am we got 2 cabs back to the hotel. It only took 10 minutes and cost less than the tuk-tuk. That was the end of John's Stag Fortnight, and we'd finished in great style. From Nana's Palace it was back to Blighty, cold and wet.
Let's have just one more bucket!
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