Pattaya trip report, Dec. 2019

[lonelywombat]

Yes, the lack of stairs is certainly a potential issue for some.

I have stayed at east suites before , the only trouble was i had a bad leg ,,and found it too much going up stairs with them not having a lift,,

Not sure what Marsilius means?
My late sixties friend complained there were no handrails for support, which made climbing up or down , difficult.
He will not stay there again solely for that reason.
Location is fine for younger or fitter men

[gerefan2]

QUOTE=aot871;263290]I have stayed at east suites before , the only trouble was i had a bad leg ,,and found it too much going up stairs with them not having a lift,,

Not sure what Marsilius means?
[/QUOTE].

Delete “stairs”....Insert “lift”.?!

[Marsilius]

Quite correct. An unfortunate lapse of consentration. East Suites has stairs but no lift.

[poshglasgow]

Marsilius,

Another excellent report: a joy to read. I suspect you are a professional writer. If not, you should be!!

I look forward to the next report.

[BOY69]

Due to your recommendation changed the booking to East Suites instead of Zing,Is it correct that guests of East sui. Have free access to Zing swimming pool ?

[Old git]

Every field report these days seems to be peppered with comments about where bars used to be, but no more.

Is the bar model broken? Is it that other countries have liberated to the extent that the LoS is no longer such a must-go for gay men? Is it the exchange rate?

- Probably a bit of all three..

The thing that deters me from Thai gay bars more than anything else is the volume and the choice of music that they mostly default to.

- Surely there must be a market for a bar with class and elegance, as well as boys..

[Marsilius]

Just to answer a few of the points raised before I move on - quite literally in fact as a few days in Bangkok are in the offing....

1. Yes, poshglasgow, I am a professional writer - less so now that I am officially retired, but I still keep my hand in with things like reviewing CD and DVD releases on one of the world's largest specialist music criticism websites

2. Yes, BOY69, there are vouchers in every East Suites room or else they are available at the reception desk. Take them with you to the Zing pool, hand them to the attendant and you get free access

3. I think, Old git, that to the extent that it used to be able to find a concentrated location where up to 20 bars were available, the old model has broken. It's a model that, I think, depends on older farang who think, probably correctly, that the quickest and easiest way to hook up with someone younger of the type that they like is in a bar where such young men congregate (if only for access to older farang with cash to spare). The model ought to have been permanently sustainable, given that as the oldest of the older guys die off they would be being replaced by those entering their own older years. That, though, seems not to have happened to the anticipated extent. Until any research is in (good PhD material, I'd have thought) we can only put forward some possible theories. (1) From the point of view of the bars, it might be steep rent increases from greedy and shortsighted landlords, excessive demands for tea money from the police (both those were cited to me by the manager of Toy Boys) or difficulty in recruiting new boys. (2) From the point of view of the boys, there might have been some moral/societal change in the way in which bar work is viewed, there might simply be more economic choices available in more conventional work back in their home provinces - or they may still be marketing themselves to farang but simply in new ways that are more convenient to them and fit in with their generally more technological outlook on life, i.e. via the Internet. (3) From the point of view of the customers, fewer bars means that it is less likely that a night out will produce the boy of their dreams so they may well contribute to the accelerating downward spiral by not going to them - or even coming to Thailand - at all; meanwhile, others may also find the comparatively thriving non-gogo Jomtien complex market a bit vanilla (there's certainly nothing to see that's X-rated) and difficult to navigate compared to the simple and familiar shop-counter cash-and-carry ethos of the tradional go-go set up. (4) Finally, we seem to have entered an age of neo-puritanism where such obvious and overt displays of pleasure must be frowned upon. St Greta of Thunberg would certainly dispprove of all those frivously undertaken air miles, so, quite regardless of the element of paid-for sex, the whole exercise must ab initio be immoral - you should stay home at home and join a lesbian* reed-basket-weaving commune instead. [* A fully-qualified lesbian, as is well known, never travels any further than to the nearest boozer where, after six pints and a packet of Woodbines, she's ready to knock six bells out of her ex-girlfriend's newest squeeze.]

I'm sure there are other reasons why there are fewer bars - those are just some ideas that popped randomly into my head. You may have others of even greaster insight and validity - but please don't use them to derail this thread, as I have plenty more to report on my trip yet.

[Marsilius]

Saturday 21 December

Mrs Rit Mk II is, as I suggested yesterday, probably something of a prototype and a work in progress. After her generally successful trial outing yesterday, however, it seems that she has been judged in need of some slight modification, so today she remained prone with her motor idling at the top of the beach. Neither, I may add, did her husband display much in the way of commercial enterprise – or even of simple energy. He too lounged inertly on a deckchair, not even stirring himself when some item of equipment fell over next to him. Instead he called over one of his waiters to pick it up. Maybe the Rit family are, in fact, androids – which might explain why it’s thought that none of their employees (pace our friend aussie_) are related to them.

You’ll have noticed there that I wrote one of his waiters. The news of the day is that Fuk has been joined by another young man. This one’s a little stockier, perhaps slightly younger than Fuk and has a rather pretty face. His speech is soft but quite fast, so I’m probably wrong in this (and if I am, no doubt aussie_ will correct me in his characteristically staccato fashion) but it seemed to me that he gave his name as Bon. Both Fuk and Bon (as I shall call him, for I sense a neat play on words in the offing) exhibit good customer relations skills: on telling you their own names, they politely ask for your own and then manage to remember and use it consistently. A small touch, but a canny and endearing one. Can the appropriate software be programmed, I wonder, into Mrs Rit?

The interesting new conjunction of names at Rit’s concession offers all sorts of promising possibilities. It occurs to me, for instance, that a new form of verbal greeting might develop. When a friend leaves the beach to go to lunch, one might wish him Bon appetit! to send him on his way. When a farang and a go-go boy have been together for two consecutive days, the salutation Bon anniversaire! might be appropriate, for, given the average length of such relationships, you’re unlikely, after all, to be able to use it on any subsequent occasion. Sending off a miserable farang to the airport might provoke a collective cheer of Bon voyage!. And now we can surely risk the wrath of the Academie Française by adding a novel French expression of our own, a wish addressed to any farang seen leaving Dongtan Beach with a masseur – Bon Fuk! [Forgive the somewhat laboured wit today: it’s hard to keep coming up with top quality gems and you’ll have to accept that they’re occasionally going to be less Ken Dodd than Ken Dudd.]

Anyway, I think we will leave Bon to settle in for a few days before we return to the beach to see how he’s been getting on – even though, at this very early stage, I think I can say, even without the benefit of second sight, that he’s likely to do very well, thank you very much.

That, then, takes us neatly to the ice cream seller, another young man of such considerable charisma and charm that I begin to believe that all such vendors must have passed through the hands of Miss Noi’s School of Modern Etiquette and Manners (cash only; no refunds). You’ll recall that yesterday saw an instance of two steps forward and one step back. Today, on the other hand, I can’t help feeling that we may have taken three steps in the right direction – that direction being ultimately, of course and as you have no doubt already correctly anticipated, the stairs to my room. Well, he is certainly a very shy young man in public. Even though he speaks little and – when he does so at all – quietly, he still seems utterly paranoid about us being overheard. Our preliminary romantic skirmishes took place, therefore, via his phone. It has one of those translation apps built into it, so we passed it hand-to-hand between us. I would take a minute of so to compose as clear, succinct and unambiguous request as possible. I’d hand it to him, wait at least one or two minutes each time and then it would then be handed back. The answers suggested that the app’s software may be based on some long-lost language spoken widely more than a millenium before the fall of Ayutthaya. “Will you come to my room?” “I come work yesterday.” “What time do you finish work?” “Chaos.” And so on… Ultimately, with the phone abandoned in favour of whispering sweet nothings under the cover of Mrs Rit’s gently reverberating snores, we fixed on meeting in Jomtien Complex in the late afternoon. And, dear reader, he turned up! With, I hasten to add, an accompanying bodyguard – though thankfully not a fearsome tom dee [see my post above] - who was to stand waiting outside for the boy’s eventual exit.

With such a nervous young (actually, it transpires mid-20s) colt – and if you are looking for something with more potential than just a quickie – the correct tactic, I find, is to take it slowly. Having enticed him to my chamber of delights (well, air-con and a hot shower seem delightful to most boys after a day’s hard pounding up and down the beach) and with the offer of a generous pecuniary sum in exchange for a demonstration of his old skills as a masseur, I took things very calmly. I lay out a towel on the bed, handed him some cream, pointed out a problem area in my back and settled (completely naked) face down. He, I think, was entirely surprised by the matter-of-fact approach that I’d adopted. He proceeded to give a B++ grade massage, certainly better than you’d encounter from many of the boys on the beach – and he judged my tolerance level for pain pretty well. When I turned over after 30 minutes and he saw that I was not displaying any visible sign of interest (our family is well-known for its remarkable self-control in dangerous circumstances such as these), he seemed mightily relieved and any hint of the tentative or reluctant in his manipulation was thereafter banished. At the end of the hour I and he got dressed (he’d started the job fully clothed and then, as his confidence increased and as the air-con was still as I’d told him not entirely truthfully, malfunctioning, he’d gradually divested himself of clothes down to underwear). He looked both relieved and reassured that I’d lived up to my end of the bargain and it was he who proposed that he’d like to visit me again soon. I have plenty of time left in Jomtien, so I am inclined to keep him waiting a little before purposing some thing like a special massage next time. Let’s see what happens…

In the evening my two friends and I ate at Café des Amis, with the more generous/by far the wealthiest of us picking up the bill (more than £300!). Everyone thought the food was very good (main courses were a steak of wagyu beef, snowfish and boeuf bourguignon) but you pay for the setting as well as the cooking. As my readers are cosmopolitan men of the world, they’ll appreciate knowing that that there’s now a very handsome half Thai-half English waiter who was brought up in Chessington. That’s a town in England famous for an attraction called The world of adventures – so perhaps some lucky farang customer of Café des Amis will one day find himself being offered one? I once offed a waiter from the Royal Cliff Chrysanthemum Restaurant but, as it was via the maitre d’ of the time who was a notorious pimp of his prettier staff to favoured customers, I don’t think that counts. Yes, the new Café des Amis waiter certainly more than passes muster, though it’s still somewhat disconcerting when a waiter at such a place with high end pretensions – usually the most silent, invisible and deferential of creatures – forcefully enquires at the end of taking the order: So that’s all, is it, then, guys?

After our meal, we departed to Boyztown and immediately to Toy Boys. That was once again full of boys – about a dozen were on stage at any one time – and exuded a happy, positive vibe. One of my friends quickly offed his petite Cambodian friend from the night before and headed off back with him on motorbikes to Jomtien Complex: it seems that on their previous encounter the boy had not only participated apparently happily in some of my friend’s more esoteric practices but had been happy to continue so doing until 6 am the following morning.

My other friend and I, meanwhile, decided to make a more leisurely return to the Complex, but finding nothing particular there to excite us, decided on another early night.

[Marsilius]

Sunday 22 December

From today, the tone of the diary of my trip will change a little. That’s because I shall be in Bangkok until Wednesday.

Although I have been to the city, many, many times, I have not set down roots there to the extent that I have in Pattaya. I know no characters there, in the same way as I know them in Pattaya and Jomtien – at least to the extent of being able to characterise them recognisably, I hope, to the rest of you: Rit, Mrs Rit, the straw-hatted boy who yells ice cleam, ice cleam, we all scleam for ice cleam!, before, I am told, at the end of the day climbing into and driving away in an expensive-looking car, the various doughnut sellers, deck-chair boys, toenail-trimming harpies, masseurs, mamasans con-artists and the rest.

In Bangkok, on the other hand, I rarely stay at the same place or visit the same night-time venues regularly, so I cannot expatiate on the particular idiosyncrasies of the city’s inhabitants – other than in the most general terms – in the same way.

In any case, it was late afternoon / early evening before I reached the capital city to await my husband (yes, there really is one – our 32nd anniversary was last month) at the old Sofitel Hotel on Silom Road. It’s now revamped itself, in a gesture to modernisation and in a genuflection to the youth culture, into the Pullman 9. The reception area has become a modernistic stark white (with, of all things, a futuristic cellophane tee-pee set up in the middle for some reason), and if any of the greeters are under 30 years old then I’m a stick of lemon grass. It’s so hip that it may soon be in need of a transplant.

Some of the rooms have been appointed in a similar fashion, with whitewashed walls suggesting that you are sleeping in a gents’ urinal. While some others may find that an attractive prospect or one quite reminiscent of misspent younger days in cottages (or tea-rooms, I believe, to our transatlantic cousins) , we have preferred to rent a more traditionally equipped Executive Suite (great views from the 31st floor, large sitting room with large bathroom off, adjoining a large bedroom with another large bathroom off; breakfast included; free canapés and cocktails in the lounge overlooking the city in the early evening).

We enjoyed dinner with a friend in the Blue Elephant Restaurant, an upmarket establishment that prides itself on producing high-quality traditional Thai dishes. After a complimentary introductory cocktail, an amuse bouche of salmon tartare was followed by a second of a spicy chicken broth over a small piece of chicken. Two of us had starters of scallops with black garlic and an asparagus mousse, while our companion ate vegetable spring rolls (imagine coming all the way to Bangkok for those: I could have had them back home in Bristol!) Our main courses were a wagyu beef Penang, lamb massaman curry and beef cheeks in spicy Thai sauce – each was offered with a choice of steamed jasmine rice or sticky black rice. Desserts were a banana and caramel concoction, Thai-tea-and-coconut ice cream and a platter of fresh mango. We shared a bottle of cabernet sauvignon and finished off with complimentary glasses of a lychee liqueur poured over a real lychee. The cost was about 8,000 baht.

After that, we were ready to look at a few old favourite bars and a few newly relocated ones. We were fortunate to be the only customers in Nature Boys, because anyone who’s been there knows that it can hold no more than about half a dozen customers. There were three boys, all dressed for go-go but none of them dancing, and each immediately attached himself to one of our party. While they were certainly acceptable, chatty and generally amenable companions – maybe for another night? - we moved quickly on to our next port of call, that venerable institution Super A. Surprise! It’s no longer a case of climbing up a rickety staircase, because the place now occupies the ground floor. There were about six or seven boys there, all in street clothes, and just lined up in front of us standing still. There was a notable absence of the screechy queenier types in which Super A used to specialise. I recall recent warnings here about a rogue mamasan and the need to check your change, but the staff seemed perfectly pleasant and the change rendered was spot-on.

From there we passed Tawan (an old favourite but one that lost me as a patron when the young men started wearing masks and destroying, thereby, the fantasy that they are real) and then moved east along Suriwong towards Patpong, the new HQ of gay life, so I’ve read here, in this part of town. The biggest bars seem to be at the Suriwong Road end of Patpong and we sampled two of them. We climbed a short flight of stairs to get into Fresh Boys (I think that was the name – it’s above Screwboys) just as a show was beginning. We saw a big cock show, a candle show, a shower show and a fucking show -a typical night’s family entertainment for the district, so you might say. Going downstairs again to Screwboys itself, our seats made getting a good view more difficult but we could make out yet more big cock and fucking shows, though this time interspersed with songs delivered by kathois of various degrees of self-proclaimed talent. Initial impressions of both bars were that they were efficiently run, had plenty of attractive boys to suit most tastes (erring, perhaps, in the direction of the more muscular type) but were definitely pricier in terms of the cost of drinks than we had been used to in Pattaya and Jomtien.

As our carriages by now awaited, we eventually downed our drinks and, as the dear old News of the World invariably used to put it, “we made our excuses and left”.

[pong]

[QUOTE=Marsilius;263324]Sunday 22 December
From today, the tone of the diary of my trip will change a little. That’s because I shall be in Bangkok until Wednesday.

Me not, Iĺl fly home tonight, on SQ via SIN

But back to your excellent reports and esp. the 4 reasons you described about the bar model slowing going astray. A possible 5th is that the nr of such senior gentlemen on the search for young+willing Thai boys is also diminishing-or slowly dying out. Plus the many other ways that instant bodily contact is now much more easy in the 100s of massageshops without all that fuss of overloud music, pesky mamasans, boydrinks or opening the roombar to be robbed of all Sing bottles, etc. Its also much more easy for guys to work there as they do much less need to stick to all the rules and formats of bars and can do parttime besides study or job.
And yes, the current nr of kids the average Thai women produces is down to 1,6 which thus means that the nr of boys as such is also diminishing quite rapidly. See the influx of Khmer, Burmese and even VNese (Lao are so few that hardly counts).