After three weeks in sunny Ireland we set off to Thailand on our way back to Australia. The purpose of my trip was to have my dental work done there (cheap and thorough), but of course I also wanted to witness first hand the lady boys, ping pong shows and a bit of Thai culture. The latter was the one I am sure I did not see! Anyway, when you are in a place like Patong or Phi Phi Island you cannot expect too much other than the touristic shit. But guess what? I fucking loved it anyway!
On our first night there we went down to the famous Bangla Road. We met some mates and got lost in the craziness! This place is truly like something out of the Hangover movie.. Anything goes and anything could happen! Rules & laws? Pfft. The Thai’s don’t care about that! You can still smoke absolutely everywhere.. If you do happen to see a no smoking sign its quite a shock. There are men in the streets with pet Lima-looking-things that charge you to have a photo with them, there are 6,000 people basically begging you to come to a Ping Pong show.. “Very sexy girl! You come, you come! Very sexy!”
There is no way you can get bored in a bar in Thailand.. If one of the skimpy waitresses isn’t feeling you up, there’s a dancer to look at, a game of Jenga to be played, or an old man dirty dancing and grinding up on his 25 year old Thai girlfriend. Non stop entertainment!
We didn’t shop around for our Ping Pong show. I am sure there are some better than others, but when we decided to go we said we would choose the first person that shouted it at us. We got about 3 metres! We followed this man up the street, up some stairs and into a small, seedy looking bar with a stage in the middle. We were told it was free entry, but had to pay 900 Baht for a beer, which is about $25! It was the slowest I have EVER drank a beer in my life and boy was I parched!
At first they just did a few dances and then did some things with volunteers from the crowd. At one point they asked for a volunteer and I dobbed my boyfriend Mark into getting up there. He loves doing shit like that so he was stoked when I not only approved, but suggested it! They got him naked, put a towel over him and laid him on the middle of the stage. Then the 3 Thai girls massaged him with their boobs.. In very inappropriate places! The girls kept looking over to me and checking if I was OK with it all, which I thought was kinda nice. I couldn’t stop laughing! I was waiting for the towel to raise around his pelvic area, but fortunately for him it didn’t! I’m sure he was thinking about grandmas or something. :p
After a while they finally did some ping pong action. One girl shot ping pongs out into a glass of water. Another pulled a string with razor blades out and it must have been over a metre long… It just didn’t stop coming! Another blew a whistle out of her vag. Out of the 2 hours we were there that’s pretty much all we saw along with a few stupid dances. Yes, it was an experience, but when paying $25 for a beer I expected a bit more insane action!
I was so dead set on getting a tattoo that night, as I usually do when drunk in an insane party country. Mark generally steers me away from things like this and wouldn’t let me. So, I was trying to find a bar that had a tattoo parlour next door and sneak out leaving the boys there! How I thought they wouldn’t notice me gone for all that time is beyond me! Anyway, I didn’t succeed and went home tattoo-less… Which is probably a good thing!
We spent a few crazy days in Patong going to the beach, enjoying our beautiful hotel and attending horrible dentist appointments. My 4 front teeth were all shaven down and I had temporary fillings on them until I’d get my veneers 5 days later. So, we decided to go to Phi Phi Island in our spare days.. Only problem was, if I lost my fakeys over there I’d be almost toothless! EEEK.
We decided to go for a few nights as we thought it would be quiet there and a few days were more than enough. How very wrong we were! The place is insane! The little town is a busy, crazy little village type place selling souvenirs, tattoos and massages of course. Once you get onto the beach you experience the crystal clear blue waters, white sand and activities galore. We hired a canoe and paddled out as far as we could. It was absolute bliss. That night we went for dinner and shortly after I was ready for bed. But, like I said before, you can NEVER be bored in a bar in Thailand. Going out for “one” will definitely not end until at least 12. So we went to a bar that was playing the English football.. Now that part was boring, but in the middle of the bar was a boxing ring and not long after we arrived the boxing began.
I thought it was going to be professional boxers, but instead it was people from the audience volunteering and then another audience member was to challenge them. I must say the girls were the funniest… and feistiest! One girl repeatedly punched another one after the round was over. Crazy!
So, after wanting to go to bed, I became super pumped and then we went down to the beach bars. We didn’t even know where we were going.. Someone said they were going to Slinky Bar so we followed the crowd. We got there to realise this place was a full-on glow stick, sex, drugs & rock n roll party town! There were people dancing on narrow beams at least 3 metres high with nothing but a crowd to catch their fall, there was a skipping rope on fire for people to jump in (I did… all the practice in primary school paid off), there were Thai guys painting people in glow paint, there were buckets you could buy to mix your own concoction of a cocktail.. There was just madness everywhere! So, we got painted, we got drinks and we partied! The bars are literally on the beach so you are dancing with waves crashing into your legs. Guys also think this is a urinal and at any one time there were at least 5 guys pissing straight into the water. No need to wait for a full moon party at a place like this! Its a 7 days a week madhouse!
The next day we went on a snorkeling tour that took us to Monkey Beach (literally full of monkeys), Maya Bay (where The Beach was filmed) and a few snorkeling spots along the way. Unfortunately Asia seems to disagree with my bowel movements and I thought I was actually going to shit myself on the boat. Haha. I thought ‘wow, this will make for a great blog’, but luckily I managed to make it to the island and now can write and say “almost”!
Maya Bay was beautiful, but what puts a downer on it is the 60 boats pulled up to the beach and the 1000 tourists strewn across the sand. If I had have known I would probably have paid for a taxi boat there earlier in the day. Anyway, it was still beautiful and I can see why they used this beach for the film. Our boat driver/guide was probably the rudest man I have met in all my travels. We would pull up somewhere and he’d say “SNORKEL! 10 MINUTE.” We all just ended up laughing at him and mocking him under our breath for most the day. Not that it mattered seeings he didn’t speak more than 3 words of English.
Actually in generally I found most Thai people to be very rude & demanding and their English was terrible! The Philippines, for example, had some of the friendliest people and everybody in hospitality spoke amazing English. The only time we had good service was at little bars with barmaids looking for some fun or the massage parlours.
After a few full on days on Phi Phi we went back to Patong for the last 5 nights and the rest of my dental work. This time we stayed at a little guesthouse right in the centre, which was great. It didn’t have a pool so we’d sneak into fancy hotels and use theirs, when we weren’t at the beach. We had a few days of pure relaxation and then after dinner one night we said we would go to a new little bar for “one”, which turned into a stumble home at 3am! We sat at the bar playing Jenga for hours against the barmaid and randoms who were there throughout the night. After 2 full days in the dentist my teeth were finished (and looking amazing) we then had under 2 days left before coming home. So, for our last 24 hours we hired a scooter to cruise around Phuket. I wish we had have done this from the beginning! It was so, so cheap and one of the funnest days I’ve had in all my travels! It cost around $10 (this was without bartering) and we used a quarter of a tank in 24 hours (and we went everywhere!) It cost about $3.50 to fill the tank. Super cheap, super fun! I didn’t want to stop riding for the whole day. I absolutely love the wind in my hair, the insane Thai roads, weaving in & out of traffic and stumbling across the most amazing places you wouldn’t see otherwise. On the first morning we got lost in some hills just cruising along the viewpoints and past small villages. We ended up at a place called Paradise Beach.. and yes, the name tells truth! It was truly stunning. Again, it would have been better if there weren’t a million people there, but at least it was still quiet, there was no one trying to sell you sunglasses or fireworks or pester you to go jet-skiing. Its these kind of places you wish were in your backyard!
It is in Thailand you see more boobs on the beach than anywhere in the world, where G-string bikinis are more common than not, when wearing speedos is “cool” (never seen so many speedos in my life!!), where every second tourist is Russian and can’t even say “thank-you” in English, where there are Russian shops and restaurants and the Thais even speak some, where mail order brides are the norm and there are way too many old men with a few too many buttons undone on their Hawaiian shirts. But who wouldn’t want to go to a country where you can have fish suck the dry skin of your feet? Or a country where there are more tattoo & massage parlours than banks. Where snakes jump out of the trees and elephants share the roads with cars. Where you can buy fresh made crepes with Nutella on the street.. In fact, fried chicken, pork ribs, watermelon, mangoes, fish, crab, lobster.. Pretty much anything! Where you don’t have to leave your beach chair for anything apart from swimming; beers, hot food, cold food, ice creams, clothes, knick knacks. Where there is a bar that has a surfing pool inside it. A country where the woman working at the massage parlour thinks its OK to yell out “Hey, chocolate man!” at the black guy walking on the other side of the street. A COUNTRY WHERE ANYTHING GOES! Who wouldn’t want to? Not me.
