Lost Horizons

Holiday, Day 1

First thing, yesterday morning, I got a phone call from Peanut, asking me to wait at Bangkok Airport for two hours, and then we would travel to Pattaya together. It seems she had to do something that meant she wouldn’t get to the airport till after 6pm. Having explained to her that I wanted to go straight to Pattaya, and that I would have had enough of airports by the time I get to Bangkok, she insisted that she couldn’t travel to Pattaya on her own. I was not a happy chap when I put the phone down, but it wasn’t going to ruin my holiday.
Anyway out to the airport; bought some cigarettes, a memory stick (they’re selling 4GB sticks now, how long ago was it they we 256MB?) and went into the bookstore to pick up some reading material. The bookstore was fairly busy, and there were quite a few staff working, but only one girl working the till, although there were a couple of staff hanging around the counter, they didn’t appear to be contributing to the process of selling books. The checkout area is a round island, so its hard to form a queue, but it seems there was one, and that I had stood in the wrong place. I was told in quite an assertive manner that I was stood in the wrong place. It was then that I realised that the store didn’t want to sell me books in a timely manner so I left the checkout, put the books back near where I had found them and left the store. One of the girls chased me, as she thought that I had taken the books – I think she was disappointed that I hadn’t. After that I sought refuge in the business class lounge near the gate – I wasn’t flying that class, but its one of the privileges of being a member of a frequent flier club.



The flight was uneventful, apart from the fact that it was almost full, it was very bumpy leaving Hong Kong, and the fact that we arrived fifteen minutes late. This was due to four people deciding not to join the flight, and of course their luggage was in the most inaccessible part of the hold.
Arriving at the new airport in Bangkok was very straight forward, this time. There was quite a long walk between the gate and immigration, and the single smoking room enroute was too small for all the people that wanted to use it. Immigration was straightforward, but the girl carefully counted all my Thailand entry stamps to make sure that I hadn’t exceeded my quota of three in six months – that’s something I will have to watch out for in the future.
I decided to splash out on an official airport taxi to take me to Pattaya; all things considered, it was probably a good move. Nice clean Isuzu 4WD thingy (I don’t know much about cars) with seatbelts, I was able to smoke and when we reached Pattaya the driver phoned the hotel to get directions, and managed to navigate there with ease. Just a couple of shortcomings:- towards the end of the journey, the driver was getting tired, and he had a tendency on the highway of driving far too close to the vehicle in front of him. It just made me a little concerned that, despite all the hype of the taxi company that they were the safest, that perhaps this statement was a piece of flexible marketing.
The hotel seems fine, nice big suite, clean, and free wireless access, so I needn’t have bought that memory stick after all. After a while Peanut calls and says she is in Pattaya, but that no one knows where my hotel is. I get one of the girls from reception to talk to her and just after nine o’clock she turns up. She is very happy that I have shaved my beard off, “ooh, you are so handsome, now”. I am always a sucker for a bit of flattery.
After a while we headed down to Walking Street – I don’t know Pattaya, so it seemed a good a place as any to start. First priority was some food, so we went to a seafood restaurant, and I let Peanut over order for us. Some roasted salted fish, crab casserole with noodles and green chicken curry was served. The food wasn’t brilliant, but it was nice, and did what it was supposed to do satisfy my hunger. After that we walked along the street. Peanut said she thought it was “oh, so long”. Most of the bars seemed to be showing the FA Cup final, and didn’t seem to be bothered about attracting other customers. I decided that I wanted to go to Angelwitch gogo, as I had at least heard of the name before. One of the great things about Peanut, is she is quite happy to go into these sorts of places, and not sit there like a dried prune, she likes to watch the girls dancing as well!
When we got in there, the B team were dancing on the stage; and then I spotted the dreaded ping pong balls. The idea of these is that the customer buys pingpong balls at a few baht each, and throws them to the girl he likes, she catches it and exchanges it for money, and the ping pong ball is recycled. If the girl doesn’t catch it there is a mad scramble by the other girls to retrieve the ball, witch can be amusing the first time, but after a bit it means that they are more intent on collecting ping pong ball than dancing on the stage. On the whole I am against the idea of ping pong balls for the reason I just stated. I also noted that the girls were a lot more undressed than they would be in a gogo in Patong. In fact, there was so much on show that I am sure several laws were being broken.
At last the proper show started, and it was worth watching. I guess there were five or six different acts varying form traditional Thai dancing by naked girls, to more gymnastic style dance. There was one girl who did some amazing things on the chrome poles including sliding down one head first from the ceiling, about five metres. Peanut thought the show went on too long, and maybe, she was right, but I enjoyed it. After the show, we went out and walked a bit further, we tried a more tame gogo, but it was a bit of a let down. Peanut bought some lychees on the street and then we caught the baht bus back to the hotel.

posted by Luke @ 10:15 AM