The Boulevard of Broken Dreams

It felt like a lucky escape. Back in Bangkok, some 36 hours after we left, both Brigid and I looked at each other — over a much craved drink or five — and said simul­ta­ne­ously ‘thank god’.

It was Pattaya.

It was hell on earth. And we spent a night there (on business).

Everyone’s heard of Pat­taya of course. Some 180km south-east of Bangkok, the town was more or less cre­ated by the US air­force dur­ing the Viet­nam war when they plonked a giant B-52 base close-by at U-Tapao, which in turn quickly led to a vast red-light dis­trict beyond the gates.

I was talk­ing to Dad today about this and he said that, noto­ri­ously, in his air­force years it was often noted that most US mil­i­tary estab­lish­ments around the world come with this happy bonus for the sur­round­ing town — whether they want it or not. In the case of Pat­taya it seems to be the gift from Richard Nixon that keeps on giv­ing and giv­ing. Forty years after they stopped plas­ter­ing kids and ham­lets with high explo­sive, agent orange and napalm, Pat­taya remains a den of inde­fin­able awful­ness where, so the guide­books say, some 100,000 sex work­ers, and oth­ers employed in the indus­try, live or earn a liv­ing in this town of about a million.

And it’s easy to see why, once Uncle Sam turned what was once a sleepy lit­tle beach­side vil­lage into a giant car­nal ser­vic­ing machine for the 2 mil­lion or so GIs that fun­nelled through Thai­land between 1967 and 1975, it grew to become the happy hol­i­day resort it is now. The answer is the roadway.

Thai­land was smart. It was prag­matic. Once it became clear that the USA was going to use them as a large air­craft car­rier and R&R des­ti­na­tion to sup­port their deadly free­dom machine the Thai gov­ern­ment deter­mined to extract all it could from the super­power over­flow­ing with $$$. Thus Pat­taya was quickly con­nected to Bangkok by an eight lane high­way, some 80km of which were raised.

Indeed, as pay­ment for their their com­pli­ance Thai­land got the begin­nings of a vast road­ing net­work (which they built on and today makes NZ’s high­ways look like county tracks) and mas­sive amounts of infrastructure.

Now a sec­ond brand new (Thai built) eight lane motor­way sup­ple­ments that first, US con­structed road­way. 16 lanes there and back.

New Zealand — also US-allied in the same awful and point­less war — seemed to extract an ANZUS expul­sion, and now ACTA and TPP. A lit­tle Thai prag­ma­tism may have gone a long way. Whereas Thai­land took the US for all it could, NZ’s relationship, especially under var­i­ous National gov­ern­ments, seemed and seems to be one of sub­servience and cur­ry­ing for favour. Whereas we’ve bowed and scraped to the USA, Thai­land has, with a wai, lifted their wallet.

And then put that in the past. Ear­lier this year the US asked if they could base a NASA U-2 at U-Tapao — for ‘cli­mate research’ — and the Thai gov­ern­ment declined. The US media hap­pily por­trayed this as an inter­nal polit­i­cal issue, and that was an ele­ment, but the accom­pa­ny­ing real­ity was also clear in the Thai media: we don’t want to go back there again, as the USA tries to mus­cle China. As one TV voice said ‘awful things were done to the peo­ple of Cam­bo­dia and Viet­nam from our lands. Never again’. And whereas in the 1960s and 1970s this was a devel­op­ing nation des­per­ate for infra­struc­ture, it’s now a nation with a stronger econ­omy than most in the west.

But, Pat­taya.

It’s awful. It’s huge and it’s in your face. The beach itself is tragic — almost non-existent in glo­ri­ous South East Asian terms: the region has lit­er­ally thou­sands of fab­u­lous beaches. The deck-chair over­crowded, grey sanded strip is not one of them.

It may be very clean (it is) and largely sew­er­age free (it’s not Kuta), but I can’t for the life of me under­stand why any­one would sit on it. Unless of course your per­sonal resort his­tory is Black­pool or the Crimea. In which case it may be par­adise. It has palm trees, warm water, cold beers are served on the beach and there are girls, girls, girls, and girls who used to be (or still are) boys — all of whom are happy to love you for as long as you are will­ing to pay. Some, indeed many, are also happy to marry you — if you con­tinue paying.

Which takes us back to the strip behind the beach. For 4 kilo­me­tres, and going back at least a kilo­me­tre from the beach, you have sex for sale, and give or take the odd Star­bucks, 7/11 and bank, not much else. Bars with hook­ers, bars with ‘exotic’ dancers, street hook­ers and plain broth­els. With swarms of mostly older men — Euro­pean, Japan­ese, Chi­nese and Mid­dle East­ern — look­ing for what­ever they per­son­ally wanted from the end­less flesh on offer.

Odd­est were the huge Russ­ian fam­ily groups — bring mum, kids, grand­par­ents and extended whanau to Pat­taya where Dad and Uncle Ivan can screw mer­rily until it’s time to get back on the char­ter flight to Vol­gograd. You can see the char­ter planes at the air­port and you can see the kids sit­ting in the open air go-go bars watch­ing while poppa ogles the pole-swingers fin­ger­ing his wallet.

Our hotel had 4 chan­nels in Russ­ian (two in Eng­lish) although this per­haps reflects a global real­ity that Eng­lish speak­ers are increas­ingly a tourist minority.

Many men come and never leave — as above: par­adise — and you can see them in some num­bers in the morn­ing sit­ting in the count­less hor­ri­ble bars suck­ing on a stubby-holder wait­ing for the girls to come back from the night’s work.

I guess it’s easy to get self right­eous about all this — as one observer said, at least it’s in the open, unlike Bali where often hyp­o­crit­i­cal reli­gious mores mean that some 40,000 hook­ers offi­cially don’t exist. And fam­i­lies sell their vir­gin daugh­ters to hor­rific vast sleaze pits in Jakarta, oper­ated — like Bali (and no doubt Thai­land, as they were in many West­ern coun­tries, NZ included, for years) — by the cops, to finance a new patio (as calmly stated by a woman on a har­row­ing doco on Indone­sian TV a cou­ple of years back). You also don’t see the fat older Euro­pean men with pre-teen boys as you do in Indone­sia — although I have no doubt it exists, just not as bla­tantly, and such is pros­e­cuted here, unlike Indone­sia where, again, the cops are implicit in that as procurers.

I sit on the fence on all this (aside, of course, from the under­age sex): many work­ing there are doing so will­ingly, but equally many are not and they are lives destroyed sim­ply to offer plea­sure to our com­pa­tri­ots. That said, sex work and pros­ti­tu­tion are also a part of Thai soci­ety going back far beyond the massed GI arrival and the atti­tude to such things is far more com­plex than any right­eous West­ern outrage.

Mostly I sim­ply find the old Farang men on the prowl ugly & sleazy, and the areas that cater for this trade are much, much uglier than the areas that cater for local trade.

Either way, Pat­taya was and is an awful hell­hole. It’s gath­ers together pretty much all of the most hideous aspects of Thailand’s tourist and his­toric rela­tion­ships with the rest of the world and throws them in your face.

I won’t go back.

Tagged with: Pattaya • Sex tourism • Thailand