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decreaseMickey Dylan, The Old-Timer - Chapter 1
People will try to tell you that the first farangs to arrive in Pattaya were a group of American servicemen who came from Bangkok in a jeep on route to the war in Vietnam on the twenty-ninth of April, 1961. Wrong. Bill Burns and me had already been getting stoned on the beach under the palm-trees where Walking Street is now for three years before they turned up. If you have the time, I’d like to tell you it has all changed here throughout the years. Back when we first arrived, Pattaya was still known as Thap Phraya, and Christ, it was beautiful. Your typical, wooden-housed little fishing village surrounded by coconut palms with a golden beach that ran into an impossibly blue ocean. Just look at it now. Sois and sois of bars, girls and drunken tourists. A Family Mart or a Seven Eleven store on every corner. Pizza huts, KFC’s and McDonalds. Cafes and restaurants selling everything from a full English breakfast to Turkish kebabs. We made do with barbecuing the fish that we caught off the old jetty over fires on the beach and kao pad kai or a bowl of noodles from the little shack along the dust-track where Soi Buakhoa is now.
If you’ve got nothing to do one day, climb up the hill where the small temple is right opposite The Big Buddha just past the turning to Jomtien. I can’t make it any more with my old legs. What used to be a wonderful view of a small strip of wooden fisherman’s houses along the sandy bay with nothing but trees and grassland behind them is now a metropolis of multi-storied hotels, concrete streets, shopping malls, bars, restaurants and housing estates that stretches for as far as the eye can see. That’s progress for you, I suppose. And the original foundations that this huge city were built upon were nothing but a bunch of Thai bar-girls. You’d better believe it.
That first group of American GI’s went off to ‘Nam and told their buddies what they had found, and before long, more and more servicemen on leave from the Vietnam war together with some of those from the airbase down the road at U-Tapao started coming to Pattaya for their R&R looking for sun, sea and sand and hopefully, a bit of sex. The first big hotel was built — the Nipa Lodge — together with a bunch of bungalows on the beach to accommodate the American servicemen, and more and more bars went up and the girls started coming down from Isaan. The ball had begun to roll.
The locals put their brightly-coloured wooden fishing boats away in the old boatyard where Soi Seven is now, and only bothered to get them out when the GI’s gave them big baht to run out to the nearby islands of Koh Larn or Koh Sak. They concentrated on renting the servicemen deck-chairs on the beach and selling them beer, food and souvenirs — and of course, with them being young men who might very probably die soon — sex. By the early seventies the GI’s were arriving in droves and the tiny fishing village had become a bustling town that largely consisted of small bar-type knocking shops catering to the desires of the American servicemen. The Marine Bar disco was built in the street containing most of the nightlife that back then was then known as The Village. Later this street was dubbed The Strip — and finally — Walking Street, as it is known today. The first disco built in Pattaya was not named for its proximity to the ocean as many people think, but because the owner hoped that he could fill it up with American Marines — and of course, the girls that were going to wait for them there every night. In the first five years of the seventies everyone in Pattaya was making fortunes. Except me and Burnsie, of course. We were more intent on spending ours. We’ll never tell anyone how we got it, though.
On the 30th of April 1975, at 11.30 am, North Vietnamese Army tanks smashed through the gates of the American Embassy in Saigon effectively ending the involvement of the Americans in the Vietnam war. The local business people in Pattaya told Burnsie and me that they thought this was pretty much going to be game over. They prepared to count the profits that they had accumulated and dig out the nets and the fishing boats again, and the bar-girls got ready to disappear back to their ban nok villages. Hadn’t we all fun and made some money, though!
Hey, hey, what was this though? Ex- GI’s started coming back for another taste of those sweet Thai bar-girls. Don’t close the bars just yet, boys. And cancel those tickets to Korat and Khon Khaen, girls. Maybe it’s not all finished after all.
Then came the first German tourists. Then came some more. And some more. And some more. Hang on! These guys spend up big! Forget the GI’s! Chuck up some German bars quick! The Hasenstall. The Wunderbar. Ich Liebe Dich Bar. The Germans started opening bars themselves now with their Thai girlfriends and Bratwurst mit Brot and Wiener Schnitzel started going on the menus and all the bar-girls started to learn how to speak German.
By the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties portly, middle-aged German male tourists were arriving in Pattaya in veritable divisions. More and more hotels went up to cater for all types of budgets and some of them even offered a girl thrown in as a special incentive. Not that there was any shortage of girls at this stage. The strip was busier than ever before and more bars had sprung up along Soi Eight and Nine and even the outlying areas of Jomtien and Naklua were beginning to get going, as well. Men of all nationalities started to come to see if the Thai girls were all they were cracked up to be (and they were), the English, Scandinavians, Dutch, Australians and just about every other nationality of farang male started coming in numbers and vying with the Germans for the attentions of the bar-girls. That was no problem. There were enough to go around, and there were always plenty more up-country waiting to come down. It was very rare to see a farang woman at this stage of the game though, and a white woman walking the streets of Pattaya would cause quite stir. Arabs took over a section of South Pattaya and opened their own bars where they played strange music and smoked stinking hookahs. Boy’s Town sprung up for the gays.
In the early nineties it looked for a while as though the bubble might burst. Pattaya started to get a bad name. According to the media, everyone had AIDS and child sex was rife. Thai girls were supposedly being sold into Pattaya bars by their families against their will. Bar-girls were apparently robbing unconscious tourists after sending them to sleep by rubbing sleeping potions on their nipples. All this seemed totally bizarre stuff to the residents of Pattaya who read all the newspapers in open-mouthed astonishment. The happy seaside town began to acquire the completely undeserved reputation of being a depraved, disease-ridden degenerate’s paradise. A lot of what was written and reported was nonsensical, sensationalist shit dreamt up by journalists who had never even been to Thailand. Even so, it began to affect tourism badly. Any lone male going to Thailand and especially Pattaya for their holidays was suspected as very probably being a child molesting pervert, or at best some kind of a weirdo.
In the mid to late nineties the truth began to come out. Burnsie always said that the Internet had a lot to do with the resurgence of Pattaya and he may well have been right. The Costas of Spain and the Canary Islands had become rather passe by now. Leonardo Di Caprio’s movie “The Beach” was released, and suddenly everyone wanted to come to Thailand. The secret was out. And why not? Like me, Burnsie, and several thousand American servicemen and German holiday-makers had known for the past forty years, and despite what the rest of the world seemed to think, Pattaya and Thailand never had just been about sex tourism. The people are friendly and tolerant of foreigners, it is safe enough if you behave yourself, there is loads to do and plenty to see, everything is ridiculously cheap and the food and the weather are great. In fact, it had always been a mystery to me that it took so long for the hordes to find it. Despite what the newspapers had told us during the last decade, it also appeared that thanks to condoms, the wonders of medical science and sheer (although probably necessary) terrorism by the media, the entire population of the world was not quite ready to be wiped out by AIDS after all. Oh, and when you are here, try to find an under-age girl around the Pattaya bars. You’ll have to look bloody hard — if you can spot one at all.
So now the millennium year has passed and there is no looking back. Thailand has become trendy. Thai restaurants are giving the ubiquitous Chinese a run for their money in many countries. Families are finally coming to Pattaya — and they love it. Cheap deals on package tours are increasingly popular. You can go home and tell your friends that you’ve seen beautiful temples, crocodile farms, Thai boxers kicking the shit out of each other, transvestite shows, and beautiful dancing girls with long brass fingernails and golden flowers in their hair. Saffron-robed monks, flashing neon nightlife, toned-down sex shows, elephant rides, jet-ski riding, para-sailing — the list of things to photograph and boast about goes on and on. Wow, exotic, man. And that’s before you’ve even mentioned some of the best golf and fishing in the world. And the girls of course. They didn’t go anywhere. They’re still here. A little smarter than they were in the old days, a little more street-wise — perhaps even a little greedier — but still most definitely here.
It seems that the English tourists have taken over these days. Forget Spain — or indeed anywhere in Europe — apparently the mysterious East is where it’s at now. A home from home in exotic Pattaya. Eat bangers and mash, an all day breakfast, or a Sunday roast followed by apple crumble with your Thai girlfriend whilst watching elephants walk by. Ride a songthaew past a gaudy, golden temple for a beer down at The George And Dragon, The Kings Head, or even The Dog’s Bollocks. Watch live premier football while the stall outside sells roasted beetles and crickets to homesick bar-girls. What a mix! Internet cafes have sprung up everywhere. The bar-girls are all yapping away on their mobile phones and opening hotmail accounts. Hello, teelac! Please send me some more money because my young sister needs new schoolbooks, the roof is leaking and the buffalo is sick again! When I look around me, I find that the amount of hotels and bars is now almost beyond belief. There is no doubt now that our previously sleepy little fishing village has arrived as a mainstream tourist destination.
Memories. Swimming in the previously clear blue water of the bay and fishing for big yellow-spot off the old wooden jetty. Barbecuing them under the wooden, thatched umbrellas that stood along the quiet beach. Fifty baht bar-fines and no more than two hundred for the best beauty in the bar. Rusty old tractors pulling the coloured fishing boats on trailers down to the boatyard at the end of the day. Shitty little eighty baht rooms and cold water showers. Playing football on the grassland along the Beach Road. Sharing bottles of Mekhong whisky mixed with coke at rickety tables outside dingy, wooden shops. Kids playing takaw in the street. All the bar-girls getting excited and screaming when a huge US Navy ship appeared out in the bay. Crew-cut young servicemen taking over the village for three or four days. Old elephant woman — the Queen of the beggars — walking round the bars and scaring the shit out of all the tourists until they gave her money to go away. Impossibly cute little toddlers running around and getting under your feet selling roses. Not having to worry about getting flattened by a songthaew or a coach every time you crossed the road. Fields and trees where Soi Buakhoa is now. The Rolling Stones. Credence Clearwater Revival. The Eagles. Even the bloody Bee Gees. Sit down at most of the bars in Soi Eight now and you’ve got so many different techno and gangster rap songs assaulting your ears at once that you can’t tell that the music is mostly crap anyway. A different world.
I’ve said enough about the old days, and I can sense that you’ve had enough of my reminiscing now. “So why don’t you naff off home, then Mickey, if you don’t like it here any more — you miserable old sod,” I hear you say.
Well, I’ll let you into an old man’s secret and tell you. All the farangs who have stuck around for any length of time know old Mickey Dylan — after all — he’s been here forever. They all know that he is far too canny and smart to have ever been caught out and fallen in love here like so many of them do. Many of the bar-girls tell me that they think that I am chai dam because I “never love Thai girl same other farang .” Not so. The truth is, I did lose my heart all those years ago to a beautiful young Thai lady, and the reason that I will never leave here is because I still love her and I always will no matter how old, ugly and brazen she becomes. And her name? You’ve guessed it — she’s called Pattaya City.
(End of Chapter 1.)
Peter Jaggs
© Peter Jaggs. All rights reserved by the author.
ISBN: 974-94985-4-2
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May 11, 2008, 20:36
In January of 08 during the daytime on the 2nd Road end of soi 15 there was a sidewalk display of photographs of Pattaya in the old days.
The beach used to be snow white. And I would like to think that a woman would have been more Siamese than Thai. If only I had known. I missed my chance at happiness.