The Good Old Days

As I sit here reading the submissions from newbies and old Thai hands my mind drifts back to those halcyon days back in the early nineties when a Singha was 35 TO 40 baht and your girlfriend was yours for 40 dollars Aussie for a real long time as in all
week and the barfine was only a 100 baht. Life seemed so simple then. Of course we got trapped in the Malaysian Hotel in those bloody riots in 92 which near put me on the straight and narrow vowing never to return to Bangkok but I did. In those
days the overhead expressway was still under construction and oh what a mess the traffic was then. Believe it or not we were in a taxi when the traffic boys pulled it over and you’re going to call me a bloody liar but they gave it an emission
test! The driver had to drive it around the block and came back to the starting point. My very nationalistic and caring for the poor people of Thailand girlfriend insisted I tip him 40 Baht for his trouble. While we were there I looked at the
local council workers working on the road filling wicker, yes I said wicker, baskets and carrying the road fill to bigger baskets but I shut up and refrained from asking any more questions.

While we were in BKK and staying at the gawd I loved that sleaze bag of a hotel Malaysian, 500 baht a night and the only hotel I have ever stayed in where on one side of the lobby they had a twenty four hour bar and grill and on the other
side a nightclub that kicked off at 11am and ran through to 6am the next day. Strewth, it was bloody dark in there let me tell you and from the moans and groans in some of those alcoves just as bloody well I reckon, but some of those girls who
got up to sing were bloody lovely, even Dana would have given them 10/10.

If I'm digressing here please bear with me because memories of a time that will never be again are flooding back and I'll try to get them in some sort of order since this is my second go at a submission and that bloody Kiwi Stick
loves putting Aussies in their place.

We'll start at Patpong where in a daze that my mother's idiot son was finally treading the sacred ground of sex tourists all over the world hand in hand with the best bar hostess in Thailand. I know she was because she kept telling
me she was. I walked through the markets and please remember this was the night before those riots started in 1992. Anyway we finished up at the Pink Panther or Pink Pussy Cat I can't remember exactly bar right down the bottom on the right
hand side going down if any old Thaipat can remember it. So we're there and it's quite a nice bar really, the girls are parading around on the bar top and lo and behold they whip off their bikini tops, a mighty roar goes up from the
punters, buggered if I know why as between the lot of them their mammary glands would not make a decent mouthful.

By this time I need to point Percy at the porcelain and ducks into the toilet but no one told me it was communal did they? There were two girls in there, one leaning against the wall chatting to her mate squatting over the hole. Being in
a state of redfacedness I mumbles something starting to back out but the girl with the sigh of relief on her face calls me back to the western throne and asks me if I want a quickie before I go! Laugh if you will but after standing at an open
air bus stop toilet you soon find out your best friend is not an object of curiosity to Thai bargirls. That could be a lead in to Pattaya but not in this one where I stayed in a guesthouse right on the waterfront where the swimming pool was on
the rooftop and there was a urinal open aired for males to use!

It was in that bar I saw the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen grown men do in a foreign country. There were some Aussie guys getting well and truly Brahms and Lizst in one corner of the bar that ignored the bouncer’s polite request to keep
it down. He finished up calling in the boys in brown or in this case one small boy, compared to their size. He was very polite asking them to remember other guests were spending their hard earned here too but these bloody idiots needed their heads
read. One silly bastard grabbed his gun out of his holster and started waving it around yelling out Bang! Bang! The police officer was out of there like a flash and came back in with back up and let me tell you these blokes might be small compared
to us but what they did to them was not pretty nor was it a sight to write home about as they put these big six foot blokes inside a five foot cage on the back of a Toyota Ute. I don't know what happened to them but I reckon broken ribs and
noses were common on the ground in that paddy wagon.

Ah yes those were the days and to my amazement looking back I survived them but I still have more to remember. In fact I'm going back to the photo album right now to get teary over them.

Stickman's thoughts:

That sounds like the days when Thailand really was amazing.