Stickman Weekly, March 2, 2025

 

 

Mystery Photo

Last week’s photo was taken beside the main entrance in to the lobby of the Nana Hotel. This is without a doubt the best-known hotel amongst Stickman readers yet only a relatively small number of you got it right…which perplexed me. Maybe the angle of the photo – taken outside the main entrance and looking back towards the soi with Nana Plaza in the background confused some of you?

This week’s photo is taken in a central area and very much in what I call the Stickman zone. No clues beyond that because I think anything more than that would give it away. Apologies that the photo isn’t as sharp as I’d like it to be.

 

 

Stick’s Inbox – The Best Emails From The Past Week

The cleanup that wasn’t.

As is so often the case in Thailand and elsewhere, a cosmetic “fix” and all is forgiven? No-one else seems to be reporting on this. What you want to do is find a list of health hazards associated with sewer water. I assure you it’s more than Leptospirosis, although that one ain’t good.

When the night tax payment is missed.

People seem constantly puzzled about the authorities not cracking down on the African working girls and African drug dealers around Sukhumvit. I bought a drink and chatted with an African honey for a while. She claimed that a representative of the boys collected 500 baht off each of them. Every night. I wonder if the round-up you mention has been selective?

A work-around to access the latest column.

I use Firefox as my web browser here in the US and I too have not been seeing a link to your new column on the home page the last two weeks when I check on Saturday night US time. However I have found that if I hit the link to last week’s column, then go back to the home page, the link for the new column will appear. Pretty easy!

Waiing Optimus Prime.

Did you go to the Talat Noi area much? The area has winding sois and troks that are like a sprawling junkyard with tiny shops overflowing with disassembled car and truck engines, transmissions, suspensions etc. It’s common to see creations that artists have made from this junk, transformers or aliens being common pieces. There’s a tiny traffic roundabout near the Sheraton with an Optimus Prime figure made out of junk. Today I went to Talat Noi to see what’s new. Looking at Optimus Prime, standing about 20 meters away and having a private laugh about the whole thing, out of the 7 Eleven behind me comes this 6-foot, 4-inch, 140 pound, drug-addict-looking, tattooed, pale white, male farang transvestite, with a bottle of water. He goes over to the statue, wais, takes off his weirdo Goth black platform shoes, kneels down, offers the water to Optimus Prime, does another deep wai with hands over and behind his head, gets up, puts his shoes back on, and walks right past me with a blank addict expression on his face. I’m thinking no-fxxxing-way! Someone is paying him to do this routine when he sees some tourists looking at the statue. I’m not buying it. And why not? It’s a pretty clever way to draw tourists. It may be effective too. Before we saw this creepy dude I was commenting to my girlfriend that I’d never seen so many farangs down there, not just in the more open sois where there’s always been tourists but in the tiny troks where I’d rarely seen them. I also saw 3 bicycle tours of about 10 – 15 bikes going through. I’m gonna go back and watch to see if the transvestite comes back out to give another offering when some more tourists are looking at Optimus Prime.

 

 

More Readers’ Emails

Bad things happen to good people.

I find it annoying when I read about people who travel without adequate travel insurance, become ill and then beg, via a GoFundMe appeal for other people to pay their medical bills. It’s not difficult to understand that bad things happen to good people and that for that reason it is necessary to ensure that you have a decent insurance policy for the entirety of your trip.

Travel insurance.

Regarding travel insurance, I’ve long felt that you are paying for peace of mind and should you ever need it, the company will point to paragraph 97, subsection C to void it. They are, after all, trying to make money and not spend it. The whole thing of course is not helped by hospitals treating these things like a payday and charging many times what they could if insurance simply didn’t exist.

Double lady drinks.

Regarding the practice of double lady drinks, there’s an easy solution. When a person considers offering to buy a woman a drink, ask how much it costs prior to saying, ‘Yes’. In a Tijuana bar, I have seen men offer to buy a lady drink. They don’t ask how much it costs. Sometimes, the waiter brings a small bottle of wine and asks for $30. (A lady drink beer costs $11.) So, “How much does the drink cost?” <This is, in theory, a good idea. The issue is that asking about the price of a one lady drink makes the customer look like a cheap Charlie, and that can be enough to kill the vibe – Stick>

Thoughts from Sin City.

Jomtien is pretty much full of Eastern Europeans speaking their lingo. Bars just about ticking over. The bar owners I know are complaining. The thing I noticed this trip is the exchange rate. It’s bad and it makes everything more expensive. The Thai baht is strong. Sure, you can still get a meal for 60 baht and take the baht bus for 10 baht. But everything else has gone up. A few hundred here and a few hundred there and your money disappears fast. I’m here with my long-term Filipina girlfriend. We hit the bars just now and then for a couple of drinks. A beer in a bar on Walking Street with a band and no girls was 190 baht. That’s more than 5 Euro. We did not stay for a second drink. There were more staff than customers. I dread to think how much you need to spend as a naughty boy these days. That’s probably why friends of mine only stay for 2 weeks at a time while I’m here for 6 weeks. 4,000 baht for short-time is the same price at home in Amsterdam. Why would I travel halfway around the world for that? There are too many bars on Soi Buakhao for the number of customers. Too many weed shops [I do like small pieces of cake], too many massage shops. Half are empty with no customers. It’s also sad to see so many blokes my age drinking at 10 AM. We were at Cheap Charlie’s for breakfast and many were boozing it up. It’s beyond me.

 

 

This Week’s News, Views & Gossip

A bit after 9:00 PM on Wednesday night, Somchai cut the wrong wire and the top of Soi Nana was plunged in to darkness. For the best part of an hour, all the bars, eateries, stores and other businesses at the top of the soi including the beer bars out the front of the plaza, Dynasty Inn and other businesses went dark. Nana Plaza, however, rocked on, and was unaffected. Power was restored around 10:00 PM.

Long-running Nana Plaza bars Rainbow 1 and Rainbow 2 changed hands this week with the operator of Wonderland, Majestics, Kaboom and Alice acquiring them. Rainbow 1 will continue to be an all-ladyboy affair. It will, however, be tweaked and become a ladyboy cabaret / show bar. Rainbow 2, on the other hand, will revert to being a girly bar. That’s good news but with one Rainbow a ladyboy bar and the other a girl bar, it’s going to be confusing. Would it not make sense for the Rainbow brand name to be used for the ladyboy bars given the meaning of that word these days, and use another name for the group’s girly bars?

The Rainbow 1 cabaret is not going to be marketed on social media, and neither will it be promoted to white guys. The marketing will focus on Chinese tour groups. The idea is that groups of Chinese will rock along to the bar, watch the show, and leave. Lady drinks? Barfines? Not part of the equation. Welcome to the future.

Still in Nana Plaza, Balcony Bunny, the cramped, pokey bar in the space that used to be the Hollywood Inn short-time hotel lobby has closed. I wasn’t a fan and thought it felt more like a single-shophouse Cowboy bar or an upstairs Patpong soi 2 bar. I don’t like to be negative, but this bar was a dud. It stood out as the least enjoyable bar I have stopped by in a very long time. Terrible sound system, cramped interior, awful colour scheme with too much white, and the C team on stage. I can’t imagine it will be missed.

 

 

If you see a middle-aged American near a nightlife area, perched on a box or some other prop to elevate him above passersby, sweating like a pig, holding a microphone connected to a loudspeaker and barking at the moon, congratulations, you’ve just come across the latest in a long line of bible thumpers trying to make you feel guilty for enjoying the nightlife. On Monday night, the fellow in the image above stood atop a fold-out chair out front of the Nana Hotel and delivered a sermon. His catchline? “Whatever you do on Soi 4, it won’t be forgiven in heaven!”

On the ground floor of Nana Plaza, popular gogo bar Lollipop will host a Mardi Gras / Carnival party this coming Tuesday, March 4th. Girls will be done out in fancy costumes. Manager Dennis promises a fun night.

Speaking of Lollipop, there was a nasty accident out front of the bar on Thursday night when a fellow said to be stoned on weed tripped and fell. He smashed his head and made a right mess of himself. Photos from the scene which I have chosen not to publish show the fellow in a bad way. He was carted away in an ambulance.

A new bar usually means shiny new premises and a new sound system. It seldom means new employees – at least employees new to the industry. In other words, a new bar can mean old girls – and with old girls come old tricks. Take note if you stop by Las Vegas where a regular Stickman reader and his friends were presented with a vastly inflated bill this week. 3 fellows stopped by Las Vegas on Soi Nana. They ordered one beer each. They each bought one lady drink. No barfines were paid. Nothing else was ordered. One fellow leaves. 10 minutes later he receives messages from his friend still in the bar saying he has been presented with a 4,000 baht bill. It turns out that ladies sitting at an adjacent table had loaded up on drinks and put them on these fellows’ tab. The girls had never asked and the customers had never agreed. Ripping off locals like this is just plain dumb. They tell their friends, word spreads, and those with an online presence like me write about it. The end result is that the bar gets a reputation for rip-offs and expats steer clear. This is exactly what happened at the Arab’s bars in the day and for going on 20 years, the reputation has stuck. In the end, 2,000 baht was handed over, which was still a rip off. To be clear, it’s not the bar per se behind this – I have no doubt the owner would not be happy – but some errant employees. So why don’t bar owners crack down hard on this? Some do, but ultimately they know that if they push too hard, the girls will just go and work elsewhere. Initial reports from Las Vegas had actually been quite good, but keep a very close eye on your bill or do as some prefer to do, and pay as you go.

 

 

Now you see it, now you don’t! What did this shell in the photo above used to be? It was a small Soi Nana bar with a food menu serving American favourites like burgers, hot dogs, chilli and pancakes. It used to be run by a fellow named Scott who, sadly, passed away a few years ago. It is, of course, The Tavern. One day this week The Tavern was open, and the next it was not just closed, but stripped of all its fittings and furniture. The iconic car license plates were removed. Word is that all of this came about due to a dispute between two partners in the bar and things got nasty. At this stage there are various things being said. Perhaps The Tavern will reopen as The Tavern. Perhaps it will re-open elsewhere with a new name. Or possibly both will happen (with a different person in charge of each location).

The end of April marks the end of the current round of 6-month leases in the CenterPoint soi 7 beer bar complex. This doesn’t mean the end of the bar area, however. Every 6 months, operators are given a new lease to sign. The old Biergarten side of the complex will be given back to the owner with a rumour doing the rounds that a single client will take over the lease. The Biergarten is making a comeback! Sorry, it’s not that. The current rumour is that another Arabic restaurant will be built. The bars that straddle the 2 areas will have to relinquish the space in the Biergarten side. The food stalls on the CenterPoint side have been removed already.

The African drug dealers are back on Sukhumvit, although they’re in much smaller numbers and much less obvious. They’re concentrated around the bus stop between sois 3/1 and 5, opposite The Landmark Hotel. One reader noted that they seemed more aggressive. Another reader noted a lone fellow peddling pills on soi 11.

In Soi Cowboy, Bad Beach (in the space that used to be Lighthouse) has finally opened its second floor. They don’t have dancers up there yet but if you want to take a dancer from downstairs and venture upstairs, you can. To be clear, this is quite different from the facilities available for even more personal liaisons on the 3rd and 4th floors. Bad Beach gets 30 – 35 dancers each night and it is hoped there will be dancing upstairs soon.

Speaking of Soi Cowboy, how many wet spots are there on the soi? No, not that! I’m talking about the leaking sewer pipes problem from recent weeks. It doesn’t appear to be as bad as it was, but it’s still not resolved. Last night (Saturday, March 1st), sewer water was leaking out from below Shadow Ladyboy Bar and along with Bad Beach.

 

 

Following last week’s recommendation for those who are just looking for a naughty and nothing else, I suggested stopping by Annie’s on Sukhumvit soi 7/1 which gets more reports of customer satisfaction than any venue I know of. A friend who is a big fan of soi 7/1 reports that our Indian friends are ahead of the game and making the most of what’s on offer at Annie’s.

Many years ago, an Australian stockbroker in our social group mentioned that he had been lusting after a particular newsreader on Thai television. Through work connections, he was told that he could have some private time with her for 20,000 or 25,000 baht. I remember thinking at the time what an outrageous amount of money for what would essentially be a short-time. Everyone in our group agreed. In last week’s column I mentioned that some gogo girls had profiles on OnlyFans and payouts of 10,000 baht or 20,000 baht are becoming common for ladies who meet men via that channel and who have no experience in Thailand and may not be aware of the going rate. As it happens, my other half used to work in the television industry and knows many of the major stars. I ran the story by her of the horny stockbroker and she wasn’t in the least surprised. According to her, that sort of thing was hardly uncommon. Would that sort of thing be possible today? With the right person, at the right time, probably. But 20K or 25K wouldn’t cut it. You’d need to put a zero on the end to get someone’s attention these days.

The more you hear about Pattaya these days, the less it seems to concern the city’s renowned nightlife. This got me thinking. What percentage of total visitors to Pattaya these days are bona fide naughty boys? If you pulled all of the local expats out of the bars, how many people would be left? For every 100 visitors to Pattaya, would 10% be naughty boys? That strikes me as very unlikely. 5%? Even that sounds much too high. I honestly don’t know what the number would be, but it’s fun to think about nonetheless. If you were to count all visitors to the greater Pattaya area, taking in Naklua, Pattaya and Jomtien, my feeling is that the percentage of naughty boy visitors these days would be in the low single digits. Would it even be 1%?

 

 

Down in Pattaya, I am hearing good things about Fever A Gogo near the top of Soi LK Metro. Some say it’s one of the better gogo bars at this time with lots of pretty ladies.

A friend who spends winter in Pattaya did the rounds of some bar areas this week, including Soi Chiayapoom, Soi Buakhao, Myth Night along with sois 7 and 8. A veteran of Thailand for the best part of 4 decades, he knows the bar industry well and his comments confirm what many have said: bar trade isn’t great. Soi Buakhao aside, most bars had ladies standing outside the bar. Inside the bars? Not many people at all. Soi Buakhao had throngs of people and many bars looked busy. But in all the other sois, he felt the girls looked desperate and many had a look verging on hopelessness. Many bars had no customers, not even one lone punter. He noted that Soi Chaiyapoom had some real rough birds while Myth Night had some attractive ladies. That bar area would have been his pick if he was on the prowl. He made his way up to Walking Street but didn’t venture inside any bars. Whether they were busy or not, he couldn’t say, but Walking Street itself was bedlam with the usual bars trying to play the loudest music and an upbeat party vibe. A few people have been saying much the same – Sin City is still very busy but most people aren’t going in to the bars. Probably the main reason is the change in mix of visitors but there could be other reasons too. Given this was late February (it’ll be March by the time this column is published), that’s a worry. The bars should still be busy at this time. How will bar trade be in a month or two? The bars will be begging for June, July and August to come around. Why’s that? That’s when the Indians visit en masse!

Over the hill in Jomtien, middle-class Russians have tended to congregate further along Jomtien Beach. By that, I mean a good way along and towards the far end, as opposed to the Pattaya end. Today, the Pattaya end of Jomtien appears to have more Russians than previous years. There are lots of Russians in the View Talay building at the bottom of the hill and Hemingway’s, traditionally popular with Brits for food and sport, now gets plenty of Russian customers too.

 

 

Have you been confused in a bar or restaurant when you talk to staff in Thai and they don’t understand what you say, and they look just as confused when you speak to them in basic English too? You know your Thai isn’t that bad, English is your mother tongue and even when you simplify what you’re saying, all you get is a look of confusion. The reason could be that the person you’re talking to is not Thai, but from Myanmar. For many years, bars and restaurants in Thailand have hired staff from Myanmar. Now, it seems there are issues recruiting folks from Myanmar too. The government of Myanmar taxes its nationals on the income they earn working abroad. Apparently, the Myanmar government has asked the Thais to collect this tax on their behalf but no agreement has been reached – with the Thai government rightly saying it’s not their job. I’ve not been able to join the dots here, but I’m told by some restaurateurs that it’s affecting restaurants who employ staff from Myanmar.

For Brits, you’ll soon have another airline to choose from with Norse Atlantic Airlines announcing this week that it will commence flights between London and Bangkok from October 26. There will be 4 flights per week departing Gatwick on a Dreamliner.

One of the classic old hotels of Sukhumvit was the former Windsor Suites on Soi 20. Accor bought it, and planned to transform it in to a Grand Mercure. The plan changed and it is going to become a Fairmont – a luxurious hotel brand part of the same group. There’s still a lot of work to do and it won’t be opening anytime soon.

Following on from the problem of the past few weeks with the server this site is hosted on, please do drop me an email if you experience any problems accessing this week’s column. Some of the server settings have been tinkered with and I am hopeful that the problem is resolved. If a link to the latest column was not showing after 7:48 AM Thailand time – the exact time this week’s edition was published – please do let me know!

 

 

Thailand-Related News Articles

From The Stickman Archives, Arsenal Alex was published on June 9, 2013. The long-winded opener looked at how an everyday Englishman talked his way in to the lives of many of Bangkok’s most successful bar bosses, pretending to be a man of immense wealth interested in buying bars. He socialised with them, met their families and made it in to the inner circle before it became clear this was not a man with means at all, the ruse was up and he had to make a run for it!

A Brit is arrested at Phuket Airport, cocaine falls out of his pocket and he falls to the ground and starts beating his chest!

An American woman is arrested at Phuket Airport about to smuggle methamphetamine to Singapore.

Police successfully stop a 30-year old Brit attempting to jump from an elevated roadway near the main Bangkok airport.

A 60-year old Brit is arrested in Chiang Mai after overstaying his visa by 25 years!

Popular Pattaya bar owner and YouTuber Nick Dean visits Cambodia, and loves it.

A notorious Singaporean hacker who had breached many Thai companies was arrested in Bangkok.

This past Friday, the United States issued a security alert for Thailand.

9 Chinese scammers based in Chiang Rai who had been targeting Americans and Canadians are arrested.

A reward is offered for info leading to the identity of Middle-Eastern looking thieves who stole cannabis on Ko Phangnan.

 

 

Closing Comments

One of the themes in this column post-Covid is the reduction in naughty boy visitors, both in total numbers but particularly as a percentage of overall visitors to Thailand. Once upon a time  it felt like so many visitors were naughty boys but that really is the very distant past. As I wrote in the body of the column, nowhere can this be seen as clearly as Pattaya where, today, naughty boy visitor numbers are dwarfed by most other groups. As for visitors to Bangkok, what percentage would be naughty boys? By that, I mean those who are travelling at least partially for the nightlife and they actually partake / avail themselves of paid companionship. The percentage has got to be really low. But how low? 2%? The reason I find this interesting is that when naughty boys made up significant number of visitors, it normalised what they got up to, to an extent. When the percentage of naughty boys drops to low single digits, they are very much outliers. Have things changed or is this all in my mind? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Your Bangkok commentator,

Stick

 

Stick can be contacted at : stickmanbangkok@gmail.com