The Stickman Story Part 5, April 2015 – Present Day: Is This Goodbye?

When someone makes an offer to buy your website, and you know they are genuinely interested and they have the money, you don’t muck around. I was out of the condo right away and made the short walk up the road to the condo where my friend lived. I jumped in the lift, rode up to his floor, walked around the corner and knocked on his door. He opened the door with his usual big grin. We got straight down to business.

This was real and he genuinely wanted the site. He’d expressed interest in it the year before but the timing wasn’t right for either of us. We didn’t need to go over the traffic or discuss the financials. He knew it all already. It was simply a case of agreeing a price and the terms and then having a lawyer draw up a contract.

He knew I wanted 10 million baht for the site but he didn’t want to pay that much. And he didn’t want to buy the site lock, stock and barrel either. He wanted to buy a 67% share and have me stay on as a partner and continue to write the column. That condition was not negotiable. Without my involvement, the deal wouldn’t work.

Right up until that moment, I had a good plan. When I moved back to New Zealand I had planned to put some distance between myself and Thailand for a while. I had told close friends that I would be out of touch for a few months as I set about reacquainting myself with my homeland. But the sale of the site with a condition that I remain involved messed things up and wasn’t ideal.

Mentally, I had checked out. I was still physically in Thailand but my mind was already in New Zealand. If I went through with this deal, my plans would have to change. Of course I could decline the offer. But it was a significant amount of money, far more than any previous offer I’d previously received. I couldn’t say no.

He had a figure in mind. It was acceptable.

Everything had happened so fast and I hadn’t had a chance to give this any thought. The one concern I had was writing the column when I was living in New Zealand. For a few weeks I could do it, but long-term it wasn’t possible. The buyer would get others on board who would feed me information from the bar industry. And I’d have to maintain contact with friends and bar industry figures.

We agreed to terms. The sale would take a bit of time. Songkran was the following week. We needed to get a contract drawn up. Given that I was moving and had a lot on my plate, it would take a month or two. I was ok with that. I had known this fellow for a few years and held him in the highest regard. If he said he was definitely going to buy it, then he would. His word was good.

A couple of meetings took place to get people involved, including a programmer who would migrate the site over to a new platform, and Dave The Rave who would contribute news and gossip. I’ll never forget what Dave said to me on the phone, “Don’t worry, you’ve got a team behind you!”

Just a few days before Songkran, and almost 17 years to the day after I first moved to Thailand, I flew home to New Zealand on a one-way ticket. I was leaving Thailand for good. This was not a let’s see how it goes and we can always come back trip. This was permanent. There was no emotion whatsoever. The decision had been made many months earlier and I was just happy that the time had finally come. Moving home was very much what I wanted.

 

 

Column readers had been expecting the end so I had to explain the last-minute change of plan. The column would continue. The response was mixed. More than a few people commented that it wouldn’t be possible for me to write the column from New Zealand. I didn’t want to tell them that I felt the same. It was a concern.

Back home in New Zealand, I bought a car within a few days and we took off traveling around the country for a few weeks. We returned to Auckland in May and started house hunting.

I was writing the column each week. I wrote a few columns about traveling around New Zealand and included what news and gossip I heard from Thailand. But it wasn’t easy and each week it felt like the column was getting thinner. There was less meat and more waffle. For the previous 4 years I had been living on Sukhumvit and was in and out of all of the places I was writing about all the time. Now? The quality was slipping by the week.

 

 

There was not a peep from those who were supposed to have been brought in to provide news and gossip. It felt like one of those scenes in a movie when someone jumps into a car to speed away, turns the key and nothing happens. I was on my own.

I checked in with the buyer of the site to see where the legal documents were. Instead of a contract, I got a term sheet. Hmmm…..

May passed and it was June, the first month of winter. And then it was July, the coldest month of the year. I was struggling to write decent columns. It’s a worry because if the trend continues you start losing readers. I’d hastily arranged a few advertisers so the site was generating a small amount of income to make it feel like the work I was doing each week was worth my while. I was biding my time for the sale to go through. I’d not heard from my friend and didn’t want to badger him. It started to feel like it had stalled.

House hunting had turned into a nightmare. Record numbers of foreigners were arriving in New Zealand and with the economy booming, New Zealanders like me who had been overseas were also moving home en masse. It was a seller’s market and house prices in Auckland were going up by around $15,000 / month. More than once we had to adjust our expectations and before I knew it the only way we could buy the type of house we wanted would mean living in a less desirable suburb. We started looking further afield.

 

 

We took trips around the North Island and looked at houses in Wellington, New Plymouth, Napier, Tauranga and Whangarei. There were options everywhere but no property really stood out. Was I too choosy or was I procrastinating? I really don’t know.

In August I sent an email to my friend about the site sale. I wrote that I was keen for the deal to go ahead, but I couldn’t wait any longer. It wasn’t an ultimatum, but the message was clear – it’s now or never. The deal had to be done in the next two weeks or I was out. He agreed. It should have been done by now. The contract was complete and I had the green light. I bought a ticket and was on a plane to Bangkok a few days later.

In early September I flew back to Bangkok, 5 months after I had left. I would stay for less than a week. The plan was to sign the contract, get paid, and then rush around seeing people, taking photos and gathering news and gossip for the column.

 

 

The Thai Airways flight arrived late at night and we planned to meet at 10:30 the next morning. I turned up at his condo. He wasn’t there. I called his phone. It was turned off. I messaged him. No reply. I tried LINE. No response. I tried calling him for half an hour. I couldn’t get hold of him. I wasn’t worried, but I was getting annoyed. I’d just flown halfway around the world specifically to meet him to sign off on the website sale…..and I couldn’t get hold of him! He turned up and apologised for being late. I forgot that he is Thai and even the best Thais often have a very relaxed view about time.

We’d already gone over every last detail and the contract was ready to be signed. We could have transacted remotely without the need for me to fly to Bangkok. But it would be a chance to catch up on stuff, hence I jumped on a plane. Once we signed the contract, he would then make payment and as soon as I had confirmation that the funds had hit my account, I would transfer the domain name to him.

We signed the contract, shook hands and it was all smiles. Payment was to be made to an account in New Zealand so he headed off to the bank and I went wandering to see what had changed and to take lots of photos.

A couple of hours later he called me. “There’s a problem.” Those words were not the words I wanted to hear!

The bank was being difficult about making a large international transfer, citing some (probably non-existent) law preventing them from transferring the money. My friend is Thai, his family is wealthy and respectable, and I am surprised he is having such difficulties. He asks me if he could instead make the transfer to my Thai bank account. I’d closed all of my accounts before I left Thailand so that wasn’t possible. But even if I still had Thai accounts, I would have declined. It would have simply passed the challenge on to me to get that money sent to New Zealand. He said he’d try another bank.

A couple of hours later he called to say that he had tried two more banks and they had both said the same, “Cannot!” Even with a contract in hand showing a business transaction, they refused to make the transfer.

 

 

We met in his condo that evening. Neither of us was happy about this hiccup. He asked if he could pay me in Thai baht. Cash. That would be millions of Thai baht, and many bundles of 1,000 baht notes.

“Errr, no, that doesn’t work!”

Can you imagine departing Thailand with many millions of Thai baht on your person? It would be suspicious and besides, there are limits on how much Thai currency you can legally take out of the country.

He had a brainwave – let’s go to Super Rich and exchange it into New Zealand dollars. I knew that even if we went around every foreign exchange outlet in downtown Bangkok the total amount of New Zealand dollars they would all have combined would not come close to the total amount.

What about changing it into US dollars? They always have large amounts of US dollars. And legally, there are no limits to the amount of foreign currency you can take out of Thailand – so long as you declare it. But such a declaration would surely raise eyebrows – and then I’d have to change the US dollars into New Zealand dollars in New Zealand and I’d lose a few percent. That wasn’t ideal either. And besides, I just wasn’t comfortable carrying that amount of cash across international borders. There would be questions both at the point of departure and arrival. I could explain it easily enough and show a contract but even so, conducting deals in large sums of cash is suspicious.

I suggested he get an older female family member to go to the bank the next day and try to make the transfer. There’s something about older people, especially respectable older females. The average Thai often acquiesces to them. He agreed. She went along, and it worked. And best of all, despite the 5-hour time difference – when it’s 9:00 AM in Thailand, it’s 2:00 PM in New Zealand – the money arrived in my account in New Zealand before the close of business that day. I transferred the domain name to him and the deal was done.

 

 

I rushed around Bangkok and for a few days I was a man on a mission, taking as many photos as I could. I stopped by all the three main bar areas and walked through and took notes in the smaller bar areas. I caught up with as many people as I could. Dave The Rave had abandoned Nana Plaza and was managing a few bars in Patpong. I conducted a couple of interviews for column openers, gathered lots of news and had enough material for a handful of column openers. Mission successful!

I returned to New Zealand and for the next 5 or 6 weeks the column went well. But by the time November rolled around it was getting difficult again. I’d used up everything from the trip to Bangkok and it was hard to come by news that hadn’t already been reported. Website traffic was holding up ok but the situation wasn’t ideal. If you aren’t entertaining readers or informing them, they’ll go elsewhere.

At the same time revenue from the site was almost non-existent. It had been my partner’s responsibility to handle the advertising side of things and monetise the site but little was happening. So I was working for little reward. I wasn’t happy about that but I was able to overlook it for the time being as I had received a windfall from the sale.

 

 

My girlfriend had mixed feelings about life in New Zealand. She liked the environment and every day was a new experience. Her English was improving although we still spoke in Thai. She had a work permit and was working in a supermarket. I thought it was an ideal first job. There were a couple of other Thais there, the work wasn’t hard and the money wasn’t terrible. In Thailand she’d always had well-paid jobs and while the money was good by Thai standards, she really didn’t like the work. So she quit. And I couldn’t blame her. Thais can be motivated by money – but if they really don’t like what they’re doing, the money had better be outstanding otherwise they will leave.

Christmas in New Zealand was great but when January came around, we had to face the reality that we still hadn’t bought a house. Prices were now, on average, $150K higher than they had been a year earlier. And in January, most people are on holiday and not much happens. We were getting dispirited.

Big Greg flew in from Bangkok and we hung out for a few days and we showed him around. And after hearing about the difficulties we were facing buying a house, the devil put the idea of going back to Bangkok into our heads.

 

 

As the weeks passed by, I felt like I was falling more and more out of touch with what was happening in Bangkok. I wasn’t happy with where the column was at. It had been a funny 10 months since leaving Thailand. How had I managed to write the column for 10 months when I only spent 5 days in Thailand in all of that time?

My girlfriend had been away from Thailand for coming up to 10 months and she missed…..the food! Thais outside the country say they miss Thailand, but press them and it’s often the food they miss most.

Dispirited by the difficulty in buying a house, we decided we’d take a break and go to Bangkok for a couple of months. In early February, 2016, we flew out. We found a condo on Soi 16 that rented by the month. We were back in our old neighbourhood, and within days it felt like we had never left. After catching up with friends and family, my girlfriend went to see her old boss. He offered her part-time work while she was back. She accepted it.

 

 

Back on the ground in Bangkok, I quickly turned the column around. It was just like it was between 2011 and 2015. I was out and about all the time. I reconnected with people I hadn’t seen in a year. The column quality was up, but reader numbers didn’t budge. It seemed like it didn’t matter if I wrote good columns or rubbish columns – traffic stayed the same.

For many readers, the column was part of their weekly routine. There are readers who come and go, but there is a core readership who are dedicated. They may not be in Thailand and in some cases they may not have even stepped foot in Thailand in many years. The column allows them to live vicariously and that is why they tune in every week.

2016 would be a good year for the column. I focused on the opening articles and included lots of photographs. It had become my point of difference. Others had come along and were doing a decent job reporting bar news. Social media had taken off and as soon as something happened, there were people who would post about it. A weekly column couldn’t hope to break stories when others were using social media and posting from the frontlines. If a bar was on fire, they’d stand outside, take photos and post live updates. I couldn’t compete with that.

 

 

We had planned to stay in Thailand for a couple of months but as Songkran approached, so did our departure date back to New Zealand. We both felt we’d like to stick around a bit longer. But we had bought non-refundable tickets. It was a case of use them or lose them.

She wanted to stay for a couple more months. I wanted to go back and buy a house. So I went back to Auckland for a couple of weeks and hunted for a house, and she stayed on in Bangkok. I had no luck house hunting and by the end of April I was back in Bangkok.

A couple of months later this was repeated. She stayed on and I went back to New Zealand. The housing market nightmare continued and back to Thailand I went! Ultimately I wanted to be in New Zealand, but I was enjoying myself in Thailand so we would stay a little bit longer and hope that the housing market changed.

 

 

I spent a lot of time that year hanging out with Big Greg. I’d drop by Margarita Storm with my laptop along and we’d sit upstairs, him working on his phone, me on the laptop and we’d chat in between whatever it was we were doing. Most people preferred it downstairs so we usually had upstairs all to ourselves. It was almost like our office. Greg would order plate after plate of food and we’d graze throughout the day.

One afternoon, each of our phones started beeping like crazy. The city was rife with rumours. Online, a Scottish journalist with contacts in the palace was saying that the rumours were true. Later that day the official announcement was made. His Majesty The King had passed away.

This event had been discussed in expat circles for years. “The bars will be closed for months!”, some cried. There would be a long mourning period without a doubt. What I remember most that afternoon sitting on the mezzanine floor was looking down on the pavement below as females in their 20s through to their 40s walked past in tears. It was an historical moment.

We would stick around Bangkok until early December. It meant that in 2016 my girlfriend spent 10 months of the year there. We headed back to New Zealand at the start of the Kiwi summer and resumed the house hunt.

 

 

We gave up house hunting in Auckland and switched to Napier which has the best weather in New Zealand with high sunshine hours, a long, warm, dry summer and low rainfall year-round. The housing market was completely different to Auckland which is where most immigrants settle. Prices were much cheaper and you got a much better house for the money. We bought a house but the settlement date wasn’t until March, two months away. So what did we do? We went back to Bangkok for a month!

In March we returned to New Zealand and moved into the house. It had been almost two years since we had moved to New Zealand and over the previous 12 months we’d spent most of the time in Bangkok. At long last the next chapter of our life would begin.

The website had been updated. I’d set it up as an HTML site which was the standard back in 1998. We switched it over to WordPress, a more robust system and the platform used by close to half of all sites on the web. It had been a huge job but it was complete.

My girlfriend had developed an online business in Thailand which required her to visit a couple of times per year. And I was still writing the column so I also had to visit regularly. In 2017, visits to Thailand would see me rushing around, gathering content to drip-feed out over columns when I was back in New Zealand. I’d load up on photos and make pages and pages of notes of general observations that I could drop into the column, stuff that wasn’t time critical. I’d rely on friends and industry insiders for current news and gossip each week.

 

 

While my partner had done an outstanding job migrating the site over to the new platform, advertising revenue was negligible. That was his duty and there was no way I could sell ads from New Zealand. I wasn’t happy about the situation and he agreed to pay me a monthly salary to compensate me for all of the work I was doing on the column.

This would continue for a few months but it wasn’t sustainable. My partner could not keep paying me out of his own pocket. At some point I think he accepted that generating income was not as easy as he thought it would be. And just like me, sales was not one of his strengths. We agreed that things weren’t viable and on August 20^th, 2017, I announced that this was the end. This was not the way I wanted to say goodbye. But when I signed that column “Your Bangkok commentator for the last time, Stick”, I meant it.

The end of Stickman was picked up by quite a lot of online media and it was picked up on the forums. The feedback was mixed. One of the more amusing things was that quite a lot of people were confused about the site, including some journalists who wrote articles and got some stuff horribly wrong. In the time I had been away in New Zealand, a new website had emerged called StickBoy, the name being a take on Stickman. Stickboy became well-established in the same space. I never liked it that the fellow behind it had copied the Stickman name and it struck me as silly – but there was nothing I could do about it so I didn’t give it much thought. Anyway, some of those who wrote comments about Stickman obviously didn’t even know the site and thought it was Stickboy.

I’d previously met Stickboy at a Nanapong dance contest and despite the obvious site name issue, we got on fine. We were the same age and having both run websites for many years, it was fun to talk shop. We never became friends, but neither was there any ill will or bad feelings. We just each did our own thing in the same space.

 

 

In February of 2018 I wrote a short update on the site about what I had been up to. And then on April 1^st, I wrote an April Fool’s Day column, something I always enjoyed when April 1^st fell on a Sunday. Another update came in June and I said I was considering a monthly column. I missed writing the column. A weekly was too much work and I didn’t have enough to say to publish every week, but I thought a monthly would work. That never happened and in retrospect I’m glad that it didn’t. A weekly becomes part of people’s routines. That isn’t the case with a monthly.

We were visiting Thailand 2 or 3 times per year. My girlfriend had an online business in Thailand which she could operate from New Zealand, but there were a few things she needed to be in Thailand for. So we visited regularly. I had a holiday and she’d do all the things she had to do before we returned to New Zealand a few weeks later.

Those visits when I wasn’t writing the column were the best. I didn’t have to think about what I was going to write that week. It was relaxing and I enjoyed the tourist experience. I didn’t venture out to the bars and I didn’t miss them. Not one little bit.

 

 

One day in August, 2018, I was wandering around Sukhumvit. I had walked around each floor of Nana Plaza, for old times sake as much as anything. I was just heading out on to the soi when someone called out my name. I turned around and saw Tony, an old friend who was a part-owner and manager of a Patpong gogo bar. He was sitting in Lucky Luke’s, having a drink.

I hadn’t seen Tony for a year or two. We chatted for a while and the website came up. I wasn’t doing anything with it, had stopped writing, was considering a monthly but wasn’t sure whether it would work. Would I be interested in selling it?, Tony asked. He worked for a company that was always looking for acquisitions and he thought it might be a fit. I explained that I only owned ⅓ of the site and I’d have to check with my partner. Tony said he would talk with his bosses and see if it was something they were interested in, but he was fairly sure they would be.

Those conversations took place and Tony and I met a few days later. There was interest from both sides. My partner had other projects and didn’t have the time to do much with Stickman which would have required a lot of effort for not a lot of reward. We both knew that the value of the website had diminished since he had bought a controlling share. Social media was emerging and Stickman had been dormant for a year with little new content and no revenue. If we were to sell, he would have to take a loss. And I would get much less for my ⅓ share than I did for the ⅔ share I had sold 3 years earlier. But I figured that if we could do a deal it would be worth it. At the end of the day, it would still be a reasonable sum of money.

 

 

Negotiations followed. The other side had engaged a big-name lawyer while at our end I was doing all of the negotiating and contract amendments myself. I mentioned this to Greg Lange and he bellowed at me something like, “You’re doing what? You know who that guy is? They’re paying him a fortune and he only works with big clients!” I did a few law papers at tech, I told Greg, including one on contract law. I can handle myself. He just shook his head. But he knew me well enough to know that when my mind is made up, nothing’s going to change it!

The buyer came in with a low-ball offer. There was some back and forth and we managed to get the price to an agreeable level. The conditions would be the hard part.

A non-negotiable for the buyer was that I remain involved with the site and write the column. I was happy to do that but with a proviso – there had to be a flat-rate salary, irrespective of the advertising revenue. No way was I working for a share of the advertising revenue again where nothing is guaranteed. They agreed to that.

They wanted the Stickman email address but that wasn’t for sale. There were 13 years of emails and more than a few secrets in there and it was a firm refusal on my part. They accepted that.

The other bit which was a sticking point was an indemnity clause.

We managed to thrash out all the details, agree, and the deal was done.

 

 

Bangkok was changing. Many old favourite bars, hotels and restaurants were disappearing. A few years earlier the Federal Hotel and the Honey had closed. They’d each been hugely popular with long-time naughty boys. Sukhumvit soi 11’s dog-leg soi didn’t have long to go. Many places had a date with the wrecking ball and would never be seen again, while some old favourites like Charley Brown’s and Cheap Charlie’s would relocate elsewhere.

Some venues survive relocation, others even thrive. The new Charley Brown’s moved to a hard-to-find sub-soi right behind the Westin and Robinson’s. It was, arguably, better than the original.

The same could not be said for CheckInn99. It relocated from its original location between sois 5 and 7 down to Soi 26, and then relocated again to Soi 33. It was never the same and even hardcore fans had to admit that the magic had been lost. For all its faults, the original location was special.

Plots that had been empty for years, decades even, were being developed as high-rises went up in record time, stretching for the sky and casting a long shadow over the area. Sukhumvit was being gentrified.

 

 

I resumed writing the column in September, 2018. I was soon informed that while Tony had fronted the deal and negotiated for the buyer, he would not be my point of contact. Rather, it would be StickBoy who had a relationship with the buyer. There was some conjecture that StickBoy had bought Stickman and some comments were made to this effect but I have a copy of the contract and his name was not in it, nor was he ever part of the negotiation nor even mentioned. I didn’t learn of his involvement until after the deal had been done.

Operating a similar website himself, StickBoy was aware of the need for fresh content. During the negotiation, I made the point that if I was to resume writing the column, I needed help gathering news. He would prove to be very helpful and fed me plenty of news and gossip.

Online, people who didn’t know us believed that we had a problem with one another. We didn’t. We would go on to have a good working relationship.

After a couple of weeks in Bangkok I headed back to New Zealand.

We’d visit Bangkok one more time in 2018, and then 3 times in 2019. We were never away from Bangkok for more than 3 months at a time. It worked well with Thai Airways operating a non-stop flight daily between Auckland and Bangkok. We were living in New Zealand which is where we wanted to be, but we were visiting Thailand regularly. It was easy to maintain relationships with those in the bar industry because I was never away for long. My girlfriend got to do the business stuff she couldn’t do from New Zealand and eat all of her favourite food. We thought we would continue like that for years to come.

 

 

After living in New Zealand for a while, there was one thing that hit me each time I flew into Bangkok. The terrible air. I remember sitting out on the hotel balcony one morning with a coffee, watching the sun rise with a hazy orange glow in the sky. You could see, feel and taste the filth in the air. It was probably always that way but when you’re living in Bangkok you sort of get used to it. It’s not until you spend time away and come back that you realise just how bad it is.

I continued to do my thing and was in a comfortable pattern, writing the column, running the site and visiting Thailand a few times per year.

And then Covid came along and the world changed.

Visitor numbers dried up in Thailand and some expats left. I tried my hardest to write a decent column but what was I supposed to write? The column became an escape for those trapped in Farangland, but with so little going on in Thailand I had little to write about and the quality plummeted. The world was a mess and I was supposed to entertain people. I felt like the band on the Titanic after it had hit the iceberg.

 

 

New Zealand came out of its first lockdown on May 27, 2020 and we took the opportunity to travel around the country. Businesses were desperate for customers and hotels were cheap. It was one of the few bright spots in a really shitty year.

In January, 2021, the inevitable happened and the boss pulled the pin on the column. Stickboy called and explained that we would be taking a break. There was nothing going on for us to write about and tourism had stopped. He had stopped writing on his site and I should stop on Stickman. He’d get back in touch in 3 months’ time and we would review things then. That was the last communication I had with him and I never heard from him again.

Covid was raging and no-one knew when the pandemic would end. People were losing loved ones. I received news from Thailand that my ex Mrs – the original Mrs Stick – had died. We hadn’t had any contact in a couple of years but it was still very sad. She was in her mid 40s. When the pandemic did come to an end – whenever the hell that would be – what would it be like on the other side? 2021 was a terrible year.

 

 

On January 10^th, 2022, I woke up to more than a dozen emails. We were two years into Covid and I had not published a column for 11 months. There was no reason for anyone to email me. At that time the Stickman email address got perhaps one email per day. Receiving 15 emails could only mean one thing. Something had happened.

Some of the emails were from friends. One was from a bar boss. The rest were from readers. I would learn that the front page of the website had been replaced with a message announcing that Stick Uncensored would be launched on Sunday, January 16^th. It would be a weekly column for subscribers. Pay $60 and you get access to the new column. A tasty list of articles was outlined which promises to rip the mask off the bar industry. Some big-hitters were named and there were promises that their secrets would be revealed. Many readers signed up.

In addition to the announcement on the main page of the site, an email had also been sent out to people promoting the new Stick Uncensored column.

But there was a problem. A big problem. Everyone thought that I was behind Stick Uncensored. And the bar owners who had been named would be furious about it!

But I had nothing to do with it!

I didn’t have proof, but I knew immediately who was behind it.

The first thing I did was send a WhatsApp message and an email to the owner of the site. It was early morning in New Zealand which meant it was well after midnight in Thailand. I wasn’t sure when the boss would get back to me until the next morning, Thailand time.

I logged into the site and tried to delete the announcement on the main page. I couldn’t. I still had access to the site but all I could do was look around. I could not do anything else. My rights to post articles or delete had been rescinded. This had been well planned.

As it happened the owner of the site was not asleep and he got my message. He came back to me and things happened quickly. Phone calls were made, people were woken up and the decision was made to disconnect the site from the Internet. Without getting technical, we did not have access to the host where all of the site’s content is stored, but we did have access to the domain name.

Emails were coming in thick and fast as readers asked if the email promoting Stick Uncensored had come from me. Phew, it seems that quite a few people actually realised this is not the sort of thing I would ever do.

I told people it wasn’t me, but some didn’t believe me! How could it not be me, they asked, when they had emailed me in the past and now they had an email from Stickman! Who else could it possibly be?

The website previously had a feature where you could sign up for future updates. This was something that had been put in place by the previous owner. He managed that and I never had anything to do with it. There was a database with all of those email addresses so the person behind Stick Uncensored must have sent an email out to everyone who had signed up to that list.

When the person behind the Stick Uncensored column discovered that the StickmanBangkok.com domain name had been disconnected from the hosting, he deleted the website. He had full control of the hosting / server where the site was stored. That meant that the entire contents of the website, any backups – everything that made up the entire StickmanBangkok.com website – was deleted. It was not just a case that it was no longer accessible online, it no longer existed offline either. The entire website was gone!

Did I have a backup of the site stored on my computer, or on external hard-drives? No. When the site was converted from HTML to WordPress, the responsibility for maintaining backups fell with the owner. He was a technical whizz and I didn’t give a second thought to the idea of keeping a copy myself. The site was gone.

The StickmanBangkok.com domain name was in the owner’s name. That was safe. But all of the content of the site, every last article and every photo, had been deleted.

Without getting into specifics, someone with outstanding technical skills was engaged. He managed to recover most of the site and put it back together again. It was a huge task and he did an amazing job. But the site would not be the same. The text formatting was wonky so pretty much every article ever published on the site didn’t display as it should. The content was there, but it was messed up. The best analogy I can come up with is to imagine a car was in a really serious crash and it was repaired, but it was not quite the same.

There were close to 1,000 weekly columns in the archives, and more than 9,000 readers’ submissions. The formatting – that is the way each article displays – was messed up. And there was no easy way to fix them. It would basically require someone to go back and edit every last article to tidy them up – and with more than 10,000 articles, it would take about a year. People could still read them, but it would be less enjoyable to do so. Some of the photos were lost for good and could not be recovered. I had all the original photos I had taken with multiple backups stored at multiple locations, but it would be totally impractical to locate the original photos, edit them and re-insert them. This was a really sad day in the site’s history and it had all been done for no good reason. Spitefulness? Jealousy? I couldn’t understand why someone would do that. It was an act of sabotage.

As I was going back over the site examining the damage, I would discover some other things I had not previously been aware of. Some columns had been deleted sometime back. Why? I had no idea. Amongst them were some of my favourite columns. Luckily, I was able to locate copies from archive sites online and restore them. One of the other weird things was that email addresses had been stripped out of all of the readers’ submissions. Why would you do that? Many people submitted articles to the site, and they welcomed feedback. They would never receive another email from any of their articles. It was incredibly disappointing.

 

 

In early 2022, Thailand announced that it was opening up to tourists. From February 1st, 2022, you could travel to Thailand if you satisfied various requirements. The country would eventually reopen to visitors without restrictions later in the year.

With tourists about to return, I resumed writing the column in February, 2022. But I never did visit Thailand that year. All of the Covid testing requirements felt like a big hassle and by the time the restrictions were lifted completely, it was the rainy season. And when the rainy season ends, it’s the New Zealand summer – and I never travel to Bangkok at that time of the year.

I did my best to write decent columns throughout 2022 but it was hard going. We’d all suffered through Covid and I hadn’t stepped foot in Thailand for more than two years. The person who had helped me with news before I had stopped writing the year before had fled from Thailand.

I was struggling to come up with topics for an opener, and I just didn’t feel like I had much to say. So I focused on what was happening in the bars. 2022 was a messy year as the world slowly – and for some, reluctantly – accepted that perhaps the response to Covid had been overblown. Readers were forgiving about the quality of the column and seemed to be happy that I was writing, even if I didn’t have all that much to say.

In mid-2023 I returned to Thailand. I’d been away for more than 3½ years. Thailand had changed. My impression from that trip was that Bangkok should be renamed Mask City. Most Thais were still wearing masks which, curiously, they would take off at night.

 

 

It felt to me like what Thai people focused on had changed a lot over the time I had been away. Where once they prioritised fun i.e. sanuk, now they were much more concerned about making money. Things had been moving that way for a while, but in the time I had been away it felt like things had really accelerated.

I’d been away for a long time and I should have been rushing around like mad catching up with people, taking photos, building up a library of material to use in the column etc., but I didn’t do that at all. I wasn’t even staying on Sukhumvit. We spent the entire time staying at my girlfriend’s house in the suburbs, some distance from downtown and I didn’t spend much time in the bars at all.

I did make it down to Sukhumvit a few times and caught up with friends in the industry. It had changed and many people had left. The days when I would go to the plaza to catch up with Dave and we’d sit out on the balcony and gasbag like two little old ladies were gone. When so many of the people you used to know and hang out with have moved on, it feels very different.

There were new bars with new names and new owners. I didn’t know them and they didn’t know me. Stick who? Bars were changing hands multiple times per year. The bar industry almost felt foreign to me. I felt like I didn’t fit in.

The quality of the column improved while I was in town but the same old pattern followed and it would drop again not long after I left. I had spent some time in Bangkok for the first time in a long time but I had to face the reality – Sukhumvit wasn’t for me. It didn’t appeal at all.

 

 

I battled on with the column. Towards the end of 2023 I confided in a few friends that I was thinking of ending my involvement with the site. They thought I was nuts, even when I explained why I felt the way I did. I checked in with the owners and they were keen for me to continue. They’d always been good to me, supportive and encouraging, so I committed to another year.

Perhaps I need to say something about the owners and the way they manage the site. They have never meddled and they just leave me to it. They don’t tell me what to write, or what not to write. I hear from them perhaps twice a year.

The calendar rolled over to 2024 and I did my best to be upbeat. 2024 was a good year. I felt like I was on top of what was going on. And for a short period, something amazing happened. Reader numbers increased.

I visited Bangkok in mid-2024 and it felt much like it had the year before. I spent more time downtown than I did the previous year. But I still felt like an outsider. I’d always been upfront that writing the column from abroad meant my perspective was different from when I was on the ground, but now I really wasn’t comfortable with it. Deep down, I felt like I was somehow cheating readers. How could I write about Bangkok when I hadn’t lived there for 9 years, and was only spending about 3 weeks there per year? It didn’t feel right.

As the end of 2024 came into view, it felt like a case of déjà vu. I spoke with the same friends about how I felt about the column, and they said all the same things they had the previous year. Stick with it, they said. I was seriously questioning whether this was what I wanted to be doing. Readers were generally very positive and it felt like most people seemed to genuinely enjoy tuning in each week. It was all of the kind comments from readers that made me decide to stick with it for another year. If I was bringing a small amount of happiness in to readers’ lives, should I really consider walking away? I agreed to write the column again through 2025.

 

 

When I visited Thailand earlier this year, it felt even less like the Thailand I first knew. Thais were getting bigger. In Bangkok there were white people everywhere. You could get sticker shock if you didn’t look at the price first and the smiles weren’t as easy.

One of the big changes post-Covid was the proliferation of weed stores. It was an almighty about-turn in a country with some of the world’s harshest punishments for drug offences. There were weed stores all over Bangkok.

I was telling those I was close to that the end of 2025 really would be the end. I did my best to produce a decent column every week but I felt like I was failing. And as long as I was only visiting Thailand for a few weeks each year, it wouldn’t change. I really needed to visit 3 times per year. If I could manage that, the column would be so much better. But visiting 3 times per year isn’t cheap and I could not justify that.

I made the decision. It was time to end my involvement with the site. In early October, 2025, I sent an email to the owners informing them that I was resigning. I gave them 3 months which I figured was plenty of time for them to decide what they wanted to do, and put a plan in place. I didn’t hear back from them.

 

 

I question whether I was ever really the right person to be writing a column like this. I’m not a boozer and my time fooling around with the ladies essentially came to an end in early 2001, just as I started writing this column. For 25 years I have written a column about expat lifestyles and chronicling the naughty nightlife while for most of that time I have essentially been standing on the sideline.

Have things worked out for me in New Zealand? I’m genuinely happy leading a quiet life. There are people I miss in Bangkok and a few favourite places I’d like to be able to drop by, but overall I don’t miss Bangkok especially. And when I think about heading overseas for a holiday, Thailand is not the place that comes to mind. Bangkok will always be there and I’m sure I will enjoy my next visit, whenever that may be. I suspect trips to Thailand are going to become further apart. A few days in Bangkok to break up a journey to Europe would be ideal. And then at some point, the visits will come to an end. The love affair with Thailand died long ago.

Next week I will sign off this column for the last time, leaving on my terms. It’s been a great run. The third and final “W” of the “WWW” will fall.

 

 

For many years, anyone reading between the lines might feel that Stickman has often been more about the past than the future. I may have commented on what was happening in Bangkok that week, but so often I’d refer to the past or compare what was happening in the present with how things once were. Other times I’d just outright tell stories from the past. Like I have done here with The Stickman Story.

There’s another thing I want to mention, but don’t wish to dwell on too much because I don’t want to end on a sour note. But this has to be said. The online space chronicling the nightlife is toxic. I don’t use that word lightly. It didn’t use to be this way. Once upon a time – see, here I am referring to the past again –  we used to be all friends. We’d meet up, enjoy each other’s company and it was lots of fun. Today it’s full of jealousy, nastiness, vindictiveness and even vengeance. It’s a world I don’t want to be a part of.

A few days before Part 4 of The Stickman Story went live I finally received an email from the owners’ representative. It had been months since I’d emailed them to say I would be standing down. I imagined they were busy with all of their other interests and they hadn’t got around to discussing what they would do with Stickman. I’ve always understood that this column is a lot more important to me than it is to them. So back to the email. It was complimentary and supportive. But they weren’t thrilled that I would stand down. They wanted to know if there was anything they could do so the column could continue and I would keep writing it. Within touching distance of the finish line, it started feeling a little bit like 2015 all over again….

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To be continued next week…..

 

 

 

Mystery Photo

Last week’s photo was taken of the Christmas tree out front of the O-NES Tower which is near the Nana BTS station.

This week’s photo was taken in downtown Bangkok last week by a friend. When I first looked at it I thought it looked like Hong Kong, but it is actually Bangkok.

 

 

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

Who was the VIP?

My weirdest experience in a gogo bar was a year or so ago in the low season. I was in Red Dragon when in walks a party escorted by 3 dudes acting as security & even wearing Secret Service attire including earpieces and, I am certain, firearms behind their suits. The VIP has 2 security dudes escort him to the toilet – 1 inside and 1 outside. It amused me given that Nana Plaza doesn’t allow firearms inside.

Flood frustrations.

When you talked about the authorities hiring a Dutch firm to divert the flood waters away from Bangkok in 2011, there is a side story. Many residents of the neighborhoods where the flood waters were being diverted to, objected. They took out their frustrations in the form of digging little holes in the diversion wall. So, some of the water being diverted actually went to downtown Bangkok and away from their neighborhood!

What you need to top up credit on a skytrain card.

I went to the BTS kiosk to top up my card and was told that I needed to show my passport. This is an abrupt departure from their previous policy where you only needed to show your passport for a new card. And you need the physical card as they scan it so the pic on my phone was not enough. I mentioned this to a friend and she went today and was told the same thing.

The hidden corners of Bangkok.

Last night I went to a bar on the 4th floor of Korea Town at Soi 12 called The Lobby Bed. They also run two AIR BnB apartments on the same floor. It’s a cute little place but was primarily empty of customers. Talk about out of the way — it almost had a speakeasy feel to it as there was a separate entrance up a staircase from the 3rd floor through a MJ dispensary — in addition to the main entry on 4th floor. On the 3rd floor, I also saw two Karaoke bars that appeared to be disguised as brothels as there were many girls languidly lying about sofa beds outside the entryway. Aah, Bangkok!

New York, home of pizza.

Concerning your comments about Mexican food, I’m an American who loves it, but never fancied myself an expert. I’m surprised to hear that many do. It must be like New Yorkers with pizza. They never miss a chance to tell you how no one makes a *real* pizza outside of NYC.

Culpable, su señoría!

I plead guilty, with an explanation. The reason me and so many other Yanks, at least those of us from California, are such assholes about Mexican food is that we eat so much of it – genuine Mexican food cooked by Mexicans for Mexicans – that we know what it’s supposed to taste like. It’s not that we think the food passed off as Mexican in Bangkok restaurants (cooked by Thais) is bad, it’s just that we’re put off by Brits, Aussies, and Kiwis who keep insisting that it’s “Mexican” food. Some of the food is tasty but it’s not Mexican. Since you’re so familiar with Thailand, an analogy might be me inviting an Isaan native to a Los Angeles Thai restaurant (which are all staffed by Mexican cooks) and bragging about how great the Thai food is. He’d laugh in my face. So there you have it. We’re all assholes with an explanation which I suppose is only marginally better than being just plain assholes. <Fair comments but do note that quite a few Mexican restaurants in Thailand have Mexican chefs in the kitchen, including the two places I frequent – Stick>

Indulging at Patpong.

I decided to indulge when I was in Radio City. The barfine was ฿800, but she needed 3 drinks before she could leave the bar (she hadn’t received any by that stage and it was past 11 PM). Add on my two Vodka + sodas and the total checkbin to release her out of the bar was ฿1,760. Add on the ฿3K short time = a total of ฿4,760. In my home currency that’s £113. To put it in perspective, I bought 7 pals a round of drinks when I was in London in August and that came to £67! And by the way, she was sensational in the bedroom. So my whole point is, is it really that expensive for the perfect end to a great night? Not in my opinion. And I can’t imagine having that same experience anywhere else in the world.

Genuine tourists are welcome.

I have entered Thailand 9 times this calendar year for a total stay of 136 days. All on a visa waiver. 8 times and there has not been an issue. One time I was asked for proof of onward travel which I provided, and then I got waved through. There is a lot of stuff online about people getting bounced. My belief is that these individuals are either working or trying to live in Thailand and the authorities are getting tough on them.

Where will the punters come from?

“Grey-haired” would be my description of 90% of Caucasian bar customers. That suggests an extinction event for this customer class in the next decade. Where are the young white men? Is it financial repression? Is it Gen-Z morality? Is it fear of social stigma? My current theory is that much of the Western world’s youth are devoid of any spirit of adventure. Sadly I know many cases back in the UK where a 30-something youth lives in a bedroom in his Mum’s house playing computer games.

 

 

 

This Week’s News, Views & Gossip

It’s December, it’s the high season but trade in the bars this week was described as mixed. There’s typically a lull in early / mid-December until sometime between a few days before Christmas and Boxing Day when trade takes off and it’s bedlam for the next month or so. Soi Cowboy was said to be particularly quiet at the start of the week, although things improved as the week went on. A friend noted that the main demographic on the neon Soi on Monday night was…..white women. In his words, a tour pulled up and a herd of white women got off. (To the English teachers out there, what is the collective noun for white women?) Photos showed them walking up and down the soi taking photos while some perched outside at the live music bars at the Asoke end, gawking.

Nana Plaza, on the other hand, has been bedlam. Cowboy and the plaza may just be a kilometre apart but they may as well have been on a different planet.

With all of these comments about how busy it is in the bars or otherwise, every single report from Suvarnabhumi Airport is consistent – anyone flying into Bangkok should expect long queues at Immigration.

Soi Cowboy used to be an early evening favourite for many expats, myself included. And part of the reason was not just that quite a few of the better gogo bars had girls on stage at 7:00 PM – and not just one or two ladies, but a full troop – they also had generous happy hours. Many of those bars have done away with the happy hour or it has been cut back to just one hour early evening. Vicky’s Secret is one bar which has a happy hour. Local beers and the cheaper spirits are 100 baht until 10:00 PM.

 

 

What happened in sister bars (they have the same owners) Red Dragon and Mandarin in the plaza on Friday night? Each of these fine bars was shut down early. The staff’s explanation was one word, “Accident!” Your guess is as good as mine.

The sewer water that has plagued Soi Cowboy for much of 2025 is no longer pooling outside Hot Lips after the bar concreted over the area outside the bar. Well done to Hot Lips, even if that is increasingly looking like it was a temporary fix. This week there have been multiple reports that sewer water is coming up in other spots on the soi and pooling outside various bars. On Tuesday night, the hot spot was out front of Suzi Wong and Spice Girls, which are adjacent to one another. And on Wednesday night, it was the turn of Kazy Kozy and Vicky’s Secret. And then on Friday night, it was Cowboy 2’s turn. The sewer water is sharing the love around! Since Hot lips sealed up the area outside the bar, the water is leaking out of any other cracks in the pipe under the soi. It should be noted that the water always pools outside bars on the southern side of the soi i.e. the Sukhumvit Road side.

And if you were wondering why I have been giving this issue so much attention, yes, I am obsessed with it! I know you might be sick of me going on about it but I maintain it’s newsworthy and, frankly, I also think it’s a disgrace that it has not been resolved by now. I accept that it looks like the only solution may be to rip the soi up and replace all the pipes so it’s not a small job. But if this is what has to be done then so be it.

 

 

Word is that it’s not great in Pattaya when you consider it’s less than a week until Christmas. Busy, yes, but bedlam? No. Last night, Soi Buakhao was described as busier than it had been on many months as many bars had a good number of customers. The second-tier bar areas like Soi Diana, Soi Yamato, Soi 7 and Soi 8 were not busy at all and much quieter than you would expect so close to Christmas. At prime time, many bars in those areas had a few punters, or even none.

Adding to these comments, a long-time restaurateur in Jomtien says he has never seen such a quiet December. And a visa agent who works closely with Immigration claims that the number of Westerners arriving this high season is well down.

Still in Pattaya, there are some open-air beer bars on Soi 7 with signs up saying no prostitution. All power to the girls if they don’t wish to go with customers but the word is that they do, in fact, go – and the signs have been put up so the bar avoids any hassles from the authorities.

 

 

Many bars will throw a Christmas party this week. Christmas Eve is usually the big day but plenty of bars will celebrate on the 25th too and some will do both. Expect the girls in many bars to be done up in Christmaswear which is always a great look.

On Soi Cowboy, Vicky’s Secret – which is getting a lot of mentions this week and, just to be clear, is not an advertiser – is amongst the many bars throwing a Christmas Eve party and there will be early Christmas gifts with free pizza and free shots.

Many bars have signs up stating that photography in the bars is not allowed. Some bars say there’s a fine for those caught taking photos – but I have yet to hear of any bar which has actually tried to enforce that fine which they seem to use as a scare tactic. So just how prevalent is the issue of customers trying to secretly take photos or video in the bars? I put this question to the owner of one of the best-known and most popular Bangkok gogo bars and here’s what he came back with:

It’s constant! It happens daily! Everyday the manager is deleting pictures! It’s never-ending. I even have signs everywhere warning of a fine. Honestly I think with these cameras in everyone’s pocket they just do it subconsciously. 98% will delete it then you have to delete from delete. It’s a pain in the ass. The other 2% refuse to delete the picture and it’s a big drama with security. The complex owners, the police, nobody wants to see a picture inside and then the bigger issue is the girls. You have to protect them, of course. It’s a daily drama. So annoying really.

 

 

Thailand-Related Links & News Articles

From The Stickman Archives comes a column from December, 2014, that seems appropriate to link to, Christmas in Bangkok.

Thailand’s banking crackdown is causing all sorts of problems for expats.

A terrible tragedy in Phuket as an Aussie dies after running into a glass door in a Turkish restaurant.

In Udon Thani, a Brazilian leaves a bar without paying his bill, assaults an American and is set on by locals.

On Ko Samui, a Brit dies at a luxury hotel in what is may be a case of drug use gone wrong.

Police bust an Indian-run online black market operated from Pattaya.

A Brit is arrested for operating bird tours (not that sort of birds!).

A Canadian woman goes bonkers in Phuket, harming herself and her two children.

The BBC published a decent primer on where things are in the border war between Thailand and Cambodia.

 

 

Closing Comments

A massive thank you to everyone who has tuned in to the column this year. I hope 2025 has been a good year for you, and I hope that next year will be even better. Wherever you find yourself in the world, I wish you a very Merry Christmas!

Your Bangkok commentator,

Stick

Stick can be contacted at : stickmanbangkok@gmail.com