“Hurtling down the Thai east coast motorway in a clapped-out old taxi cab, we both felt as though we had left the comfort and familiarity of the Hotel De Bangkok a little too soon. Our next destination was Pattaya, two hour’s drive from Bangkok.
Of the locals we had already met, many had scoffed at our travelling plans: Pattaya has a well-established reputation as a hub of all-night partying, prostitution, and lairy drunken sex tourists.
A few kilometres from Pattaya at about 5pm we reached a traffic jam that stretched for hundreds of cars along the road into the city.
‘No way round,’ our taxi driver informed us, ‘you’ll have to get out and walk the rest’.
Now both wishing we had packed fewer t-shirts in our heavily laden 20kg backpacks, we continued towards Walking Street – the main tourist district of Pattaya – on foot under the 36-degree heat of the sun.
As it got dark we arrived at our hostel to be greeted by a very burly, very friendly German manager named Stefan. His first words to us I will never forget: ‘Two boys… one room?’ he asked with a wry smile (rhetorically, I hoped at the time).
Having reassured Stefan that we were happy with current sleeping arrangements, and that he would not catch us with any illicit third roommates during our stay, we headed up to our room and got ready to go out.
Pattaya’s nightlife was, without a shadow of a doubt, the most raucous I have ever experienced. From the excessively flirtatious (and downright sexually aggressive) ladyboys, to the forthright purveyors of special ‘ping pong shows’ and other tourist traps – we took it all with a pinch of salt. You leave Pattaya hardened to a lot of things.
For us, the real highlights of Pattaya were jet skiing across the bay; our boat trip to a nearby island, and, of course, the time we were invited to take to the stage of a gay gogo bar near Walking Street, putting the professional strippers to shame with our twerking skills (we did remain fully clothed though, honest!).”
Sin City won Second Prize in a competition in Durham, following Jono's visit to the elusive country of Thailand. Give us a comment to let us know what you think of the short story. Check in again for more stories like this.