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The first thing I do when I move into a new hotel room is to check out the view.

Thailand and Cambodia 2000 - Part One - Bangkok & Siem Reap

Dougburnett
2003-11-22 17:55:13

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path. It's in an area of narrow lanes, full of auto parts shops. Despite its industrial nature, the neighborhood was amazingly clean and quiet. The main issue was finding it. The night I arrived, I had the hotel send a car for me - it cost 350 Baht ($10.) I found it reassuring to know that I wouldn't have to search for the hotel after a 22-hour flight. Then, once I had walked the neighborhood, I noticed that there were plenty of signs pointing the way, so finding it again wasn't a problem. Even at night it was ok: the area was well lit.

I walked over to the nearby Sheridan Hotel and got a tut-tut from the stand there. When my young driver stopped at a traffic light he turned and asked, "What you going to Patpong for?" He had a look on his face I came to recognize. I saw it whenever one of the tut-tut drives was pitching me on some massage parlor or girlie bar. Anyway, I told him the truth "I'm going to look around." He leered back and said, "Yea, sure." I found that if you are a single middle-aged man, the immediate assumption is that you are in Thailand looking for sex.

Patpong was actually two streets. The first is closed to traffic and had a brightly lit night market running down the center. The stalls sell everything from tee-shirts to silk jackets, from porno videos to Thai spices. The street was lined with bars and in front of each was a tout carrying a card that listed the prices of the drinks. Through the open doors I could see the scantly clad girls bumping and grinding to the loud music. The street was full of shoppers: some looking for souvenirs and others for sex.

One street over is Patpong 2 - that's where the serious sex shoppers go. Again there are touts in the street with drink cards and again you can see the girls in the bars beckoning you to come in, but there is no night market here to distract you, simply lots of sex bars. I had been thinking I might stop ...