I used to travel a lot but then I got a dog and became extremely attached to her and don't ever want to leave her alone or with other people. So my amount of time going for some R&R has diminished to the point of nothingness in the past 6 years or so.
For various reasons this recent vacation of mine needed to happen and needed to happen now, and thankfully there is a couple who are looking after my Nadi in their house with a garden during the 12 days that I am gone. This trip has seen me travel to Thailand to visit some old friends and mostly do a bunch of drinking and reminiscing. Day 5 was basically a travel day, but I wanted to showcase how much of an absolute shithole Pattaya is and why unless you are looking to just hang out with hookers all the time, you should just avoid that place.
Basically, this is every street in Pattaya. The advertisements reach further and further above the streets, there are zero sidewalks aside from the beach road, and you are constantly dodging traffic and various hawker stalls that set up on the street encroaching further and further into the road until the police come by and tell them to back up a bit.
Down each of the roads that come off of this, and every other road in this city are a bunch of "beer bars" or colloquially known as "bar beers" where the sort of industry they are involved in is quite obvious.
We did a little walk around on our one and only night to at least have a look at what this place looks like at night and while I lived in Thailand for a very long time and was aware that Pattaya is all about the red-light districts I had no idea how extremely widespread that this was. We tried to do some math real quick based on the amount of girls we saw working in this bar and that and the fact that there are hundreds of bars and estimated that there has to be 10,000 prostitutes here or something insane like that. One street called Soi 6 has about 100 bars on it and each bar is essentially the same thing: There is music that is WAAAAY too loud playing to compete with the noise coming from the 99 other bars on the same street and there are a dozen or so scantily-clad young women shouting "hello welcome" at anyone and everyone that walks by.
I didn't take pictures of this because of a couple of reasons: There are security that get really upset if you do so and even though I don't participate in this industry I do not look down on the people that are doing it and therefore see no good reason to accidentally expose them. They are just trying to make some money and it isn't their fault that this is their best option in life.
So we hung out and walked around a lot and quickly found out that this is basically the only thing that this city had to offer. One of my friends is traveling with his wife and the other 2 aren't really interested in "paying for it" the same as me, so we stuck with our original plan of getting the hell out of there the very next day.
Therefore day 5 of my "vacation" was filled almost entirely with travel and well, that is never fun even if you do go VIP like we did.
The VIP taxi that we booked to take us to our flights in Bangkok was actually one of the nicest taxis I have been in anywhere in Asia. When an agency uses the word "VIP" it is almost always a lie but in this one instance we had a huge Hyundai minivan with tons of room for all of us as well as individual climate control. We were not expecting something this nice for our near 2-hour journey to Don Muang Airport and while being in a car isn't exactly my idea of a vacation, it was much more enjoyable than walking the disgustingly dirty streets of Pattaya.
The journey was about as enjoyable as you can expect from a 2-hour taxi followed by 1.5 hours in the airport followed by a 1.5 hour flight followed by a 40 minute car ride on the other end. So yeah, it was kind of brutal and I am likely just going to stay put here in Phuket for at least a few days. By the way I am in Phuket right now and I once briefly lived here years and years ago. Although there are many more people here than I would prefer there be, it is an absolutely lovely island so in the coming days you are likely going to see me complaining a lot less than I normally would do.
The Day 6 report is likely to be much more pleasant than the ones that I have regaled you with up to this point.
The people looking after Nadi send me daily picture updates of her status and well, I wish she looked happier but don't worry little buddy. I'll be back soon and it is unlikely that I will leave you alone for this long ever again.