Can there be a more profitable market for cell phone operators than Thailand? The average Thai person under the age of 30 is completely fixated on their mobile phone, the females especially. It’s not unknown to see a scooter coming along the street with 3 Thai girls perched upon it and all 3 of them including the driver chatting away quite happily on their cell phone.

Nuth is just as bad, she has a big family you see and she seems to think that if she calls one of them then she must call them all, this process can take up to 2 hours. This wouldn’t be a problem if she (and all Thai people I have seen using a mobile phone) could get the concept of prioritisation. She will quite happily chat to one of her sisters for 20 minutes whilst I sit on the scooter waiting for her because her sister happened to call as we were about to go to the market. What would you do in this situation? Personally I would tell the caller that I can’t talk right now I have somebody waiting for me and that I will call back. Nope, not a Thai person, they give the caller their undivided attention until every last drop of conversation has been consumed and then resume what they were doing prior to the call.

There is another problem though, again more prolific among the ladies here. They can’t go without talking, I seriously think Nuth would die if she was forced not to speak for more than an hour. A great example of this happened yesterday, I had to pop to a friend’s house to do a couple of hours work for him, Nuth decided to come with me. We had been there 10 minutes and she had tried several times to strike up a conversation with me, all failed because I was concentrating on work. So what does she do to releive her rising panic at the thuoght of not speaking for an hour or so? Simple, she spends 2 hours calling her entire family, this was following the previous 2 hours she had spent calling them just after breakfast!

I’m not complaining I think it’s pretty funny, it only gets to be a problem when I’m waiting to do something and she’s switched off and talking to her little sister about the price of rice, how hot it is and what she’s cooking for lunch.

This will be my final catch up post, sorry it’s taken so long to get up to date but life has been busy.

Myself, Loeky and Winchy spent a week upon Koh Samui after leaving Pattaya. I think we all needed a rest after our antics in that crazy place, unfortunately it was not to be so!

I guess the biggest thing to happen was my becoming a certified scuba diver, what an amazing experience that was and something I shall return to in the future. Winchy had already passed his open water course and only had to take a quick refresher. We had a days diving around Koh Tao, first a beach dive at Mango Bay and then a boat dive at Twins, check this out, full on discovery channel type images taken with an underwater camera!

Everything was not all healthy water sports, myself and Winchy had a fair few nights on the booze, I think the worst was the night the owner of the bar said I could drink the 3rd of a bottle of Sang Som on the shelf for free if I could drink it straight in one go. I was already drunk, downing a 3rd of a bottle of cheap Thai whiskey in one go isn’t wise! The resulting chaos was interesting

I left the guys on Koh Samui after a week and headed home to Koh Phangan 30 minutes away across the sea, I took with me a Thai girl named Nuth, she has been here ever since, kinda strange living with somebody again after all these years, enjoyable though.

Ok, let’s get something in perspective here before I start this update. I visited Pattaya in the company of Loeky and Winchy, both of whom have lived in Amsterdam most of their lives, Loeky especially is no stranger to the Amsterdam nightlife. So when I say these two gentlemen were shocked by Pattaya maybe that will give you some idea of just how extreme this place is.

I’ve visited a lot of towns with so called ‘red light’ districts, well forget all that, Pattaya is a red light town, there must be several hundred bars populated by thousands of bar girls, it is one full on experience.

On our first night in Pattaya I was arrested within 30 minutes of us leaving the hotel, a cop grabbed me for not wearing a helmet whilst driving a motorcycle. He confiscated the keys to the bike and I had to go to the police station and pay the fine before I could have them back! Winchy was arrested the following night for driving the wrong way down a one way street!

Whilst on the subject of motorcycles, lets talk about a little street racing! We had rented some scooters, 125cc, unrestricted, these things will do 120 kmh no problem. I will never forget racing Winchy home at 6am, drunk as fuck, weaving in and out of the incredible traffic on one of the nastiest roads I have ever seen. Neon lights flashing past in a blur, the constant BOOM BOOM BOOM of the bass from the girly bars, half naked chicks all over the place, very hard to drive when every 10 metres you have to turn your head to the pavement to have a look at some little bar bunny! I have no idea how we both made it back alive!

We found a very cool bar down a back street, if you have ever seen Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas you will understand what I mean by a revolving bar, you sit on a stool at the bar and the whole bar revolves, very unsettling but it does mean you get to have a good look at all the skirt you would normally miss that’s standing behind you!

It was whilst sitting in this bar that we met my friend Till and a friend of his whose name I can’t remember. This guys particular thing is shagging lady boys, he says he isn’t gay, he just likes to shag lady boys, a very strange Hungarian chap, as you can see in this picture!

Oh and we also found where Zab has been hiding for the last few months! We all thought he was freezing somewhere up in Scotland but I think this picture tells the truth!

If I had to choose one thing to sum up Pattaya it would be what happened on my last night there; we had a cab booked for 2am to take us back to Bangkok, so I went back to my hotel room for a few hours sleep at around 10pm. I picked up the phone and ordered a massage from room service. I first had a 1 hour Thai massage, followed by a 1 hour oil massage and then I shagged the masseur! When she left she asked me for a fiver!

I’m never going back again though, the place is just too crazy for me, I must be getting old!

So, on with the entertainment! I met up with Loek and Winchy on the 3rd of February in Bangkok, we did some tourist like things. Visited Pantip Plaza (8 quid for a 2GB SD Ram card for my Palm TX thank you very much). Spent a while getting very lost in MBK, had our photo taken with a fake pirate on the Koah San Road and rented a longtail boat for a rather cool waterways tour of Bangkok. Here is a picture of Loeky on the boat.

That was the normal part of the Bangkok visit, the other parts were rather interesting. First off, let’s remember that Winchy’s particular fetish is Asian women and this was his first time in Asia. So of course, we ended up in Patpong, Winchy and myself dragged a couple of bar girls out of one of the show bars. We had to split cabs on the way home as there were too many of us for one cab. I get back to the hotel first where upon the reception desk ask my girl for ID so they can make sure she is over the legal limit (20) and she can’t find it. I then sit in the lobby with her crying whilst I wait for the guys to turn up in their cab. Finally she finds her ID and the problem is resolved. Winchy turns up with his girl and tells me she’s been in tears in the cab because it’s her first time working a bar.

So the night goes much as expected, mine leaves early in the morning and I meet the guys in the hotel restaurant, Winchy looks a bit upset so I ask him what’s wrong? It turns out his girl is so inexperienced and stressed out that Winchy couldn’t get it to fit! (I laughed quite a lot at that).

We also had three very strange events involving taxi drivers.

Event 1: We walk outside of Pantip Plaza and flag a cab, we climb in and ask him to switch on the meter, he says ok in a minute. We drive about a mile with us asking him over and over again to turn on the meter, eventually he says no, we have to pay him more because of the traffic. So we ask him to pull over and let us out, but that’s not good enough for him, he’s getting aggressive and that triggers Loeky, so we almost have a boxing match in the middle of the street!

Event 2: Myself and Winchy decide to go shopping on the Koah Sahn Road one evening. We get into a cab, he turns on the meter and drives around for about 30 minutes. He then pulls over to the side of the road, tells us he is hungry and is going home and kicks us out of the cab!

Event 3: We book a cab from Pattaya to Bangkok, about a 2 hour drive. It’s 2am in the morning and still really hot and humid. At first the cab is nice and cool but soon I realise I’m starting to sweat. I look at the dashboard and the cab drivers has the aircon set to 32 degrees! He’s got the fucking heater on and it’s colder outside than it is in the cab! We ask him to turn it down and he does…. to 28 degrees! He’s still cooking us!

Stay tuned for the next gripping episode, which involves Pattaya, getting arrested, a fucked up Hungarian who likes to shag lady boys and a large dose of street racing.