I slipped into a sordid yet wonderfully satisfying routine. I would awaken about 11.00 am, later if I had bought a girl home with me, and shower and stroll down the Beach road. On the way I would buy the papers, a magazine or two and settle in the Lobster Pot for a long lunch. Then I would stroll back to the crossroads bar, carry on reading and writing and then back to the hotel to watch the Simpsons and freshen up. Sometimes I would arrange for a girl to meet me then and we'd fuck for an hour or so with a couple of beers.

Later I would pop out and see Lek or Noi, while they were working. Lek worked at a bar where there was one of those dreadful drag shows where admitedly beautiful transexuals dressed up in glittery gowns would mime the same old tired numbers looking as bored as they were boring. But for some strange reason both Ferang men and women seemed to love it. When I drove the Ocean road in Australia to the Twelve Apostles, my girlfriend made me watch Priscilla, Queen of the desert. While it was interesting to see the same places that I'd visited, the film left me largely cold - what is it that people like about drag shows? Oh well, each to their own I suppose.Later, quite drunk I would listen to an only half bad band that played at the bottom of one of the sois, by now I seemed to have a 'friend' or two in each bar. Eventually I would settle in one bar, play pool until the small hours and if I felt up to it, take a bar girl home with me.

One such night I bumped into Steady Eddie. Like many British people there he was from 'up north' originally and over a game of pool we started chatting. He'd settled here with his girlfriend running a food delivery business to the Western bars and was doing quite nicely. During the course of the conversation I mentioned that I'd only been to one go-go bar here in Pattaya and that was with the reprehensible Mitch. Steady Eddie insisted on taking me on a tour of the go-go bars, and although reluctant, cough, he eventually twisted my arm.

'Come, on hurry up and finish your beer Eddie,' I said, pulling him like a dog wanting to go for a walk.

Eddie explained that there was only one real sex-show in Pattaya. There used to be many more, things were a lot wilder a few years ago when girls would fight each other for the right to sleep with a punter. There were sex shows everywhere but the whole thing got out of hand and the police cracked down, closing most of the strip joints. They were replaced by the tamer go-go bars where clothes, technically speaking, had to stay on. We went down Walking street and drifted from one go-go bar to another. Some were themed, where the girls wore cowgirl outfits, others wore leather boots, thongs and bras and in one bar, the girls wore nothing at all except luminous body paint. That bar had a long entrance so if the police came the bouncers could warn the girls to cover up. After a while in each bar, it basically becomes rather boring. Again, some of the girls are loving it up there, really putting themselves into their routines and worshipping their own bodies in the mirrors. Others you just knew wanted to be anywhere else but here as they moved stiffly and unconvincingly around. The punters were mostly middle-aged men again, but there were a suprising number of women there also carefully watching the girls writhe and sway up and down the poles on the stage. Eddie told me that quite a few couples would take a girl, sometimes two home with them, Pattaya was not just a male paradise, it was also a swingers paradise. And the girls in the go-go bars were some of the sexiest women I have ever seen.

We grew bored and so Eddie then announced the grand finale. Pattayas only sex-show. We downed our drinks, and outside dodged the arm-clinging transexuals (I go you, you me go yes?) as they hunted down the unwary, or more often, those that knew exactly what they wanted. Against the flow in the balmy night we climbed the stairs into the dark within.

yechydda,