Ya-yas and Trustafarians. Silly, rich, and tiresome kids who went on skiing holidays — that's who went to Thailand, so I thought anyway. I had probably met a couple of such types before I ever ventured further east than Turkey, and I just assumed these were solely the kind of people who ventured out to the land of smiles. Not now. I've been to Pattaya and Chiang Mai.
Places like Chiang Mai are almost exclusively inhabited by digital nomads; there's 30,000 or so of them. Head down to the islands of Samui or Pha Ngan, and you'll find crypto bros and yoga sluts. Go to Phuket, and you'll stumble across all sorts: Essex boys, sex tourists, Aussie scumbags, wannabe Mai Tai champions, and drunk lesbians. Oh, and Russians. Lots of bloody Russians. Pattaya is mostly — for the Europeans — sex tourists and old expats, and it's these sex-fueled expats who you never want to become. They are broken beyond repair.
I have never grown tired of observing the antics of Pattaya expats; they're very special. You can easily stroll past a 7/11 — minding your own dirty business — and bang, you're face-to-face with a 60-year-old lobster-tanned man dancing to a tune in his own mind whilst drinking booze from a bag. There is zero self-awareness. There is zero hope. Loonies in the park that kick pigeons, and loonies on the streets shouting at invisible enemies — these gallant men of Pattaya are not so dissimilar. Vests, shorts, booze, and PTSD stares. That's what their new life in the sunny land of smiles has rewarded them with, as well as the odd STD and balcony dive.
As Europeans — and especially British ones, though Europe is a sillier place than Britain — we have a troubling syndrome when living full time in warm climbs: boozing. The average Brit cannot even go to the airport without having three pints for breakfast — they're smashed by the time the plane takes to the runway. In the UK, when the sun finally shows itself after being in exile during autumn and winter, every man, woman, girl, and boy will ransack the local shop or supermarket for all its booze and proceed to try and barbecue sausages and eat them before they black out. The sun makes us feel like we're on holiday, and living in the sun feels like it's just dandy to drink lager from 10 a.m. in the morning until being rescued from drowning at dusk.
In Spain or Greece or France, or Portugal, this is also a problem, but it doesn't lead to the level of brain-fucking that Thailand, and Pattaya in particular, leads to. The Spanish and the Greeks and the French and the Portuguese ladies don't consistently shout "Where you go, sexy man" 24/7. Pattaya is a land of zombies who have convinced themselves they are hot shit!
I always enjoyed watching the stupid, joyous faces of old men stomping down whatever grotty soi it may be whilst getting catcalled and having their old-man balls slapped. They loved it. After a while, though, the ball-slapping and shouting can fully remove a man from the preciousness of reality.
There used to be two old buzzards who frequented the shop outside my apartment block. This was a local shop that had tables and chairs and let people buy booze for shop prices and drink all day long in the unforgiving sun. I would often come outside in the early morning to get my bowels moving with nicotine and see old buzzards 1 and 2 getting on it. Then I'd go out around mid-day and see them still getting on it, and they'd still be getting on it upon my return in the afternoon. They were on it until my final cigarette of the day, at about midnight. I never saw them speak or smile, or do anything that would alert me to signs of "life." They were stone-cold dead inside. This was their dream retirement: staring into the abyss with a brain marinated by booze. I managed to live in that zombie apocalypse for the best part of a year before I had the privilege of engaging in conversation with a broken Pattaya man; I should have stayed out of it!
One delightful conversation was with some old puffins from the depression lands — that's the north of England, if you didn't know already. He had been married three times to three Thai women, and all marriages had ended in devastating failure. One wife had had him receive a mighty kicking from her brothers and cousins. I don't know why; maybe he told me during my periods of zoning out, but I do know it was a harrowing experience. This old northerner gave me some advice: "If a Thai lady says it's night time and you go outside and can see it's dark and it's definitely night time, it's not night time — that's how much they lie!"
Fucking hell! How lovely!
Another time I spent an evening hopping from Go-Go bar to Go-Go bar with a cheery southerner. He was the life of the party. He loved to chat to everyone and drop joke after joke. He was always quipping, laughing, and giving me the old chirpy nudge-nudge. His cheeriness was a facade. Every now and then, he would open up — uninvited — about his personal life. His Thai wife, from the whore farm of Isan, was bleeding him dry. They had agreed to a monthly allowance, which was more than I care to remember, but it had reached a point where that wasn't good enough: this cat-calling jezebel wanted a house — for herself! This southern buzzard rented one for her, which was better than buying one, I suppose, and this annoyed her because he seemed like a cheap bastard. There was an unlimited sadness behind his mischievous eyes. It was a sadness I never wanted to experience for myself. Luckily for me, I just didn't experience that sadness, because the sadness doesn't exist; it's just a symptom of something far more difficult to cure, borderline insanity. That's what's really going on with these men, and it would get me in the end.