Pattaya: Believe It or Not

If the phrases "amiable depravity" and "another day in paradise" seem apt descriptions of life in Florida, they are equally apt for the similarly warm, open, and peculiar kingdom of Thailand. Keep an open mind, and the paradoxes of Pattaya will come tickle you over and over again.

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Alarmingly ramshackle infrastructure can be found inches away from the heights of hedonistic luxury. Overlooking our hotel's serene blue pool is a building under construction, where workers set up sawhorses and ladders, and work far into the night, perilously close to the raw edge of the upper stories, without protective devices or barriers of any kind. We can see them up close when we pass by in our 6th-floor hallway, but we scurry along quickly so as not to distract them. Some of them wear hard hats or reflective vests, but it's hard to imagine these offering any protection to someone hurtling to the ground. They seem to have excellent balance, though.

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On a nearby street, we encountered a beggar who appeared sadly lacking in adequate medical care. He told us he was in this state of affairs because of a terrible accident, and hauled out his colostomy bag to prove the point.  And yet Bill has found a UCLA-educated dentist in nearby Jomtien Beach who, within 5 days, went from first impressions to fully crafted dentures at one-tenth the price we would have paid in the States. In Dr. Nan's waiting room are coffee, soft drinks, and a bottle of whiskey for patients who need them. Bill had received such an ill-fitting temporary pair in Florida that he wore them only once and tossed them aside. The new choppers are, he reports, 10,000 times better. This is why so many Westerners come to Thailand for their dental work, afterwards treating themselves like kings as a reward.  

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Which leads to the fact that there are no straightforward explanations of the bar scene in Pattaya. Nothing in this sexual theme park is quite what it seems. Paradoxes and complexities abound.

Of course, one becomes quickly used to seeing elderly gentlemen, some on canes or walkers, arm in arm with slick young Thai girls, their girlfriends for the length of a holiday, who will show them the ropes and happily accept their spending money. But the economy here is changing.  Cosmopolitan malls, hotels, restaurants, clinics, and casinos are nibbling at the edges of what used to be one big red-light district and now provide more respectable jobs for girls who had only menial or bar-girl work as options. 

To be sure, though, the bar girls are here, even if not all of them are available. Most massage parlors are only that, for example. The man sitting next to you at a bar might be husband to one of the girls, but this might or might not mean that she is available.

One Isaan country girl lived a 17-hour bus ride away from Pattaya, loves her mama and papa and country music, and has come here to work. In her words, she has worked at a bar here for exactly three days and seems shy, innocent, and giggly. She is 28 years old. This might just be her schtick, or it might be the truth. One cannot know for sure.

Another bar could be more family-friendly, a local Cheers like Ken & Jim's Bar, where proprietress Jim can be found Skype-ing husband Ken, a contractor in Afghanistan; tending to her baby girl; or putting on an awards dinner for a roomful of Swedish golfers in town for a tournament. There's a Thai expression that everyone knows: jai di, "good heart." Jim has one.

Another Ken, from Switzerland, who owns a home around the corner from Ken & Jim's and is there so often that he has become a fixture.

Me and my new friend Kim, at Ken & Jim's.
She and her Swedish golfer husband are snowbirds who escape
 their Scandinavian midnights by wintering in Pattaya.
A classic "good girl" from Nakhon Phanom, in far-north Thailand. Kim nevertheless loves
the Pattaya go-go scene, just because it's fun.

Bar girls will even chat with foreign wives, if they make the effort to speak Thai with them, play their games, or trade girl talk about a new purse, earrings, or where they got their nails done. They will greet you with a smile, teach you Thai, share their flower wreaths, and dance with you, even if their motivations may be ultimately mercenary.

A lively game of dominoes enlivens
the slower midday hours behind a bar

Sometimes, though, you might glimpse the darker side of this life, when a girl drops her smiling mask for a moment.

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But the biggest Pattaya paradox is a massive, all-wooden construction called the Sanctuary of Truth.

Until I got its name straight, I persisted in calling it the Fortress of Solitude, but now, for a number of reasons, I won't forget it. Not far from the north end of overdeveloped Pattaya Beach, it couldn't be further away in spirit.

So near and yet so far

The brainchild of a now-deceased wealthy Thai businessman, the Sanctuary was begun 33 years ago, with the lofty goal of expressing the ephemeral nature of human life and the infinite nature of the spiritual. To capture this concept in wood, the obsessive founder decreed that construction would never end. Now, years after his own ephemeral life ended, his creation continues. The air around the sanctuary is filled with sawdust and a never-ending din of hammers and saws wielded by Burmese craftspeople carving every inch of the place with intricate designs. That they can manage to continue doing this forever is a tribute to industry and employment in Pattaya.

 

The results are astounding.

But, in true Thai fashion ... wait!  There's more!

You'd think it should be enough to keep endlessly re-creating the magnificence of heaven on earth. Not here in Pattaya.  Instead, a vast menu of Disney-esque amusements awaits the bored and jaded traveler. The Sanctuary of Truth presents, for modest additional fees, challenges worthy of The Amazing Race: speedboat tours, horseback rides around the grounds, elephant rides around the grounds, a horse-drawn carriage around the grounds, an ATV go-kart course, horse races, bungee jumping, a suspension bridge, shark feeding, fish feeding, traditional Thai music and dance, and, last but not least, an air-gun range. One wonders what deep spiritual wellsprings all these activities are meant to tap. Where, exactly, does the air-gun range fit in?  It is as if the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris began offering a zipline from one flying buttress to the next.

At the Training Race Course, this bored young thoroughbred showed more interest in
Bill's trousers than in racing his colleagues.

Rules 6 and 9 for the ATV course are the sort of thing that tends to give tourists the jitters. If your go-kart breaks down amid a melee of  other karts, you must exit your vehicle immediately and wait in the middle of the track.  Wait. What?  And "If any additional damage will charged by cost." We were unsurprised to see no one taking advantage of this activity.


Also unattended was the suspension bridge to nowhere. Here, thrill seekers might mount a tightrope wire enmeshed in netting, to cross a scum-coated creek and then return via a second tightrope wire.

I had dressed, I thought, with appropriate modesty for the Sanctuary, in a skort that ended just above the knee, but it turned out not to be so. I was cordially asked to wear a sarong to cover my immodesty.

And then,  because of the ongoing construction, without benefit of such modern conveniences as nails, we had to wear hard hats. We looked quite jaunty but were soon drenched with sweat and a bit nervous because we had to wear them in the first place.

To reach the ground level where the Sanctuary stands, one must descend a hair-raisingly steep flight of splintered planks with only a rope for a railing.  This was when we came to understand the value of instead riding a horse, an elephant, or a carriage.