Phuket: Where Morals Go To Die

Thank you, stereotypically Asian-style cartoon! It's great to be here!

I decided to take a shuttle from the airport to my hostel since it would be cheaper and I assumed it would probably take about as much time (in retrospect, I really had no basis for making that assumption). I was mostly right on both fronts.

In the van, I met this blonde Australian girl who is also exploring the world. She is traveling with a friend at the moment, though I got a really weird vibe going on between them so I assume their travels together did not end up being as awesome as they had originally anticipated. Whoops! She was super cool, but our itineraries didn't overlap at all, so about 20 minutes later, I hopped out of the shuttle onto Bangla Road, never to see her again. Story of my life.

Like most of the hostels at which I've stayed, I chose this one because it was highly-rated and because it was close to where a bunch of other hostels were, which is generally a good indication of it being in an area that is relatively safe and has cool stuff to do. It turns out Bangla Road is INSANE. I hopped out of the shuttle and onto this street filled with people. And lights! So many lights! And more ladyboys than (most of) you have ever seen before in your lives! And go-go dancers. And so many dudes soliciting tourists to come see ping pong shows. If you don't know what a ping pong show is, for the love of God, please DO NOT Google it. Some things can never be unlearned. The worst part is that these guys keep making this popping noise with their mouths after they approach you saying "ping pong show!" [Pop Pop]. WORST.

The biggest fake tiger I've ever seen.
And I've seen A LOT of big fake tigers. (...no I haven't.)

When I got to where my hostel was supposed to be, it was no where to be found. Instead, I found a go-go bar with a GIANT fake tiger roaring at me. What IS this place?!

I must have looked totally lost, because a few minutes later a stranger walked up to me and asked me if I need help finding something. So the thing about traveling alone in a foreign country is that you have to be super-vigilant at all times because you don't want to be that guy that is stupid and gets robbed and/or mugged and/or scammed. And especially when I'm carrying a 35-pound backpack, I'm in a particularly vulnerable position because I basically can't defend myself and/or quickly exit a dangerous situation. But sometimes you also have to fall back on the idea that most people are mostly good and want to help you out. Luckily, this situation was the latter. I told the guy what hostel I was looking for and it turns out he was an American guy who happened to know the owner of that hostel, so he pointed me in the right direction (which was basically across the street from the GIANT tiger) and I was on my way. Turns out Google Maps was actually right, but this hostel just sucks at signage.

This street is FILLED with people on a
Wednesday night. Don't you have other
things to do?! I guess Bangla Road IS the
thing to do on a Wednesday night.

After I checked in, I met a whole bunch of people in the hostel. There was my new English friend, MM, and his German friend who he met a couple days ago while traveling. There was also LI, the somewhat mysterious girl who is from Norway but is racially and somewhat ethnically Iraqi. There was also the girl staying in my room from Texas, BK. is basically the second American I've met while traveling, which seems crazy to me but... I'm pretty sure that's a true statement. We chatted for a while, she seems pretty cool. Later that night, I met her French friend with whom she is traveling, who gave me this super cold reception. What's the deal?! Whatever.

The night was still relatively young at 10:30pm and I just gotten to Thailand, so there was no way I was ready for bed. MM and I went to go exploring Bangla Road, which isn't really that big. We ended up at this bar pretty close to our hostel. When we got there, this kind of older Thai woman approached us and offered to play a game with us. Basically, there's a giant tree stump, and the game is to take turns trying to hammer in a nail into the tree stump using the back-end of the hammer. Whoever hammers in their nail first wins. She then tried to get us to wager that the loser buys the other a drink. I'm not one to buy drinks anyways, but this totally screamed scam to me (some Google searching the following day confirmed as much). In any case, we did play the game sans wager, and we both got destroyed by this woman, who had obviously had a lot of practice playing this game.

It turns out that these kinds of games are pretty common here as a way for the bar girls to get people to buy them drinks / give them money / spend more money. It is also common for men to pick up these bar girls to take them home. When that happens, the dude has to pay a "fee" of sorts to the bar for allowing the woman to leave work. There was a disturbing amount of gross, old white dudes with young, attractive Thai girls all over Bangla Road. Which I guess is what you expect when you come to Thailand, but... it's just so blatant. I guess it makes sense. I mean, who is going to see you when you're out in Thailand? Not your friends or your kids or your wife. You can do whatever you want out here because this is certainly not real life. So it makes sense that these dudes don't feel the need to hide what it is that they're very obviously doing. Prostitution has technically been illegal in Thailand since 1960 but enforcement of that particular law is... basically nonexistent. Surprised? Nope.

We didn't spent too much more time there and actually did call it a night around midnight or so. Five days of this? I might have to rethink my travel plans.

CONTINUE ON to Phuket Part 2: Finally, a Nice Beach!