travel diary – day 90
the travel diary for days 61 to 88 can be found under himalaya trek.
day 89 - i enjoyed a rare sleep in and watched some tv in my hotel room. i checked out and waited for ryan and boom in the restaurant attached to the hotel. due to a mixup, i didn’t realise that i was supposed to head out and meet ryan and boom, who’d spent the morning shopping in bangkok.
finally i got it all figured out (after waiting for 2 hours), jumped on the skytrain and headed across to mbk for a late lunch. ryan and i looked at camera gear and i could resist buying a very nice kata backpack. it’s a hybrid camera gear/general stuff pack and i think it’s going to fit the bill very nicely. my lowepro, while nice, is heavy and because it’s a one shoulder pack i’m having trouble with the weight. the kata is small, but roomy and when i have my big pack, i can swing the kata around to the front and carry it on my chest.
after shopping we said our farewells, then ryan and boom caught a cab to the airport for their flight back to chiang mai. i jumped in a taxi to khao san and checked into a hotel. i called up a thai friend who i met in mandalay. she lives near khao san and we met for dinner. as it turns out, shinya (who was dating her while we were in burma) was still in bangkok and the three of us had dinner together. we went back to their place and drank some beer. late, i returned to my hotel.
day 90 - i slept in and had a late breakfast. i needed to make arrangements to get a new passport and today was my only chance to do it before i caught a train to chiang mai. i called the australian consulate in chiang mai to see whether i could do it there. the answer was no, i had to do it in bangkok. so i jumped a cab across to the australian embassy.
the embassy is asbsolutely beautiful. seriously, i’ve never seen an embassy that nice before. the embassy building begins on the second floor. the entire first floor is a parking area, a big pond, a waterfall and a massive garden. at the back is the ambassador’s residence. i seriously couldn’t believe i was in an australian embassy. inside was just as nice. the whole place was huge and spacious.
the girl at the counter was thai, but she had a thick australian accent which i found quite cute. she was helpful and i went through the paperwork. unfortunately, the passport photos i had with me weren’t good enough (the passport photo rules are really, really strict) and i had to go for a walk to a nearby shop which does photos for all the surrounding embassies. 15 minutes later i was back, which photos in hand and completed the passport application. i’m getting a 64 page passport and it’s costing me AUD$220 … a bit bloody expensive. they told me i could come back to pick up the passport on june 12th.
when i got back to khao san road, i walked into the apple istudio store. i was thinking about buying a pair of full sized headphones. after looking around for a bit i decided to get some food instead, and as i was leaving the apple shop, a worker asked if i was interested in doing a survey – in return, i’d get a free istudio tshirt.
it must have been “cute girl friday” cause she was cute too … so i said yes to the survey. 15 minutes of flirting later, i had a tshirt and was on my way down khao san looking for food. i spotted a bookstore and went in for a look around. i was actually looking for some rudyard kipling (he wrote some travel diaries about asia which were published as a book). i couldn’t find the book i was after so i settled on a book called “the cellist of sarajevo” by steven galloway.
i got some food and started the book (which was really good). at 5pm i met ploy (the thai girl) and shinya for dinner. we went to a theatre restaurant which was a little expensive, but had kids doing performances and acrobatics. although it was mediocre, it had a lot of potential. after that shinya and i got talking about pat pong … which, for the uninitiated, is bangkok’s famous red light and ‘ping pong show’ district. i’d been to pat pong before, but only through the markets. i hadn’t actually been to see one of the shows.
i was keen to go and so was shinya. ploy, too, said she’d be interested in seeing the shows. although she’s thai, all locals know about the sex tourism industry. the ping pong shows are famous. so i guess a lot of thai’s are curious about the shows. so, we got into a cab and headed over to pat pong. it was pouring rain and we just went into the first place we saw. the place had a half dozen people inside, including a foreign couple. we got a table, had some beer, and sat to watch the show.
the place was fairly small and made up of mostly a big raised stage and some tables for customers. it looked like the typical strip club from hollywood movies, but on a smaller scale. there were a few girls dancing topless (wearing a thin red g-string) and other girls standing off to the side talking. instantly we were bored. it wasn’t anything that exciting. then a woman came onto the stage. she was older than the dancers (who looked quite young). the woman, buck naked, walked onto the stage, lay on her back, put a whistle into her vagina, and started blowing through it. after about a minute, she stopped, stood up, and walked off the stage.
that was it …
the younger girls kept dancing, mostly looking at themselves in the mirror, until another woman came up to do a ‘trick’. one woman pulled a huge string of balls out of herself. another woman used a straw in her vagina to blow out candles on a cake. then came the infamous ping pong show.
by this time (maybe 30 minutes later) we three were the only ones in the bar. a girl in a g-string handed me and shinya a ping pong bat each … we knew what was coming next. the girl went on the stage, buck naked, with a bucket of ping pong balls. she put one in her vagina and fired it across the room. i was honestly impressed that the ball was being fired around 3 meters at a decent speed. she started firing the balls at shinya and i.
i’d had three beers, and the room was dark, but my aim was still good and i was smashing ping pong balls back towards the stage. actually, i was aiming for the topless dancing girls, just out of fun, and i told them that i was aiming for them. one girl turned around and flashed her bum at me. i hit an oncoming ping pong ball at her and barely missed, the ball boucing off the wall centimeters from her.
the woman on stage continued to fire ping pong balls until her bucket was empty. we clapped (well, it was fun!!) and while she was collecting the ping pong balls from the floor, she asked us for a tip. we paid her a few baht we had left over from the beers.
the girl i had fired balls at came down to help clean up. while she was walking around, she came and sat on my lap … wiggling her bum into my crotch. she was very good looking and had a nice body. so i enjoyed the free ride. she got up again, walked back onto the stage, and kept dancing.
i was happy … pat pong was mostly crap, but we’d had a bit of fun. we finished our beers and walked outside to find that the rain had stopped. we hailed a taxi back to khao san and i got some sleep.
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