Banging on about Bangla Road

Up until now, this blog has been PG-rated - as in, no graphic or what may be considered adult's only content, I don't mean "rated Pretty Good".

This is where I need to touch on some racier topics, so if you're easily offended or don't want to lose your image of me as a sweet, innocent, 42-year-old, then perhaps you can skip to the next article where I document some of Phi Phi islands wildlife, and not Patong Beach's nightlife. You will however, miss a great restaurant review - it's up to you.

OK. All of that said, it's not like I was running naked down the main tourist strip of Patong. You need a licence for that sort of thing, or at least an understanding with some of the local law enforcement representatives.

My guide on this mid-week sojourn into Phuket's most famous (sometimes infamous) street was an expert. A man who has lived here for about 16 years, and actually gets paid by some crazy company to write about and review this area of Thailand (along with others) so that people all around the world will know what to expect when they get here. Where to go, where not to go, and how to avoid buying a round of drinks for everyone in the bar. All good stuff to know.

We started our night in Patong with a visit to the legendary Sea Hag restaurant, recommended by several locals, including our guide. The food was stunning. I can't remember how many different dishes we had, or what their Thai names were, but I have not had better seafood in Thailand.

We looked at menus for ten minutes or so, and when we were ready to order, or host, Khun Kenya, ignored all our selections, and chose a veritable smorgasboard of Thai dishes that were so full of flavour and all so different. Some were spicy, but none painfully so.

Baked whole fish in tamarind, mixed seafood cooked in a claypot, a fish mousse, and huge prawns wrapped in super thin noodles and deep-fried. Wow! And for us, a very cheap feed indeed. I hate leaving food on a plate, and will often stuff myself so food doesn't go to waste (but instead to my waist) - but there was no way I could eat another mouthful, and some of our security guards got some great leftovers that night.

With our taste buds truly satiated, it was time for a full-on assault of our other senses. The sights, sounds, and yes, smells of Bangla Road.

I've never seen so many Australians in one street before. It was like being a kid lost at Sydney's Royal Easter Show again. Of course there were also Britts, Russians, Americans, those from the Middle East, and various other assorted nationalities.

All in one main street - and its various sois - being coaxed into bars, urged to look at menus of the performances available in some of those bars, and huddling around groups of katoey (lady boys) to take photos. You could also purchase various fluorescent toys that flew into the air, wooden frogs that croaked when you stroked their back, tailored suits, DVDs, and the usual cacophony of special offers available to the tourist in Thailand.

How could I describe the scene for you? If you took the cars out of Kings Cross in Sydney and made it for pedestrians only, took out any of the legitimate cafes and other businesses that might operate there during the day and replaced them with bars that have no walls and instead just have bars with seats and bands playing and girls dancing on the bars, and then added about 100 times more people than you get on an average Saturday, swapped the risk of getting stabbed for your wallet with the risk of getting fleeced of the money in your wallet, and put smiles on everyone's faces, than that's pretty much what it's like.

Actually, it's not. I suspect there's nothing like Bangla Road in all the world. It has it's own attraction for some - clubs, shows, girls, lady boys, cheap knock-offs of everything from designer jeans to stun guns... And for others the exact same list would make them want to stay away, or condemn those who work and make their living here. I wonder what Fred Nile would do in a place like Bangla Road? Anyway, I digress.

As a sample, we had our first drink at an ice bar. There's plenty of these around in a lot of cities. Everything is made of ice including the glasses, it's very cold, and you drink vodka shots.

This ice bar turned out to be the freezer room at the back of another bar, where you paid to step out of the hot and humid night air, and into about -15C. We were given drinks in glasses made from ice, which we were told we had to smash against the concrete floor. That was how we started.

It was a truly memorable experience. I've been to bars before, but Bangla Road has a life and spirit of its own. Its not just that there's bars where weird stuff happens, it's that they're all here in one place and everyone knows about it. So everyone comes. Tourists mostly.

In one bar, I even questioned my command of English (let alone Thai), when I order a vodka, lime, and soda, and received a soda, lime, and soda. Or maybe they have that special Thai vodka that tastes like water. Same price though.

The word "exploitation" crept into my head a couple of times as we walked around. But it was more of a question than a comment. I'm not being deliberately naive, but I didn't see unhappy people on either side of the bar, or on the bar. Going back to the Kings Cross parallel, there is a note of desperation there. The stench of drugs and other addictions seep out from behind the lights and glitzy veneer, so you know it's false.

Here there is no veneer. There it is as you walk down the street in front of you - the question is asked in a thousand different ways: "Is this what you want? Well here it is."

I'm not ignorant of the fact that there have been many cases, recent cases, of child and female exploitation in and around Thailand. But so too in Australia, and Britain and America...

Like the beaches and the amazing natural beauty in this country, the tourists come for this, and the tourists spend a lot of money because of this.

D.