It’s unlikely that I’m the first person to enjoy the realization that our worst and most questionable decisions often gift us our most amusing memories. Speaking for myself, a strong contender for the dumbest thing I’ve ever done is also the funniest story I have to tell. But to clear something up straightaway, although my grandest personal fuckup happened in Bangkok and involved sex, it did not involve prostitutes.
In the spring of 2015, I worked for several months in a rural, mountain village in Northern India in the stunning, and always picturesque, arc of the Himalayas. Life in a rural village has many fine and recommendable qualities: 8-10 hours of sleep nightly (because everyone else goes to sleep around 10 pm), a healthy, nutritious diet of local foods, ample opportunity for outdoor exercise, and the list goes on.
One notable gap in this list of environmental pros, however, is nearly any chance to interact with the opposite sex. I’m a straight, unmarried male and was in my early 30s at the time. Naturally, an environment of social conservatism that frowns generally upon unmarried women even talking to men isn’t conducive to a satisfactory sex-life.
I was slated to finish work in the last week of April. As I had the month of May free, I’d booked a climbing trip in western Nepal with a Nepali friend who runs a guiding company. The trip was supposed to take about three weeks but two days before I was planning on heading off for Kathmandu the horrible earthquake of 2015 (April 25) happened. We were several hundred miles away and it still knocked down some buildings in the area. It took me even days to be able to reach my friend in Kathmandu and verify that he and his family were ok. Naturally, it was no time to be going on vacation in Nepal. So I decided to make other plans.
Throughout the previous year, when I had time off I’d frequented Bangkok. It’s a short and modestly priced flight from Kolkata and offers all the amenities of life that a gringo such as myself is accustomed to (hot showers, same day laundry, bars and restaurants open late). I impulsively booked a ticket to BKK with the intention of working out the rest later. Later that night a traveling buddy of mine texted me about his recent trip to Myanmar and the time he’d had there. I was sold. Myanmar it would be. I’d unwind in BKK for the weekend, visit the Embassy of Myanmar on Monday for a visa, and go for 28 days of trekking around the jungle and looking at old temples.
I arrived in BKK around noon on Friday. I had two Irish mates in town who’re solidly reliable for a good time. We made plans to go out Friday and Saturday night and indulge in the sort of bacchanalia that BKK generally tolerates. Through all of this, in the back of my mind was the smoldering hope that I would chance upon an opportunity to get laid as it had been several months since the last such occasion. Now to clarify, I’m no pick-up artist or Casanova-skilled operator and I have no illusions about my physique and appearance being a fortuitous gift to the generality of heterosexual womankind. What I have in my favor: I’m tall, not jacked but generally fit, and I have a full head of hair (My brief experience with Tinder has confirmed for me the relative importance of these attributes). But more importantly, I’m not terrible at making people laugh. This last point, however, presents a tactical dilemma. Middle to upper class BKK society is fairly socially liberal. Young women go out, they date, they drink in bars, have boyfriends etc. But in bars and clubs, you can’t expect fluent English from any given Thai patron anymore than you should expect fluent Thai from any given pharang. Denied my full range of expression, what charm I have (I’ll decline to quantify it), is significantly diminished. As I expected, in our two nights out in various bars and clubs, I had a variety of short, semi-flirty conversations with several Thai women but nothing came of it as I found myself reduced to shouting (I actually fucking hate clubs) in caveman syntax and thereby likely being completely uninteresting.
The other route in this dilemma is, of course, other foreigners (of which there is no shortage in BKK). Alas though, Friday and Saturday passed without the presentation of any significant opportunity. I packed the Irish lads in a cab Sunday morning (bound for the airport and diving in Koh Tau). I’d resigned myself to an appropriate day of Sunday rest at my guesthouse. Myanmar (as of 2015; can’t speak to the present) had an old Soviet style visa application: 15 pages long, requesting a complete work history and all sorts of other, totally unverifiable information. The application process had two steps: go to the embassy at 8:00 am and submit your docs and passport, then return at 4:00 pm to see if you had a visa. As I’d heard rumors that the embassy officials loved nothing more than to pour over applications for inconsistencies and deny them, I planned to make a proper go at it. Have a mild Sunday, detail the application, and not show up hungover on Monday morning.
I had breakfast around 11:00 am at my guesthouse (which requires some explanation). I’d found this place on a previous trip and liked it because it was cheap and actually on the banks of the Chao Phraya near the Rama VIII bridge and had easy access to the water taxis. It was accessible but tucked away in a quiet alley. Also, it seemed to be operated by about half a dozen ‘Thai bros.’ I don’t know what else to call them. They were always there and at any given time, day or night, you could expect to find two of them cooking something, two of them working out shirtless, and the other 2-3 drinking beer. We got on fine but couldn’t really communicate much so while I generally liked them and think they liked me, our interaction was limited to sharing the occasional beer on the docks and making the best of head nods and hand gestures.
Now we all know bad WiFi is an order of magnitude worse than no WiFi (bad WiFi manipulates the unkillable hope of the human spirit and mocks it). That morning the Thai Bro Guesthouse had bad WiFi. In the end, it drove me to a street side beer joint in Rambutri Alley (little plastic chairs, lots of sunburnt pharang swilling Chang in tank tops). So there I sat, Burmese visa application in hand, constructing an utter fiction of my 15 year work history. I don’t remember how it started but at some point I found myself engaged in a conversation with two lads of similar age from Edinburgh. These two were a real crack: funny, taking the piss out of everyone around. We drank some beers and watched some Football (might have been EPL; I don’t mind Football but I really don’t pay any attention to it). Around 6:00 pm, visa app granularly penned, I intended to set out. But the scruffier of the two Scots invited me to another beer bar a bit later for another match. I expressed doubts and reservations. He said there’d be ladies present. So, like an utterly predictable stereotype of myself, I went to shower and headed out to meet them.
Around 9:00 pm I showed up to this typical Rambutri beer joint (tiny plastic chairs, flatscreen hauled into the streets, various 9-12 year old children available to bring you beers, and the occasional passing shot cart). Now, as I’ve said, I do not think of myself as a particularly outstanding iteration of male sex-appeal. But, on the basis of a select number of experiences, I do feel like I’m not entirely blowing myself to say that I think I know when a woman is immediately attracted to me. And I feel perfectly comfortable saying this because it’s not something I claim to experience with any kind of frequency. With that in mind, when I approached the table I made eye contact with a young woman (late 20s, early 30s, shoulder length brown hair, blue eyes, a light, floral summer dress, and an exquisite Edinburgh accent). And I knew, in that moment, that she was attracted to me. The nature of the eye contact and so many body language queues. So I sat right next to her.
For the next 3-4 hours, I was in the rarest of forms. I shared stories and anecdotes that detabled more than one attendant with laughter. I was briefly, a god among mortals like Thor spying a buxom maiden from the heights of Valhalla and stepping into an evening’s fictions.
We drank. We kissed. We drank shots of hot rum from passing street vendors.
As an accomplished drunkard, I often recall experiences as if they were the memories of two people. One sane, one whiskey rotted. As I recall this experience now, there was a friend/roommate of my paramor to be. But earlier in the night she’d bagged off with a lad and it seemed that she would be AWOL till the morrow. So as the night drew on and our comrades evaporated, the sane kernal of my lizard brain suggested moving to her digs rather than mine as I’d seen the Thai Bros preparing some kind of brofest earlier in the evening and suddenly my thin walled room seemed a poor choice for sexual liaisons. And so I found myself en route to her Rambutri budget hotel room.
We arrived. It was approximately 4:00 am. The limiting parameter of the architecture of the building was clearly horizontal. Each floor (of 6) had four rooms with a regressing stairway leading into a common space on each floor. We’d been hands all over each other all the way there. Up the stairs, she turns the key………….
And there is the fucking roommate/travel companion snoring on one of two twin beds that are approximately .5 meters apart.
Fuck.
I immediately resign myself to the evening’s failure. It’s ok. It happens.
But after she relocks the door, we continue kissing. And it starts to heat up. Kissing, caressing. I don’t have a plan at this point because I’m drunk, I just know I don’t want to stop kissing this beautiful Scottish woman. So here we are in the square common area of this weird BKK hotel. I continue kissing her and the next thing I know my belt is undone. Then my pants are down and she’s blowing me in the hallway against the door of her room. The sane part of my lizard brain that was trying to keep me from getting arrested, resigned. I stood her up, summer dress up, and we did the deed against the door of her hotel room. Quick kiss goodnight, I make my way downstairs (thankfully without seeing anyone).
Back to the Thai Bro Guesthouse at 5;30 am. Everyone is passed out. I sleep 2 hours and make my embassy appointment, get my Myanmar visa, and head back to my guesthouse.
So now I have 24 hours in BKK with nothing to do. And I’m thinking I’d love to see this girl again and maybe have sex in a bed or something remotely civilized. But I only know her first name and the hotel where she’s staying. But I can’t bring myself to go to the hotel. I haven’t had many one night stands in my life but I’ve had enough to know the protocol can be complicated. I don’t know if she never wants to see me again or has already planned the wedding. So I take a half measure. About 6 pm, I go back to Rambutri and post up at a street side cafe and order a curry and a few beers. 30 minutes and success. Out come the Scottish, in full press. She sees me and comes over to say hi and kiss me. I feel great.
We progress to another bar (same shit, EPL for the pharang). But I can’t get a fucking word in with (name withheld) because her friend has assumed a hostile position. She interrupts everything I say and takes every opportunity to interject a smidge if passive aggression . It is palpably unpleasant between us.
Finally, the friend/roommate goes for a piss. I go for directness and breach the subject. I ask “Why is your friend so fucking hostile to me tonight?” And she said a few things that I remember in granular and clarion detail:
She (And yer best Edinburgh accent for it): “You see. We done a bad thing, Dave.”
Me: “I don’t care. Fuck prudes and the lot they rode in on.”
She: “No, there were cameras about the place.”
Me: …………..
Whole thing was captured on CCTV by the downstairs security crew.
And they showed it to everyone. Even the fucking banana vendor across the street.
So they had to leave a paid for room 3 days early.
Source: reddit.com/r/gonewildstories/comments/gxdawa/my_bangkok_accidental_porno_story_the_racy_parts
Oh Bangkok, good times. Can’t wait to return :-)
Amazing. BKK take me back.