macaroni21

Interesting how PBS World says this 4.1 was " the strongest quake in the province in recorded history" but our very own PeterRS can quickly find records of 6.1 and above. And PeterRs is credible. Am I missing something here? I wonder if the key operative phrase is "in the province"....

I hesitate to reply to this because my visit was 10 years ago (sorry, I thought it was 6 - 8 years ago in my earlier message, but on checking my notes, it's evidently even earlier). My recollection from a one-week stay in Ubud was that there weren't many massage places obviously visible along the streets (almost surely many more tucked within resorts), and what there were had female staff - with one exception. The one exception was a place called Nur Salon, a property that comprised about 3 or 4 houses in a (cramped) garden setting. It catered to both genders and there were male and female staff. Naturally, I asked for a male masseur. A 90-minute body scrub and massage cost about 250,000 rupiah. What was memorable about it was the setting and the tub. The massage room was open to the sky, with privacy provided by 2-metre high walls. So, I was in a little private garden. One one side was the massage table, on the other side was a tiled pool, just big enough for one. It was just a little bigger than a bathtub. After the body scrub, the masseur led me to the tub/pool in which rose petals had been added to the water. I don't remember whether it had water jets, but I think it did (gentle ones). After a soak of about 15 minutes, the masseur came back to the room/private courtyard, helped me out of the tub/pool and led me to the massage table. But there was absolutely no extra service. A quick google search shows they're still in business. Although there's no website and their Facebook page has not been updated since 2012, Tripadvisor has reviews dating from as recently as August 2022.

Thank you @dscrtsldnbi. I was just wondering whether I should plan for Bali in the first quarter of next year. It's good the hear that the massage places are alive and well and you've certainly made it sound a more desirable choice than a few other destinations I was mulling over. I have only been there twice, with the last visit more about 6 to 8 years ago (I'm not even sure how many years anymore). I too remember happy endings at massage places. That said, I don't recall full-on body contact a la Thailand, but merely handjobs with the guy standing beside the massage table -- too mechanical for me. Which was why I had no urge to go back. Perhaps you could share your experience or thoughts whether the masseur would himself be naked while performing the massage and whether he would climb onto the table for the afters? I also remember bad traffic and having to spend much time and energy getting to wherever I wanted. In this regard, are there any recommendations where one should stay to reduce travelling time to the massage places and the bars? I am usually a 3-star hotel type of guy. If I do get there in 2023, naturally, I shall be writing a trip report.

Here again, another mention... I find this rather intriguing.

This is a good question and I genuinely don't know either, so would appreciate information from those who have experience with Brazil and/or Colombia. From my occasional glance at the Latin American sections of this forum, it seems to me that there is a lot of focus on muscularity and above all, the size of dick, which on the face of it, suggests that the keen visitors to these places are largely bottoms looking for tops. So the question is: would tops looking for bottoms find Latin American saunas, massage or other possible gay-for-pay places too frustrating? This may be a factor in how some members here prefer Thailand. I don't really know but it seems to me to be worth an honest (and respectful) discussion.

But maybe the Thai boy didn't know that in such a restaurant one is supposed to order an individual dish? He could well have thought that, like in Thai dining, one orders 3 - 4 dishes to share. The typical Thai boy isn't as well travelled as some folks here.

Pie in the sky.... again. It so happens that only about a month ago, I researched the average length of stay of tourists in Thailand. There is a graph in my blogpost Will Pattaya revive? that shows that in 2018, tourists from Europe averaged about 17 days in Thailand. Now, these tourists are mostly from the UK, Germany, France, Russia, Sweden, Netherlands, Italy.... All of these countries had visa exemption and 30 days, and yet they did not stay (on average) close to 30 days. Just because Thailand now extends the max stay to 45 days, does not mean the visitors will stay longer. The majority of tourists to Thailand are from East and Southeast Asia. Thai statistics group these two regions together, and in 2018, their average stay was just 7 days. Chinese and Taiwanese tourists were Visa on arrival which meant they could get 15 days. Other major Asian markets were Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and all these visitors could get 30 days with visa exemption. Yet, Asian tourists stayed only 7 days on average.

I am pretty sure they were, (or more specifically, the mamasan was). Just because I said that the tip SHOULD be money going exclusively to the boy does not mean that he would not be extorted of part it by the mamasan the next day. I think the waiter would have been happy with 2,000, in line with the other gogo boys of the bar unless he has a very high opinion of himself as some kind of Adonis, in which case, he won't be value for money with an attitude like that. Bear in mind that however appealing he may look to you, his performance in-room remains a complete unknown. It's an independent variable. You have no way to assume that he is worth 3,000. If I were in your place and am smitten by the waiter, I would try to find a way on my next visit to the bar to slip him my LINE contact and ask him to message me. Rather than off him from the bar where the vulture (oops, I mean the mamasan) would be watching, I'd try to arrange an afternoon tryst via LINE. I would go no further than 2,000. After all, he already knows that 3,000 is unacceptable to you from the incident the other night. He would have no expectation of 3,000 by now.

I checked the distance from Phuket airport to Best Western in Patong. It's 40km. They are charging 800 baht. I also checked the distance from Suvarnabhumi airport to Patpong. It's 36 km, and a typical taxi ride (minus tolls) would be around 400 baht. Distance for distance, Phuket taxis are charging twice what Bangkok taxis charge, and that's only when the authorities step in to impose a "maximum". Good thing you're staying within walking distance of the gay area.

Customarily, the practice is like this: Offing a waiter and removing him from the available staff in a bar (not that bar waiters have that much to do anyway) is usually discouraged through a higher bar fine (off fee), not through imposing a higher tip for the boy, which anyway should be money going exclusively to him.

That was exactly my thought when I read what emiel wrote. And not only waiters, I would not use mamasans or papasans when negotiating offs with the gogo boys either.

In all the discussion so far about Phuket on this thread, no one has mentioned the taxi mafia yet. Perhaps we should forewarn 12s12? @AlexThompson were taxi prices as ridiculous n 2018 as I remember it from several years earlier?

This is quite common in East Asian countries - and Turkey. If it's not a bench, it's a stool. Millions of people across these countries wash themselves sitting down. It also makes it easier to wash one's feet thoroughly. Like the bum gun, westerners can learn quite a lot from these countries.

I have "outed" myself as the blogger time and again since more than ten years ago, but few people seem to notice, 🥲ha ha ha. It's a little deflating, I must say ... By the way, the latest two posts are about Tawan - one recent report and another from 13 years ago. Compare the two and weep!

It does sound like an attractive alternative to flying, but how badly do I want to go to Koh Samui? The answer isn't quite a Yes. I also notice that it is a roll-on roll-off ferry and I tend to get a bit nervous about these vessels. There are stories of doors that don't close properly or broken, leading to sinking. Many years ago, I was on one that hit rough seas and while the door looked well secured, water still managed to seep in quite noticeably. OK, maybe it wasn't that well secured, but I am not qualified to judge. It didn't take long before about 5 - 10 cm of water sloshed around the car deck, and car owners were visibly worried, as were us ordinary passengers. Fortunately, the ship rounded a cape not long after and the sea was much calmer the other side, and anyway we soon reached port. But I told myself: think twice before I take such ferries again.

They may not be numerous but there are. In Pattaya, the cabaret shows at The Venue and Castro draw decent crowds. The difference is that these bars position themselves as showbars and the clients go there wanting/ expecting that. I think their prices are also much lower than the boyticeria prices ( haven't been in lately) so they achieve a high-ish level of customer satisfaction. The boyticeria, on the other hand, charge customers for their shows when customers are looking for sex and do not care much for their shows. It's like @Gaybutton's example of some hotels making all their guests pay for Christmas dinner whether they wish to participate or not. And as @emiel1981 reported above, even if the show price is jusifiably built into the first drink, why is it also in the second drink?

Once again, @emiel1981's observations match mine - this time about Tarntawan Hotel. It is habitable, but it's getting really old. The dark wood of the heavy furniture is the one thing I remember most. I found it made the room gloomy, and that's not a mood I want to be in. I also have a personal dislike of bathtubs. A modern shower stall is important to me. preferably one big enough for two. So, except for maybe 2 visits perhaps 10 - 12 years ago, I have not been back.

That was true in July too. Credit to Hotmale. If only more bars followed that example. By the way, did you pay 350 baht or 400 baht for your first drink there? They certainly have, but the role of shows in the bars' business model has changed to dominate the business objective. This makes the boy hunter feel neglected. His interests are not well served. But first, we need to distinguish three types of shows: They are (a) live porn, (b) fancy dancing by boys (or, more often than not, hopelessly amateurish attempts at fancy dancing), and (c) fake singing by fake women (I think someone will rap me for being politically incorrect). Live porn and some degree of fancy dancing goes well with a boyticeria; it complements the business well, since it interests the same kind of customer, heightens the erotic quotient in the bar and lengthens the time he stays in the bar. Fancy dancing should not dominate the show programme otherwise the programme starts to slip into non-erotic mode. Fake singing by fake women is actually counter-productive for boyticerias. Customers aren't in the bars to watch women, real of fake, why waste their time demanding that they watch? The ladyboys tend to be overdressed and the performances are more like cabaret. The nett effect is to lower the erotic quotient, replacing it with bright lights, voluminous costumes and deafening volume. My memory from the days of Twilight and Barbiery in the 1990s was that live porn dominated their show programmes. There were some numbers by fake women, but not enough to seriously alter the tone of the bar. Then Extreme Bar came along (Soi Twilight, early 2000s?) and they introduced fancy dancing. They did not flash anything from under the belt in the entire programme and within a couple of years, the bar went out of business. But the damage was done. The other bars began to "improve" their shows. More fancy dancing, usually with real dancers brought in for the evening to do 2 or 3 numbers (nowadays we still see that in the "B-Boys" break dance numbers), and when bars needed to fill an hour-long programme, more diva items were added. Then, from 2005, Thailand saw huge increases in visitors from Asian countries and Russia. What happened next to the business model of the bars and to pricing is described in my latest post 15 years of price rises. These new visitors to Thailand, while middle-class enough to travel, weren't big spenders like Westerners. Offing boys might have been too costly for most of them. In any case, as I wrote: 6 - 7 years later, these Asian tourists were no longer surging into the Soi Twilight bars. My blogpost tries to explain why. But more damage had been done. Firstly, the shows had been bulked up; they were now too long in duration and too heavy with gatoeys (ladyboys) and secondly, drink prices had gone up to levels that were off-putting for customers who were primarily interested in the available boys and booking one of them out. Worse, as @emiel1981 also noticed, the book-able boys are mostly hidden away during the show. In short: Shows in the form of short bursts of live porn add value to the bars businesses; shows in the form of hour-long wanna-be cabaret subtract value.

@emiel1981 Thank you for the report on Jupiter. Your observations are exactly like my assessment in 2018 or 2019, and I have not had any interest in going back since. From a mix of mamasan whispers and my own observations, the hetero women's behaviour don't mirror gay men's. They get more "head over heels" and generally tip better than the men. However, they hardly ever take the boys off - partly because they often come into the bar as a group for entertainment, not to hunt for physical sex (see quote below). Unfortunately, from the gogo boys' point of view, if tips are generous enough for sharing 10 or 15 minutes with women - and anyway their natural interest is in women - there is less and less interest in accepting offs from men, where they will have to WORK for their money. This partly explains the tendency to ask for more and more. Here's a good description from Magic Men: 7 major differences between male strip clubs and female strip clubs. The article references hetero strip clubs, but they equally describe what happens in gay strip clubs and the behaviour of women in these same spaces (as in Jupiter and BoyzBoyzBoyz). Let me quote a key passage: Jupiter (and Moonlight) are taken in by the style of fashion shows, where the "models" do runway walks, often at quite a fast pace with unsmiling expressions. I wonder if somewhere in the psychology of women, they like this kind of thing.... They are also mimicking the shows of the Thai bars e.g. Fake Club. Not that I've been to them, but I have seen videos. They get a good (and mixed) crowd, and their shows too are often like runway fashion shows. I won't be surprised if the Silom-Surawong bar owners and managers think that this is the route to success. But these are show bars, not sex-offing bars (according to my Thai friends). At least in the above video, it was a guy, not a woman, who was invited to the "chair dance". The next video is perhaps their full show for an evening (or most of it). But places like Fake Club are show bars where friends go in groups to enjoy a night out, not sex-offing bars. And frankly, from the videos, Fake Club does a better job of shows than any Silom-Surawong bar. The problem is this: If we had to choose between going to a show bar with no realistic chance of a satisfactory off and a sex-offing bar with no show, which would we go to? I would choose the latter with no hesitation, and I think many members here would too. Yet the Silom-Surawong bars keep investing in shows with gatoeys and loud music. That shows you how much the bar owners understand their market.

Thanks for those details. It's already interesting. When I was there in late July, about 5 weeks before you, the drink price was 350 baht. You are now reporting 400 baht. The crowd size you saw was better than what I saw. I think the peak crowd when I was there was about 25 -30 people.

Wow, so many replies within 24 hours. I used to choose hotels in or close to Boyztown, but one trip, the noise level annoyed me. Ever since, I have chosen to stay in Jomtien Complex, even though I hardly ever spend time in the Jomtien Complex bars (they do nothing for me). Only the Boyztown bars hold any interest for me. Not even the Sunee bars (RIP). So why do I stay in Jomtien Complex? Proximity to the beach. There are really two things on my agenda when I am in Pattaya: boys (gogo) and beach. When I stayed in Boyztown to be near the bars, I had to commute every morning by Songtaew to Jomtien. Now, I stay in Jomtien Complex to be near the beach and commute every evening to Boyztown.

I have seen those coach loads. They would not be taking them to the Agate but to the Blind Massage place next door to it. I mentioned a coach in my report from 2020. See: https://shamelessmacktwo.travel.blog/2020/04/07/blind-optimism-blah-outcomes/

I'm sure you will have a blast. Enjoy!

I think these are interesting times seeing how slowly or rapidly Bangkok, Pattaya and Phuket recover from Covid-19. In my July visit, I noticed some instability in pricing. I saw a few instances of price reductions in bars' desperate attempts to get customers. I have a feeling that prices in September will be different from what I saw in July. If you could report on bars' prices each time you walk into a bar, it will help me assess their business recovery. Personally, I am a collector of details, but it would be presumptuous of me to expect the same of anybody else, but if you're happy to help out, we can compare notes regarding: - price of drink (there may be different prices for second drink and boy-drink) - off-fee. Most of us do make a mental note of how many boys available, but it would also be interesting to note - how many customers in the bar (need to make a note of time too) - ratio of Asians to farang; - ratio of female customers to male (a rough measure of how gay/straight the audience is) And if you could take a close look at the doors of Lucky Boys, Screw Boys and Bangkok Massage (all on Patpong 2) for any signs of re-opening, e.g. interior clean-up or remodelling. And yes, the bar with the big tank at the end of Soi Twilight was Classic Boys.

I mentioned Indonesia. There's a film called The Act of Killing (full movie with English subtitles available on Youtube) in which the killer Anwar speaks to camera and re-enacts what he did. The WIkipedia page says that "The film focuses on the perpetrators of the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–1966 in the present day. The genocide led to the killing of almost a million people, ostensibly for belonging to the local communist community. When Suharto overthrew Sukarno, the President of Indonesia, following the failed coup of the 30 September Movement in 1965, the gangsters Anwar Congo and Adi Zulkadry in Medan (North Sumatra) were promoted from selling black market movie theatre tickets to leading the most powerful death squad in North Sumatra. They also extorted money from the ethnic Chinese as the price for keeping their lives. Anwar is said to have personally killed 1000 people."