TRIP REPORT PATTAYA - BOYZ BOYZ BOYZ

[Londoner]

I'm intrigued by the relatively-recent arrival of Indian tourists; Indian men, that is....how often do we see Indian women or children in South Pattaya?

I wonder if their spending-power is a good deal less than that of other nationalities and the visa change perhaps reflects this?  We seldom see them in up-market malls like T21 and Central while  the many Indian restaurants are invariably empty when we drive past them at night; the guys seem to eat  in street-side venues. I assume that they attend the new Indian nightclubs in the Walking Street area but during the daytime there seems to be a great deal of hanging around just outside  the hotels. You seldom  see an Indian tourist on his own, or even  with just one companion.

Are they punters in the go go bars? or on the apps? are they beach-lovers? do they take the day trips to the islands and other tourist  places like Nong Nooch? why do they all seem to be between the ages of about thirty and fifty? are they long-stayers or is Pattaya  enjoyed for weekends and so on? It is, after all, not that far from some parts of India.

Many questions, no answers.

 

 

[macaroni21]

It so happens that I had a short conversation with four (maybe five) of them a few years ago, and another short conversation with a solo guy in a 7-eleven on my visit earlier this year. I don't claim that what Iearned from just two conversations would be representative, but at least they gave me a bit of insight. But let me share my observations regarding your more general questions first.

7 hours ago, Londoner said:

Indian men, that is....how often do we see Indian women or children in South Pattaya?

A handful of women perhaps, always sticking close by their husbands, but I don't recall seeing any children.

7 hours ago, Londoner said:

I wonder if their spending-power is a good deal less than that of other nationalities and the visa change perhaps reflects this? 

I don't know about the thinking behind the visa change, but just on objective measures alone, India is really a poor country. I was recently surprised to see, for example, that Vietnam has became nearly twice as rich (in terms of GDP per capita) as India. 

From: https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-per-capita/?source=imf&region=asia&year=2026&metric=nominal

Thailand: 8,105 USD per capita
Indonesia: 5,362 USD per capita
Vietnam: 5,115 USD per capita
Cambodia: 2,902 USD per capita
India: 2,813 USD per capita.

Sure, there are middle class Indians, but "middle-class" in any country is often relative to the overall economic standard in that country. So one might say that the middle-class Indians are far poorer than the middle-class Thais. This issue will come up again when I describe the conversation I had with the solo guy in the 7-eleven.

I reckon the Indian tourists we see hogging the roadsides in South Pattaya are the middle class of India but it's all relative.

7 hours ago, Londoner said:

We seldom see them in up-market malls like T21 and Central while  the many Indian restaurants are invariably empty

I think it's a combination of a purchasing power problem and a tastebuds problem. Many of what may appear to us as Indian restaurants in South Pattaya are actually Middle-eastern restaurants that grew up to serve the tourists from the much richer Persian Gulf states. Their prices may seem astronomical to Indians.

7 hours ago, Londoner said:

during the daytime there seems to be a great deal of hanging around just outside  the hotels. You seldom  see an Indian tourist on his own, or even  with just one companion.

I've made the same observation.

7 hours ago, Londoner said:

Are they punters in the go go bars? or on the apps? are they beach-lovers?

I have never seen these groups in the gay bars, though there may be the occasional upper-middle class Indian arriving solo perhaps but not the South Pattaya lads. The latter may be found on Pattaya beach in the late afternoon and dusk. "Upper" is all relative again, probably equivalent to the spending power of a Western backpacker on Khao San Road. One indelible memory I have is that of a professorial-looking Indian guy so shocked at 500 baht for a drink (this was in a Bangkok bar) he was so at a loss for words, he couldn't speak English anymore.  Naturally, neither the waiter nor mamasan understood Hindi (or whatever language he was stuttering).

[macaroni21]

Some years ago, I was doing a post-prandial stroll along Beach Road promenade whiling away an hour or so before hitting the Boyztown bars when a group of 30-ish Indian men asked me if I could take a group photo of them. There were maybe four or five of them. 

We got into a bit of a conversation, and I learned that they were on a short company-paid trip. Can't remember how many days but my impression now is that it was a five-day or one-week thing at most. The were all working for the same company and each had won the best salesman award for the previous year in his sales district. So it was a kind of incentive trip. To my surprise, one of them said it was his second trip to Thailand. The earlier trip was when he was with another company and they had sent him to attend a conference in Pattaya (maybe it was Bangkok, memory's a bit hazy) organised by the regional office of some American company.

This may explain the demographic profile that Londoner observed (and I agreed with). Men in the 30s and 40s. Travelling alone without wives or family, in all-male groups. (In many industries in India, women are rarely seen doing sales and marketing).

As for why they had little else to do in the days they were in Pattaya, I guess they were supposed to make their own tour arrangements (at their own expense) and maybe the "at their own expense" part was too much of a hurdle.

[macaroni21]

Then in February this year, while queuing to pay at a 7-eleven along Pattaya Second Road not far from Boyztown, the Indian gent behind me tapped me on the shoulder to ask my opinion whether the bun he was holding (among a basket of other things) was vegetarian. I offered my opinion that it probably was; "Taro bun", the label read (turns out he didn't know what taro was).

The queue was slow and we had a chance to talk. I learned that he was vegetarian and for the 4 - 5 days in Thailand, he plaintively said he could find almost nothing to eat. (Come to think of it, it's actually difficult to find vegetarian Thai restaurants!).  The difficulty was compounded because he came from North India and said they (or at least he) didn't eat rice. They only ate flatbread as their staple, and it's not something he can easily find in Thailand. I stupidly said "Shawarma stalls would have flat bread", before realising, three milliseconds later, that they're not vegetarian!

He didn't fancy trying other cuisines, not knowing what was in them, and anyway, he said, the tastes of Thai and Western food didn't suit him. I was going to challenge him by saying that if he had never tried, how would he know, but then I decided to be diplomatic. I had learned to wait a few milliseconds before speaking my mind.

The conversation soon moved on to prices of the things in his basket and the long and short of it was that everything in his basket (from a Thai 7-eleven) cost twice as much as he'd had to pay in India. What was in his basket? I remember seeing yogurt and more bread... and lots of beer. He was surviving on that through his entire trip.

[PeterRS]

Lots of Indians to be seen in Bangkok, many in the up-market shopping malls carrying designer goods bags. Recently in Paragon, Em Quartier and even Terminal 21 we have seen many Indians. Most are couples or in small groups.