Bangkok Guide
Southern downtown
Patpong
Address: Between the eastern ends of Thanon Silom and Thanon Suriwong
The neon-lit go-go bars of the Patpong district loom like rides in a tawdry sexual Disneyland. In front of each bar, girls cajole passers-by with a lifeless sensuality while insistent touts proffer printed menus and photographs detailing the degradations on show. Inside, bikini-clad women gyrate to Western music and play hostess to the (almost exclusively male) spectators; upstairs, live shows feature women who, to use Spalding Gray's phrase in Swimming to Cambodia, "do everything with their vaginas except have babies".
The centre of the skin trade lies along the interconnected sois of Patpong 1 and 2, where lines of go-go bars share their patch with respectable restaurants, a 24-hour supermarket and an overabundance of pharmacies. By night, it's a thumping theme park, whose blazing neon promises tend towards self-parody, with names like Thigh Bar and Chicken Divine. Budget travellers, purposeful besuited businessmen and noisy lager louts throng the streets, and even the most demure tourists – of both sexes – turn out to do some shopping at the night market down the middle of Patpong 1, where hawkers sell fake watches, bags and designer T-shirts. By day, a relaxed hangover descends on the place. Bar-girls hang out at foodstalls and cafés in respectable dress, often recognizable by faces that are pinched and strained from the continuous use of antibiotics and heroin in an attempt to ward off venereal disease and boredom. Foreign men slump at the bars on Patpong 2, drinking and watching videos, unable to find anything else to do in the whole of Bangkok.
The small dead-end alley to the east of Patpong 2, Silom 4 (ie Soi 4, Thanon Silom), hosts some of Bangkok's hippest nightlife, its bars, clubs and pavements heaving at weekends with the capital's bright young things. Several gay venues can be found on Silom 4, but the focus of the scene has shifted to Silom 2, while in between, ThanonThaniya's hostess bars and restaurants cater to Japanese tourists.