Simon Los - Confessions of a Pattaya Bar Manager

Confessions of a Pattaya Bar Manager

By Simon Los

With Ben Elmore

About the Author

Simon was born in the UK. He is happily married to his beautiful Thai wife. They were living the dream and running their own homestay resort in Thailand until Covid 19 hit and forced them into putting a hold on their dream. At the time of writing, they are currently back in the UK working hard, waiting for international tourism to get back to normal so they can return to Thailand and reopen their resort. Simon is also kept busy with his popular Youtube channel, 'Land of Smiles Thailand'. Through his Youtube channel, Simon has built up a reputation as a masterful storyteller on the Thai Youtube scene, and a collection of his stories ( Love on the Rocks ) was published in 2021 by UK publishers Monsoon Books.

Contents

Prologue

Glad to be Back

One Door Closes....

The Girls

Kirby and Apple

In it Together

Customers

End of an Era

Bangkok

Back to Pattaya

Prologue

It's hard to get Thailand out of your system. If you've visited the 'Land of Smiles' before, you'll know what I'm talking about. As soon as you arrive back in your home country, Thailand seems to be calling you back. I had been there a few times so I knew this feeling well. But this time I was determined to resist Thailand's lure and get on with my life in the UK. I was living in rented accommodation in the northeast of England, making decent money taxiing at night. I thought I was over Thailand, but then one night a beautiful young Thai woman got in my taxi and something stirred inside me. Memories of Bangkok and Pattaya came flooding back. It was clear that this woman was an escort. I had been in the taxi game long enough to spot one a mile off. We started talking a little and she told me her name was Ae. She was a very pleasant, friendly young woman. I mentioned to Ae that I had been to Thailand, and she burst out laughing when I spurted out a couple of Thai words that I had picked up on my travels.

"You are very good at Thai," she said, as she tried to control her laughter, but obviously she was just being polite.

We were getting along great. Ae's English was excellent so she was easy to talk to. I dropped her off at a swanky hotel, and as she was paying me, she asked for my phone number. She said she would pay me to stay in the area for a couple of hours and then come back to collect her. Perfect! All taxi drivers love those jobs. Sure enough, a couple of hours later I got a call from Ae asking me to pick her up. It was almost four AM by the time I dropped her home. She lived in a small house in a rundown part of town that was in stark contrast to the fancy hotel we had just come from. Yet Ae clearly had a lot of money. Not only did she pay me above the going rate for both journeys, she also paid me handsomely for the waiting time. I was delighted. I made a whole night's pay on that one job.

I forgot all about Ae, but then a few days later I got a call from her asking if I could pick her up from her house, drop her off at another expensive hotel across town and wait for her in the area like the last time. From then on it became a regular thing. She started calling me almost every night. We used to chat away in the taxi, and she was getting more relaxed around me, so she asked me to take care of a couple of other girls that she lived and worked with. I jumped at the opportunity. It was easy money. She passed my phone number on to the two girls, and within a few days I was like a private chauffeur for these three Thai escorts. It was like a full-time job picking them up from their house at random hours, dropping them off at their different clients around town, and then bringing them home at all hours of the night. The girls obviously trusted me and felt comfortable in my taxi because they started using me more and more. It started off with just night work, but then they started calling me during the day too. It became too much for me. I had to ask a friend to help me out. We agreed that he would run them around town during the day, and I'd take care of them at night. God knows when the girls slept! Sometimes they'd even ask us to drive them down to London for the weekend. They were obviously earning serious money.

We were all getting on so well that the three girls started inviting me into their house for a cup of tea or coffee while they were getting ready. As time went on, I'd go to their house in the early evening, have a meal there, drop them off at their jobs around town, and then I'd come back and sleep on their sofa for a few hours while I waited for their call. My mate and I even went on a few nights out with the girls. They really became like friends to us. The girls were great company, lovely to be around. Not only that, they also paid very well. Sometimes I was getting almost double the money of a normal night's work, and I was spending hardly anything. This went on for about a year. Then one morning I got a call from Ae saying that her and her housemates had to leave town quickly. I never asked her for an explanation but I guess the police were on to them. That afternoon the three girls threw their things into my taxi and I drove them down to Southampton (four hours away), where they planned to carry on their business. I was devastated to say goodbye to Ae and her friends. They were the best customers I had ever had, and now they were gone. It was a shock to the system. I was back to driving around drunken fools all night.

I had been a taxi driver for years but all of a sudden the thought of driving strangers around every night made me kind of depressed. Over the following weeks and months I could feel myself gradually falling into a rut. I wasn't enjoying talking with my customers, and after I finished a long shift I used to just go home and watch TV for a few hours before falling asleep for the day. I wasn't doing any exercise and I had no hobbies. I was miserable. I needed to snap out of it. I started to think about how I could change my life. I knew I had to do something drastic. All the while I could feel Thailand calling me. My time with Ae and her friends reminded me how much I loved the country. I had to go back. After a couple of months of careful consideration, I decided to go off travelling for a year. My plan was to go back to Asia - fly into Thailand and then go on to a few other countries in Southeast Asia. I booked my flight to Bangkok and I was pretty much ready to go. Although I was in my early forties, I didn't have much tying me to England. Over the next few months, I sold most of my stuff to raise some extra travelling funds, stored some keepsakes in my mother's house, and rented out my taxi to a friend for twelve months. I told everyone that I was going away for a year, but deep down I was thinking it could be much longer. It wasn't just a one year trip for the sake of travelling and having new experiences. I also wanted to see if there might be something in Asia for my future, perhaps a job I fancied or a good business opportunity. I was open to the idea of living in Asia long term if I could figure out a way to make money there.

Glad to be Back

My plan was to base myself in Thailand and take trips to other Southeast Asian countries throughout the year. Two months in Thailand and then a month in Cambodia felt like a good way to start, partly because of my visa situation. Back then you got a one month visa on arrival, and you could get it extended by a month at any immigration office around Thailand easily. When the two months were up, you had to leave the country, but you could come back into Thailand the next day and get another thirty day visa, which could of course be extended by another thirty days. So I figured it would be a good idea to visit a new country every third month, and perhaps spend a month there if I liked it. I could afford to travel around a bit. My budget was about a thousand pounds a month. The Thai baht was much weaker back then, so it would be like having two thousand pounds a month these days. I knew I had enough money, but I just had to be a bit careful with it. It wasn't just beer money and accommodation that I had to account for. I also had to budget for visas, long haul bus fares and possibly some flights between countries.