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Mickey Dylan, The Old-Timer - Chapter 1

 

People will try to tell you that the first farangs to arrive in Pattaya were a group of American servicemen who came from Bangkok in a jeep on route to the war in Vietnam on the twenty-ninth of April, 1961. Wrong. Bill Burns and me had already been getting stoned on the beach under the palm-trees where Walking Street is now for three years before they turned up. If you have the time, I’d like to tell you it has all changed here throughout the years. Back when we first arrived, Pattaya was still known as Thap Phraya, and Christ, it was beautiful. Your typical, wooden-housed little fishing village surrounded by coconut palms with a golden beach that ran into an impossibly blue ocean. Just look at it now. Sois and sois of bars, girls and drunken tourists. A Family Mart or a Seven Eleven store on every corner. Pizza huts, KFC’s and McDonalds. Cafes and restaurants selling everything from a full English breakfast to Turkish kebabs. We made do with barbecuing the fish that we caught off the old jetty over fires on the beach and kao pad kai or a bowl of noodles from the little shack along the dust-track where Soi Buakhoa is now.

 

If you’ve got nothing to do one day, climb up the hill where the small temple is right opposite The Big Buddha just past the turning to Jomtien. I can’t make it any more with my old legs. What used to be a wonderful view of a small strip of wooden fisherman’s houses along the sandy bay with nothing but trees and grassland behind them is now a metropolis of multi-storied hotels, concrete streets, shopping malls, bars, restaurants and housing estates that stretches for as far as the eye can see. That’s progress for you, I suppose. And the original foundations that this huge city were built upon were nothing but a bunch of Thai bar-girls. You’d better believe it.

 

That first group of American GI’s went off to ‘Nam and told their buddies what they had found, and before long, more and more servicemen on leave from the Vietnam war together with some of those from the airbase down the road at U-Tapao started coming to Pattaya for their R&R looking for sun, sea and sand and hopefully, a bit of sex. The first big hotel was built — the Nipa Lodge — together with a bunch of bungalows on the beach to accommodate the American servicemen, and more and more bars went up and the girls started coming down from Isaan. The ball had begun to roll.