Editor's Note: Over the next little while I am going to share some stories told to me by a girl I met in 2017 at a bar in Koh Pha-ngan, an island in the Gulf of Thailand just north of Koh Samui. Koh Pha-ngan is famous for its Full Moon Party with attracts upwards of 20,000 party-goers, sometimes more, every month. I met her in a bar on the outskirts of Thongsala, persuaded her to leave the bar and travel Thailand with me from Surat Thani to Hua Hin and on to Chiang Mai. In that time, I got her to share some of her stories. These are her stories, and my understanding of them. I remain in touch with her to this day.
Question: Can you tell me about the most men you had had in a single night?
Koh Pha-ngan is famous for the Full Moon Party, but there's also something called a Half Moon Festival. It takes place in the middle of the island near a place called Baan Nuea. Quite a few of the girls in the bar decided to head off to the party in search of customers. I decided to stay back and try my luck at the bar. So did a friend of mine. There was very little action. One Italian guy wandered by at about 11 pm. He sat and chatted for a while, and played silly bar games. He also made it clear that he was much more attracted to me than he was to my friend. [Editor's note: I can personally attest to the fact that her friend was not very attractive]
Around midnight, my Italian friend made it clear that he wanted to go 'short time' with me. We settled on a price of 2,000 Baht and went to do our business in a room at the back of the bar that was set up for this purpose. It was soon all over, and he was on his way by 1 am. He was a nice enough customer, but nothing special. My friend and I waited another hour but there were no more customers, so we closed the bar at 2 pm. Then we lingered outside the bar, talking. This might seem strange, but the way it works in many Thai bars, there is a room in the back with a bed where the girls take their customers and sometimes another room where the girls sleep... so instead of going back to that hot, stuffy room, we decided to sit out in front of the shop, chat, and enjoy the night air.
As revellers began to leave the party, the traffic along the road where our bar was located began to increase. We watched the songthaews pass by, filled with party-goers. Then one songthaew stopped at the Big C right near our bar, on the outskirts of Thongsala, and three men got out. They saw us sitting outside the darkened bar and came over to talk. It was soon clear to me that the three of them had very little interest in my friend and a great deal of interest in me.
At this point in my life, I had been working as a bar girl for about 10 days, give or take, and I had been with at least one man every night. Sometimes there would be one man earlier in the evening, and then, later on, another, but I had never been with more than two in one night... and certainly never together.