Report Asia Bugle

[aussie dollar]

REPORT FROM ASIA BUGLE CURRENT ISSUELast week was the Samui Regatta which has been renamed, following a 2-Chang brainstorming session - to the Tropical Island Regatta. This is the fourth such event. Up until this year I was prevented, by various ailments and other distractions, from attending. Anybody who knows yachties as I know yachties will know that more important than the sailing is the party. And with one brewer as a sponsor, I was correct in my assumption that the booze would flow. The downside was it was the wrong beer! But who cares when it is at the right price! There were various evening parties as well as the Regatta Tavern open every afternoon on the beach. I attended the party at the Bungy, not a place you would normally catch me. Elastic, baskets zillions of inches above terra firma, jumping and me do not go together. And this is a really stupid bungy, I mean an even more stupid bungy because the elastic does not stop you before the ground, but instead of the ground there is a swimming pool! A water dip they call it! The boss Spiky Pete promised us that one of the girls from Dream Girls gogo would jump wearing little more than a grimace. A suitable gratuity was prospected for. But when she did jump, she wore more than she wears on the stage. This promise by Spiky looked very like an attempt (successful) to keep us at the event for the hour or so it took for the Dream Girl to prepare herself. True or false is a matter of conjecture. However since the beer sponsor had delivered that nights rationings warm and late, we were drinking proper beer from Spiky’s stock and paying for it! Mind you I felt a lot better the next day for drinking Tiger!
My enjoyment of Lamai Beach has been reduced in recent years as the bar scene has been taken over by roundball enthusiasts - suitably loud and tattooed. My drinking options had been reduced to whatever few products were in stock at the Red Fox on that given day! However Noel a pleasant gentlemen from the isle to the west of the UK has taken over the sports side of Brauhaus and is busy turning it into the Samui Shamrock. This will be an Irish sports bar on the lines of Topical Murphy’s in Chaweng. I wish him luck as Lamai is crying out for that kind of operation especially since the demise of the Rising Sun: not dead but sad.
Another interesting operation is The Club which has replaced Dirty Nelly’s. The new owner is Jurgen from Hamburg and he has found a novel way of excluding the less genteel roundball supporters who have threatened to take over Lamai. The Club is membership only. To be a member you must be blessed by Jurgen’s approval and friendship! Beyond the locked door this is a pleasant drinking bar with Jurgen calling the shots, and some shots they are too. He makes up his own shooters and they slide down a tad too easily! Because of the locked door, the local rumour mill has decided that it is a gogo. In fact it is no more so than most of the other open bars which have gogo pole and small stage. Not a bad little operation and I just hope Jurgen finds enough like-minded people.
In Chaweng Soi Green Mango and its second soi often called soi Black Jack continue to boom. On the Green Mango side of Black Jack there is a large area that an ambitious property owner tried to make into a plaza. However, the bars at the back either got no takers or failed miserably. So now the front bars have absorbed the back bars making some long, deep units. The pick of these is Chonchitas Bar run by the friendly Lyn who seems to have a suitable bevy of fun ladies working for her. Her husband John, him with the coiffure, is from England and relishes his retirement job of bordello keeper!
At the top of the U that these two sois make, was the Red Lion now re-branded, but not significantly modified, as the Condom Bar. There now seems to be a fair collection of lonely ladies working here. With or without a condom was information to which I was not privy!
Most of the bars in the main and very expensive area of Green Mango, have been knocked down and rebuilt to maximize the marketability of their space. I was pleased to see that Heaven Bar and the next door Blessing Bar have not yet been changed. Opposite these two there has been a rebuild with the arrival of Crash Bar complete with the front end of a VW on the roof. As this is Samui, it is safe to assume that the back end was one of this tropical accident centre’s victims. The roads of Samui are notoriously accident strewn so the name is well chosen. When I trundled past, there were only a couple of bored girls watching a film on the large screen TV making no attempt to woo any of the customers pouring past. It looks very much as if Crash is indeed a crash waiting to happen.
The area outside the Green Mango disco and the Sweet Soul Bar is packed most nights and on some nights the soi is totally impassable with the crush spreading down the street. However the problem is that many people are drinking booze bought in the 7-11 down the street. The situation is so bad that the soi owners, Green Mango disco, have declared that the bars are losing 20 million baht a day to this outside booze. Well that is what I was told by a sane and serious bar owner. By my calculations that means it is not a 7-11 but a brewery with a bottling plant turning out 400,000 bottles a day! Maybe 20 million Baht a year is a fair figure that would suggest that something over a thousand beers a day are being sold by the 7-11. Assuming they are selling to others as well that must make that 7-11 one of the busiest retail alcohol outlets for many a mile. Back to the problem of the carried in booze. Surely the answer is to get the security guards, employed by soi Green Mango, to stop people bringing in their own booze! Or is that too simple