Pattaya's Soi 6

 

Well away from Pattaya's nightlife central, Walking Street, is one of Sin City's more infamous naughty boy areas.  Running from Beach Road up to Second Road is Soi Yodsak, or as it is also known, soi 6.  It might only be a few hundred metres long, but soi 6 is home to more than 50 bars and perhaps 1,000 naughty girls.

Soi 6 has it all, with open-air beer bars, sports bars, a few gogo bars, a traditional English pub, massage houses and even a number of regular, mainstream businesses such as a dive shop.  But the main feature of soi 6, and the reason so many guys visit, are the short time bars.  With such bar names as Route 69, Hole In One, Love Club and Horny Bar, there's no second-guessing what soi 6 is all about.

Gogo bars and beer bars need no introduction, but the short-time bar format is less common.  Short-time bars are just that - a bar you go to for a drink and to take the girl for a short-time experience.

In the short-time bars of soi 6, girls typically sit outside in sexy, skimpy apparel showing plenty of flesh and call out to any and every guy passing by.  Competition is fierce with bars offering the same services at the same prices lined up next to each other.

If you decide to enter a bar, you should choose a girl before passing through the curtain and into the often dark bar area.  A drink for you and one for her and she will cut through the BS and do everything in her power to convince you to take her upstairs.  There's no pretension about what's on offer and not even a hint of the girlfriend experience.  What soi 6 offers is cheap, readily available sex, much as I expect prostitution is like in the West.  You walk into a venue, order a drink, choose a girl, go upstairs and do the business.

The short-time bars open for business late morning but things don't really get going on soi 6 until around midday or later and peak late afternoon when most have a full compliment of girls.  Some bars put their girls in uniform and on the right day you might see a bunch of sexy Thai girls wearing nurses' uniforms or other sexy theme.  In addition to their uniforms, one of the hallmarks of soi 6 is the way many girls go totally over the top with make up.  Garish eye shadow in pastel pinks, blues and greens seems to be a feature of the soi.

Soi 6 is a favourite for many Pattaya-based Westerners, but I often wonder what all the fuss is about.  My memories of soi 6 in the past is of walking past bars with a line up of dreadfully ugly girls, many heavily tattooed and some who could have done with dropping 20 kg or more.  It was quite possible to walk up and down the soi and not see one girl you even remotely fancied and making it worse, many seemed desperate.  It would be a thrill to walk along and have dozens of girls screaming at you, pleading for you to choose them, but is that really that great when they don't look too flash?!

But things have changed somewhat and in fairness to the soi, it is one of the few bar areas which seems to have improved in recent years.  While there are still plenty of uglies to be found, it seems to have shirked the industry trend of girls getting bigger and bigger.  Dare I say it, on my last stroll along soi 6, I thought some of the girls were quite pretty.

The prices on Pattaya's soi 6, which is also known as Soi Yodsak, used to be a street-standard 200 - 300 baht barfine, which covered a short-time barfine and the use of a grotty room above the bar.  Then there was the girl's fee which was typically 500 baht.  Throw in a drink each and a tip and all in you'd be up for around 1,000 baht.  Prices are said to have moved a bit with 300 baht being the standard barfine / room fee and 700 baht most girls' expected compensation.  So with drinks it's going to run closer to 1,200 baht all in, still a fair deal.

In what I find to be a curious development, soi 6 has become a hunting ground for gogo bar owners who trawl the soi often, keen to recruit new girls.  Ironically, pretty girls on soi 6 can potentially make a lot more money on the down-market soi of brothels.  Those who making several trips a day upstairs could make 5,000 baht upwards a day, a figure few Pattaya gogo girls reach.  But there's a stigma with soi 6, even amongst the girls, and there is a certain pride in being offered a position in a gogo bar, which says to the world that "I have got a hot enough body to get out of this environment and join the crème de la crème of Pattaya bars."  The soi 6 bars are little more than brothels - and the girls know it.

In some ways soi 6 reminds me a little of Soi Cowboy with some girls living on site in the rooms above the bars.  Apparently this was more common in the past than it is now and more girls live outside, the same as it is at Soi Cowboy.

Soi 6 is not somewhere I spend time hanging around.  I guess that more than anything it just doesn't feel welcoming to those who aren't participating.  For someone like me who likes to linger, sip on something non-alcoholic and people watch, you're given a very definite look that you're really not welcome.

The soi attracts some pretty grotty characters.  Like the Beach Road, some of the local characters who spend time on soi 6 have seen better days but with that said, the lane happens to be a favourite with some youngsters too.

Customers on soi 6 are very much the Pattaya crowd of yesteryear - white guys, Westerners.  Certainly the Russians, Indians and Middle Easterners who make up the bulk of the Walking Street lurkers these days don't seem to have found soi 6, at least not en masse.  You'll always get the odd stray, but for the most part they're strangers to the area.  Signs in Russian which can be seen up and down Walking Street can't be found on soi 6.  Yet.

Soi 6 is a high traffic bar area.  I'm not talking cars, motorbikes, or pedestrians.  Some of the girls, the pretty girls who make up a small percentage of the girls in the soi, can turn as many tricks in a day as an English teacher does lessons.  Some years back a notorious whoremonger who wrote outrageous sexpat reports under the pseudonym of Ranger told of a particular favourite of his on Soi 6 who did 180 short-times in one month.  Hardly the norm, of course, but the traffic can be considerable.

I've seen plenty of photos taken inside the rooms above the bars and they're grim, often worse than what 150 baht gets you on Khao San Road.  That said, some bars are said to have been done up with nice rooms similar to what 1,000 baht would get you in a Pattaya hotel.  In fact many of the bars don't just rent out rooms by the hour but by the night.  The hardcore could check into soi 6 and spend their entire stay in the heart of the action.

Many of the bars on the south side of soi 6 - that would be the right-hand side if you were waking up from the beach - back out on to its sister soi, soi 6/1.  Few venues can be entered from soi 6/1 and that lane is more like a thoroughfare with service entrances for the bars and other businesses.  Soi 6/1 is worth a stroll if you're into ladyboys and features a bunch of giant ladyboys, some of whom can be quite aggressive, making very direct offers about what's available and on offer.  There are also a few ladyboy bars, or bars with a mix of girls and ladyboys, on soi 6.

In some soi 6 bars anything goes and bars where anything goes right inside the bar - the main drinking area - are sometimes referred to as diddling bars.  Venues such as My Friend You Bar have no restrictions on what happens in the bar so don't stick your head inside if you're shy!

Not everyone likes soi 6.  I'm ambivalent about it, as much as anything because I don't partake.  Hardcore Pattaya sexpat residents love it whereas those who are picky about the girls tend to prefer the gogos.  A Pattaya media mogul once said to me that soi 6 is the one part of Pattaya he really doesn't like and would rather it didn't exist.  I have to admit a degree of surprise that it still operates as it does, with girls frequently yelling out all sorts of interesting phrases in English to passers by, often gesticulating and sometimes even flashing them.  Like everywhere it faces crackdowns from time to time but things always return to normal quickly.

Soi 6 doesn't attract mainstream tourists like Walking Street or Bangkok's nightlife areas do.  The sort of ambling up and down soi 6 with a camera or video camera that is the norm on Walking Street won't win you any friends on Soi 6.  Pulling out a camera gets a similar reaction to pulling out a gun.

Comparisons between soi 6 and the Coconut Bar are inevitable.  You'd have to say that liaisons in soi 6 would be safer and the chances of being ripped off are remote.  In fact at least one bar on soi 6 used this as part of their promotion using the slogan "get laid without getting scammed!"  The girls found on soi 6 are for the most part more attractive than those loitering on Beach Road.  It is more expensive but at a thousand or so baht all in, it's hardly going to break the bank.  Given that everything takes place on the premises, a better comparison may be with the massage parlour experience.

You can get a cheaper beer elsewhere and if you're down to your last few baht, you can always find a cheaper bonk on the beach, but for the combination of the laid-back atmosphere of the Pattaya of old and a relatively stress-free experience without tourists gawking at your every move, soi 6 remains a favourite afternoon spot for many Pattaya locals.

Pattaya's Soi 6 offers a purer form of prostitution than what you find in other Westerner-oriented nightlife areas where customers seem to want to know the girl's life story and hope that she will treat him like her boyfriend.  Whereas other areas are about fun, entertainment and the girlfriend experience, Pattaya's soi 6 is simply about sex.