Perversion of paradise: Thousands of British men fuel a vile sex trade in Thailand - but who's really exploiting who?
Early afternoon and a middle-aged, balding British tourist is striding purposefully down Beach Road, Pattaya's main street, with a Thai girl slung over his shoulder. He's obviously in a hurry, preferring to walk between the traffic rather than along the crowded pavement. The girl's long, dark hair swishes round his back. Suddenly, she pops up her head, grins and then flops back, making no attempt to free herself. She seems little more than a teenager.
'It's OK, she's fine,' says the man, without slowing down. 'Another 200 yards and that's my hotel.' Hardly anyone one bothers to look - not much in Pattaya merits a second glance. This is the resort, a two-hour drive from Bangkok, where another middle-aged Brit loved to spend his holidays - Derrick Bird, the Cumbria killer.
'Thailand's capital of fun' is how the pocket guidebook to the town describes the place, which attracts a million visitors a year. A less kind, but more accurate, description would be one huge brothel. The average visitor appears to be male, 40 or more, probably losing his hair, frequently fat, very likely British and there for one reason only - to buy sex with young Thai women.
Though there are many other nationalities there, the town is geared to the Brits. Pubs offer heart-clotting all-day breakfasts and giant portions of toad in the hole to set up holidaymakers for a long night cruising the streets crammed with massage parlours and bars, many with names too crude to mention. There are two kinds of bar in Pattaya. Bird apparently preferred the quieter sort, the oddly named bar-beers, over the brasher go-go bars.
Sex for sale: Cumbria killer Derrick Bird with On, his 32-year-old Thai bar girlfriend
There's even an official tourist police force, many of whom are long-term British residents, who patrol the streets around the sex bars.
Outside, two middle-aged men flag down one of the songtaew buses that cruise round the downtown area. They're heading back to their hotel with two girls. One man is hugely fat, sweat oozing across his T-shirt where his man-boobs droop down onto his beer belly. The girls are tiny, beautiful and snuggle up adoringly. 'I'm exhausted. I'll need a holiday when I get back,' says the fat man in a Merseyside accent. His pal laughs. 'And you'll never be able to tell anyone why - what happens in Pattaya has to stay censored for them back home.'
To his annoyance, his girl answers her mobile phone. It's obviously another punter. 'Hi honey,' she coos. 'No, I not work tonight, I sick.' Her friend giggles and the woman shushes her. 'No, you my number one man, I see you very soon, honey, I miss you.' She hangs up and cosies back up to her new number one man.
Like Derrick Bird, many of the men who come to Pattaya are lonely and delusional enough to mistake a transaction for a relationship. The women may promise to stay off the game if the men continue to send them money when they get back to Britain, as Bird did. On apparently told him she needed money to do up her house so they could live there, happily ever after.
'I'd like to find a foreigner to be my partner so we can care for each other' That's a line that could have come straight out of an extraordinary little book that's hard to find, but much sought after in Pattaya. It's called Get Rich Quick English For Bar Girls. It's a Thai-English dictionary for seduction, sex and survival. These men will believe anything! Even that the hookers are going to remain faithful to them after they leave, as long as they send money every month. Of course there are many suckers sending them money so they only need a little, because it all adds up.
Geared for Brits: Pattaya's pubs sets up holidaymakers for a long night cruising the streets crammed with massage parlours and bars
Si thought she would get work as a waitress in Pattaya, but quickly realised she wouldn't earn enough to keep herself, let alone send money home for her children. She has to sell sex to farang - foreigners. And the little phrasebook has taught her how.
There's a list of names for relevant body parts - anatomical and swear versions. Other chapters have useful phrases such as: 'You're the man of my dreams'; 'I love you, not your money'; and 'I never slept with a foreigner before, I'm still a virgin'.
Then there's a whole section on how to ask for money, which includes: 'My father is in hospital'; 'My brother needs school books'; and 'I have really bad toothache and need to pay the dentist'.
Si says she tried working as a labourer and looked for jobs in one of Thailand's huge electronics factories, but only sex pays a living wage. She claims she's been with only three men since she came to Pattaya two months ago because she hates it so much.
'If most girls are honest, they hate it, too. I'd like to find a foreigner to be my partner so we can care for each other,' she says, as tears well up in her eyes. It's probably true, but unfortunately it sounds just like a line from her little book.
There are a few attractions-other than sex on offer in Pattaya. One of them is a shooting range a few miles out of town - another place Bird visited. Pick a pistol and you can fire at a life-sized cut-out of a man, then take the target home as a souvenir, which Bird did. Or you can blast away with a pump-action shotgun - the kind of weapon Bird used on his murderous rampage.
You aim at metal squares - a paper target would be no good because one hit from a powerful cartridge would shred the target. One of the unexpected things about Pattaya is that there's nothing threatening or violent about the atmosphere.
On a Saturday at a crowded bar at 2am is Peter. He's a quietly spoken, neat man in his early 60s from Derby, whose wife died from cancer 11 years ago. When one of the BGs asks if he 'wants to play', he nods enthusiastically. As a regular visitor, he knows what will happen next. From under the bar she pulls out a game of Connect 4 and the pair of them giggle away while she thrashes him at noughts and crosses. He might pay for 'short time' a bit later, but many evenings he just sits and chats. He says his wife is irreplaceable and: 'Britain is going to the dogs - can you imagine if this was Derby on a Friday night?' And in many ways he's right. In most British cities, the street would be full of girls brawling, sprawling and spewing. In Pattaya, they're smiling, decorous and attentive.
Clearly all sorts of men go there as sex tourists, not just social misfits. But Derrick Bird isn't Pattaya's only notorious visitor. In the mid-Nineties, a young QE2 steward came ashore and discovered a lust for prostitutes. His name was Steve Wright - he's better known as the Suffolk Strangler, who murdered five women in Ipswich in 2006. And Josef Fritzl also enjoyed himself there, while the daughter he repeatedly raped and the children she bore as a result remained locked in a cellar back home in Austria.
In one of the posh hotels at the nicer end of town, a fat man with skinny white legs comes down to breakfast with a Thai woman less than half his age. 'I'll say something in English and you teach me the Thai,' he says. She smiles in agreement. He picks a phrase that's probably already in the Get Rich Quick handbook: 'Go to the bedroom.'
I clean virgin, not ho, you keep sending me money monthly sucker and I will love you looooong time!
