Seymour Totti’s Foreign Policy

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I found out last night that Wanchai institution, Fenwicks - the Dock, has closed. I managed to get in one last happy-hour beer before the shutters rolled down for the last time. At the request of the police the government have refused to renew the clubs licence. The owners are appealing but it may be a month or two, if at all, before it re-opens.

According to a report in the South China Morning Post sex was not the only commodity from Colombia that was on sale. I must admit, though I never went there on a regular basis, I find that hard to believe. I chatted with the South American ladies on numerous occasions and never got the slightest hint that there were selling anything other than a fuck.

But I feel mostly sad for the 30-40 people whose jobs have been unnecessarily flushed down the toilet in these appalling economic times. Fennies was a tourist destination in its own right. Business travellers, tourists and visiting navies all made a beeline for it after dark. The club was still doing good business despite the gloom and doom.

To add insult to injury they have been forced to close just two days before the busiest party weekend of the year. The Hong Kong Sevens starts Friday night

Whatever happens it wont stop the sale of sexual services, nor the coke dealing if that really was the case. In a few months a new place will open and the cycle will repeat itself. As it has been doing since the 1860s.

See also: Hong Kong Sevens
See also: Networking

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It’s almost a dozen years since China reclaimed Hong Kong. I recall, prior to the hand-over, that many in the drinking classes were a bit worried about what might become of the Wanchai strip.

To some that part of Lockhart Road was just a trench filled with girlie bars. Where Filipinas danced around poles and were quite willing to leave with a customer provided he compensate the bar. A fee that was considerably more than a flight to the Philippines. (He would then have to negotiate with the girl for whatever services she might provide.)

There were some seriously expensive clubs where just the cost of a round of drinks could have got you to the Philippines, and there were a handful pubs and a few discos.

It was a pale shadow of what was available in hot spots such as Bangkok and Manila. But it was, and still is, steeped in history and tradition. This is the area where Suzie Wong plied her trade and while her world may have been eclipsed by the venues further south there were a good many girls from those places heading north in search of bigger bucks.

Arsenal Street, at the very end of the strip, is the dividing line between Wanchai and Admiralty. As the names suggest this is where the British Navy was berthed. And what is the first thing an able seaman wants when he hits land after a long voyage? That’s right, a glass of beer and a fuck! Even now the Navies of friendly countries still disembark at Fenwick Pier for a spot of R&R when they are passing.

But were the fears well founded? How has it changed under Chinese rule?

Well I think it’s fair to say that Richard Mason, the author of The world of Suzie Wong certainly wouldn’t recognise it. Indeed some people that frequented the area as little as ten years ago would notice considerable change, and I’m happy to say that it is mostly for the better.

The pole dancing bars are still there and they are still expensive but there’s a number of new bars such as The Bridge and the re-invented Old China Hand that cheerfully turn a blind eye to professional ladies hanging out in the bar. After all they attract the guys and the guys buy drinks.

Neptune Disco is still going strong but Crossroads, The Makati and Pussycat have been replaced by The New Makati, and Fenwicks ‘The Dock’. A few years ago the government launched a marketing campaign with the slogan “Hong Kong: Asia’s world city”. Nowhere is this more evident than in Fenwick’s where you can often find girls from as far away as South America complementing the usual crop from Southeast Asia.

If you prefer not to go into smoky, beery clubs and pubs it’s really quite easy just to pick someone up on the street.

There are, of course, other pubs that have large screen TVs for those that want to watch the big match and venues to fulfil our other needs. Big Ernie’s Diner do good burgers, twenty-four hour breakfasts are at The Flying Pan, Ebaneezers for kebabs and The Curry Pot is self explanatory.

Here is a brief rundown of the key haunts. There are, of course, plenty more:

1. Beverly Hotel - rooms by the hour
2. Big Ernie’s Diner - burgers etc
3. Bridge, The - beer and wimmin
4. Bulldog’s - beer and TV
5. Carnegies - beer and wimmin
6. Curry Pot One - beer and wimmin
7. Delaney’s - beer and TV
8. Ebaneezer’s - kebabs
9. Fenwicks - beer and wimmin
10. Flying Pan - 24 hour breakfasts
11. Joe Bananas - beer and wimmin
12. Ming Court Hotel - rooms by the hour
13. Neptune - beer and wimmin
14. New Makati - beer and wimmin
15. Old China Hand - beer and wimmin
16. Swindlers - beer
17. Typhoon - beer
18. Villa Victoria - rooms by the hour

See also: New chip on an old block
See also: The Red Lips Bar, Hong Kong

Beautiful Nepalese women

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It’s perishing cold in Kathmandu. There are also frequent power-cuts. Not that it matters all that much. None of the tourist class hotels that I’ve stayed in have heating anyway and the water in the shower, even when the power is on, is usually little more than tepid.

I don’t do cold very well. It makes me miserable, my bollocks scrunch up into tight walnuts and it cools the libido … a little.

But it is high season in Nepal and the narrow lanes of Thamel, the tourist district, are throbbing with taxi touts and tiger balm vendors. People selling everything from jewellery and huge Ghurka knives to hashish. They weave through traffic jams that are made more alarming by the fact that they consist entirely of small cars and bikes. Larger vehicles just don’t fit!

Nearly every bookstore and music shop is playing the same Tibetan chant CD and if there is anything more distressing than the traffic it is to suddenly find walking along with the phrase “hum bali bum bum bum” stuck in your head.

But is is high season and I’m glad to be here again. Back in March I’d visited the few ‘dance bars’ that I could find. They had all been curious but rather tame affairs with no chance of snaring a Himalayan hottie to help me warm the frigid sheets.

This time is a little different. The dance bars are more numerous and more visible. There is also a greater enthusiasm amongst the girls that work in them.

Though the actual dancing is still fully clothed and fifty percent male it seems clear that, with more opening up, they are having to offer a broader range and better services in order to compete.

I visited one called Striptease. There wasn’t any of course that’s just the name of the bar. It’s a large cavernous place with a huge stage upon which a lone dancer gyrated in a white miniskirt and blouse. Lights flashed, Indian pop music wailed and four pairs of hands enthusiastically lead me to a table, beers and juices were ordered and we got down to the serious business of bar talk.

“What’s your name?, “Where you come from?”, and “How long you stay?” are all questions that I have considerable experience in dealing with and, despite the impassioned wailing of the Hindi-pop vocalist who was doing her best to quench conversation, I was able to answer adequately. “You want my penis explode in my ear?” threw me a little bit. Your penis? I said “My penis!” she confirmed and just to make herself perfectly clear she reached down and grabbed mine.

Not satisfied with what she found she let go, pulled my arm up around her shoulder and guided my hand down the front of her sweater. After making sure I had a good handful she checked ‘her’ penis again but I already knew she’d be pleased with developments.

Kathmandu closes early and Striptease is no exception, though there are some bars that stay open later. We left shortly after eleven o’clock. My last concern was getting her past security and into the hotel but security was already cocooned in a blanket and dreaming of pleasant things.

See also: Kathmandu revisited

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The Safari Bar in Bangkok’s Patpong Road is one of the few bars that has kept its name over the years. I like the Safari bar. I like the name. The idea of being on a kind of sex safari appeals to someone as twisted as myself.

Of course sitting in the Safari isn’t so much like bagging wild game in the bush, it’s more like shooting ducks in a tub. But who cares when you have a cold beer in one hand and a hot babe, who just happens to be trying to shove her tits in your ear while grabbing you cock, in the other.

I was in the Safari the other night. High season in the year of the credit crunch doesn’t appear to be all that high and there just aren’t enough customers to go around. Oh goody!

The girl was actually behind pressing her tits into my back, I had my left elbow on the stage where another girl was dancing. The girl on the stage was a real corker, I’d forgotten what the one behind me looked like but I knew she was alright - and she was squeezing my dick.

She also caught the dancers attention and beckoned her to dance a little closer so she could show her the stiffy which was clearly visible through the fabric of my trousers. She danced closer then squatted down so that her pussy was just millimetres from my face and hidden only by a thin piece of cloth. I stuck my tongue out but she didn’t come any closer. I reached out and touched, I could feel her smooth pussy through the material. She giggled jumped up and was gone.

I swivelled on my stool and glanced around the bar but within a moment the dancer was in front of me. She put her hands on the back of my neck and pushed my face into her tits. They weren’t big but they they were firm. I pulled her bikini top aside and liked her nipple, it was small and hard. The girl behind was still squeezing my dick.

I motioned for another round of drinks and when she came back we went into sandwich mode with me crunching my credit into her bumcrack. Short of a dick to hold the first girl stretched her arms around both of us and massaged the dancers boobs

Well I was either going to cum in my pants or I had to get them home so I could cum into them. They both seemed happy with the idea of a threesome so I paid the bill we all piled into a taxi.

It turned out they were a bisexual couple who enjoyed working a a pair and I got quite used to them playing with each other while I went off to make the tea. “Who’s the hottest?”, they’d ask when I came back. And of course I had to dip it in both of them to check!

See also: Bar snacks in bangkok
See also: Little Brown Fucking Machines

Cute though ain’t they? (Reuters)

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In Kathmandu, according story on Reuters, police have been raiding “scores of discos, nightclubs and dance bars” saying many were running bars where “nude dances” were performed. This has led to thousands of bar workers to take to the streets in protest.

This must be a fairly recent thing because I was in Kathmandu earlier this year and I spent several evenings looking for just such nightspots. I’d been planning a trip anyway but a newspaper report I’d read spoke of dance bars where desperate maidens sold their honour to foreign males. I was sold.

Well that turned out to be a load of bollocks. In Thamel, the main tourist district of Kathmandu, I found no more half a dozen discreet bars where girls were dancing respectably and who reacted with horror at the suggestion of anything more lewd than polite conversation.

None of the bars I went to had many customers and the few that did were patronised by locals. Of course the good bars may not be in the tourist district, maybe I was just looking in the wrong place.

It’s possible, but I doubt it. Bars have overheads, they need to sell beer to pay the rent and the girls. In the venues I visited a beer was around US$5, lady drink was US$7.50. That’s big bucks in Kathmandu and beyond the budget of most locals, who don’t seem to be very big beer drinkers anyway. The only people who can pay those prices with any degree of regularity would be tourists.

And that’s the problem. If the bars are not in Thamel few tourists would ever find them. Most of Kathmandu is a warren of narrow lanes, unnamed, unlit and totally deserted by 10.00pm. It’s also a place where the kind of outfit that western girls might wear to the mall on a Saturday afternoon is regarded as downright salacious in the conservative Hindu nation.

Now I’ve no doubt that commercial sex exists. But I also know that foreign correspondents have to justify their existence and on a slow news day a juicy, wildly exaggerated story on prostitution will always get picked up by someone.

I also doubt that genuine sex workers in Kathmandu would be out protesting in broad daylight and smiling for the cameras.

Having said all that there is great potential for a bar scene and the women, with a blend of Indian and Tibetan are strikingly beautiful. My next visit is penciled in for late this year.

See Reuters
See also Kathmandu Reveisited
See also Hot Indian babe

Mature Asian women: Not shy and demure any more

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From the novel A killing Smile by Christopher Moore:

“Zeno, Headquarters, HQ, the Star Wars Bar on Sukhumvit. You can’t miss it. Fake Greek columns in front of a sign that reads Turkish Bath, Barber, Massage, Espresso Coffee Shop. Fritters fried in big pots of palm oil outside the entrance. Beggars, bar girls, diplomats, spies, writers, bums, ex-Nazis, merchants, gangsters, tourists drifting in and out, eating at makeshift sidewalk cafes beside food carts and stalls. Cuttlefish and lottery vendors working the crowds. Like you, they’re all looking for shamans and ghosts.”

The Greek pillars and the massage parlour have gone now, the original building was demolished. But within days of the original closing, in 1996, a new one opened just a few doors away. It is now in the basement of Ruamchitt Plaza, 199 Sukhumvit Road. Some of the surroundings have changed, since Moore’s description, but the overall atmosphere remains.

It first opened in the 60’s. Cheap beer and cheap women made it a popular hangout for GIs on R&R from Vietnam. It was one of a number of bars that included Thai Yanok, The Blue Fox and the Grace Hotel coffee shop. Thermae is the only one left.

Approaching from Nana it is on the left. You have to elbow your way through a forest of market stalls where package tourists from all over the world come to haggle for cheap trinkets and t-shirts. An illuminated yellow sign points out the steps down to Thermae from behind a barrier of motorbikes. Most tourists don’t see it, it’s not mentioned in the glossy brochures.

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