In search of the Bar Girl Factory – Part 1 – On the Road to Burriram

The Bar Girl Factory

The legendary Pants Elk once wrote a brilliant blog at TFS2M about a fanciful bar girl factory in Isaan, which he identified as being “the Inter BG Bar Girl Factory a couple of kilometres north of the Friendship Bridge.”

I’ve always loved the imagery of a factory where they churn out bar girls on an assembly line.

Burriram must be Eldorado

During my time in Bangkok I’ve probably spoken to 2 or 3 thousand bar girls.  There are two questions I always ask.  First I ask their name, then I ask which province they call home.

This admittedly unscientific and non-random survey has convinced me that the vast majority of the girls that I find most attractive come from Burriram. In spite of Pants Elk’s information about the location of the factory, in my mind there’s never been any doubt that the highest quality production line must be in Burriram.

I’ve often said after a few pints that I reckon it would be a good idea to cut out the middle man — to go directly to the source as it were.  In short, it seemed like a visit to Burriram would be a great idea.  Find the girls at the factory so to speak… get them fresh off the the factory floor, before they’ve been used, soiled and possibly ruined here in Bangkok.

For years now I’ve been dreaming of going and finding some beautiful young Isaan girls who haven’t yet seen their first farang — busting their cherries if you will.

You mean I can’t work this week?

This week I was disappointed to learn that, due to a three day public holiday, I had no work at all from Monday to Friday.  No work means no pay, so this was fairly depressing.

Then I brightened up.  It occured to me that this might provide the opportunity to go make my own search for Eldorado.  I could use the time to go to Isaan on a quest for the mythical bar girl factory.

I called a friend of mine, who shall be referred to in this post as Blogger X in order to hide his actual identity in an impenetrable layer of mystery, and asked if he’d be interested in making the trip with me.  In spite of my fairly sheepish question he expressed a lot of enthusiasm for the idea.  We queued up a plan — on Sunday afternoon he would pick me up in his 4-wheel drive pickup truck (Ute for you Aussies) — and we would go to Burriram, then on to Khon Kaen.

I was excited.

Two Guys, One Car, 2000 kilometers

Sunday at two in the afternoon he arrived exactly on schedule.  I tossed my travelling bag in the back seat of the dual cab then clambered in to ride shotgun.  The engine roared and away we went.

Two guys stuck together in a car for a long road trip.  This could be tragic.

So, where are we going?

I have been to Isaan before.

In January 2006 I went to Ubon Ratchatani for a 5-day holiday.  At the time, though, I was focused on traditional culture.  I visited a temple, looked at the few legitimate tourist attractions in the area and returned to Bangkok having learned nothing about the wellspring of all the beautiful brown flesh that I enjoy here in Bangkok.

So this trip was going to be different.  We had a mission.

I confess that after 4 years of living in Bangkok, my understanding of exactly where all the usual bargirl home provinces were located was woefully inadequate.

Yeah, they are “in Isaan”, but where exactly?  Which ones were close and which far away?  Why did I seem to associate some places with numerous and quality bargirls (Sisaket, Roi Et, Burriram, Ubon Ratchatani) while others barely registered a blip (Yasothorn, Amnat Charoen)?

Blogger X had a GPS navigation system mounted on the dashboard of his 4wd, which made maps obsolete, but he had brought a paper map and I had brought two.  While he followed the visual and voice commands from his GPS master I unfolded one of my maps to see the “big picture”.  I wanted to see for myself where we were and where we were going.

Route 226: Bargirl Alley

I was a bit surprised to see that there was something of a “bar girl alley” that existed along the major highway heading east-northeast out of Bangkok.

Drive north on Route 1 from  Bangkok and in about two hours you would reach Saraburi.  There you turned East on Route 2 until you got to Nakhon Ratchasima.  From there, Route 226 runs to Burriram, Surin, Sisaket and Ubon Ratchatani.  Wow!  Route 226 is to bargirls what the Alaska pipeline is to oil.

Of course, this isn’t where all the bar girls come from.  To the north you can find Chaiyphum, Roi Et, Khon Kaen, Kalasin, Sakon Naknon and — of course — Udon Thani, but there is no other single stretch of highway like Route 226 where so many bar girls are conceived and reared on a single road.

It seems clear that Pants Elk’s assertion that the factory is in Mukdahan is a ferfie designed to mislead anyone searching for the bar girl city of gold.  If the factory exists, I felt sure that it would be found on Route 226, and Burriram — the place of my dreams — seemed to be a great place to start the search.

What were we looking for?

Young, beautiful girls.  Ones that were just about ready to be shipped to Bangkok.  Fresh from the factory floor models that could be grabbed prior to shipping.  Perhaps if we bribed a logistics clerk….

Dinner

The actual trip to Burriram took about 6 hours… slightly longer if you count the dinner stop we made around 4:30 in the afternoon.

The dinner stop itself is worth a full blog.  It was fantastic.

Me and Blogger X were in the car, barreling down the road when he suddenly braked and pulled into a dirt and gravel lot on the left side of the street.

Why he had chosen this particular restaurant is a mystery, but he deserves to be on my Christmas card list forever for making the decision.

The building was an unimpressive looking wood structure on stilts that had a view over a large resevoir.

At the front of the building they were cooking catfish over hot coals.  The catfish were fresh out of the reservoir according to our server.  They were packed in salt on the outside and stuffed with lemongrass on the inside.

I’ve seen this fish cooking a thousand times before on the streets of Bangkok, but I’ve never thought it looked appealing.  Somehow, here at the edge of a resevoir on the side of a dusty highway in the heart of Isaan it seemed like the right thing to eat.

We asked for a large catfish, Yam Woon Sen Moo Sap, Som Tam Thai and Pak Bung Fai Daeng.  It looked great and tasted better.  It was one of the best meals I’ve ever eaten!

We enjoyed our meal, relaxing for a half hour or more, then hopped back in the truck to keep on going.

Finally! Burriram.  Now, where’s that damned hotel?

Aside from stops for diesel fuel, soft drinks or to empty our bladders the remainder of the trip was uneventful. Around 8 p.m. we rolled into Burriram.

Since neither of us had ever been here it was gonna be an adventure to figure out where to go. The first order of business would logically have been to find the hotel, but the unbelievable throbbing of loud music caught our attention.

Music, Cars and Coyotes

There was a show on in the parking lot of the Big C shopping center. I believe it was an audio equipment (for cars) show. There were a number of large vehicles outfitted with incredible sound systems with booming bass that shook the ground.

Atop each vehicle was a coyote dancer writhing to the music.

All the available space was filled with Thai guys pointing their mobile phones in the direction of the dancers, either shooting video or snapping photos.

We decided to find the hotel later.

Here’s what we saw:

Walking around was pretty awe-inspiring.  As each of the dancers spotted me — 6′2″, bald and white — they flashed a brilliant smile at me.  It was more intense by a mile than what the mob of Thai guys were getting.  Clearly this was a place where a white guy stood out and it seemed that I was going to be popuar.

I was a million miles away from Sukhumvit Road.

The people in the crowd were staring at me as well, and moving to make a path for me to walk.  Some were smiling, but a lot of them simply looked puzzled.

Welcome to Burriram on a Sunday night.

Now, where was that hotel?

Eventually Blogger X and I got  bored.  We figured it was time to find that hotel.  He had identified it from an internet website, so, while we had a name, and even an address, we had a surprisingly difficult time actually finding it.

We were looking for it on the main road, but it turned out to be a block or two back, and it took a couple of turns and some rather difficult-to-see signage to get there.

When we arrived the staff was friendly and spoke passable English.  I booked two rooms while Blogger X unloaded our meager luggage.

The hotel had once been quite nice, but the years had taken their toll and one would have to say the place had seen better days.  At 600 baht per night (including a breakfast that I was sure we wouldn’t be eating) I wasn’t complaining.

Here’s a quick look at the Vongthong hotel:

For years I’d been wanting to come to Burriram, and now I was here.  I had a hotel.  It was just after nine o’ clock in the evening and I was anxious to get out and look for some girls.

Blogger X and I had the same idea:  We would take 30 minutes to shower and get into some quality fabrics, then head out into Burriram to see if they could handle two wild and crazy Americans.

We agreed to meet in the lobby at 9:45 and we went off to our respective rooms.

End of Part 1

In Part Two I will talk about our night out in Burriram.

Subsequent installments will give details about our change of plans about visiting Khon Kaen, how we killed three hours in Amnat Charoen while waiting for my favorite (former) go go dancer and her best friend to join us, our adventures in learning about the Isaan karaoke scene, how we managed to find two different girls on consecutive nights that fit the description ‘two balloons on a popsicle stick’ and my efforts to impress an Ubon girl who spoke no English by sending her an SMS written entirely in Thai.

Stay tuned.