In search of the Bar Girl Factory – Part 4 – Nugget Hunting

Two new units from the Bar Girl Factory undergoing quality control testing

Excerpt from Part 3:

Up to this point Blogger X had done all the driving from Bangkok to Buriram and from Buriram to Amnat Charoen. Now it was my turn. I slid behind the wheel in the midst of a driving rainstorm, having not driven since September 2005 in Australia. This was gonna be fun.

“Take us to Ubon” said Blogger X as he closed his eyes and prepared to sleep. I was amazed that he trusted me that much.

Click Here to Read Part 1

Click here to read Part 2

Click here to read Part 3

It was pissing down rain as I drove out of the town of Amnat Charoen, heading for Ubon Ratchatani. It was 4 years since I’d last driven a car. I would have preferred to find my feet in the middle of a sunny morning on an empty highway, but Blogger X seemed unconcerned as I navigated the trafficked streets in the pouring rain.

Soon enough we were on the highway and Blogger X was asleep, drool sliding slowly down his chin as his head nodded forward and back.

I adjusted the music volume and settled in for the hour-long drive.

And about 60 minutes later we were in the city of Ubon Ratchatani.  We arrived around 8 p.m. and Blogger X awoke just as we hit the center of town — a large park with a brightly lit night market next to it.
In normal circumstances I think we would have parked the car and walked through the market, but the rain was bucketing down.  The only sensible course of action was to find a hotel.

It took less than 20 minutes and we settled on another aging 3-star called the Tokyo Hotel.  The girl behind the reception desk offered two air conditioned rooms for 700 baht per night each and I accepted.  It was only later that I realized that they had fan rooms priced at 450 baht.

She didn’t mention the fan rooms and I didn’t ask, but I would have preferred it.  I actually sleep better with a fan than AC, and Ubon on a rainy night in July isn’t particularly hot.  It’s possible that all the fan rooms were booked, but I regret that I didn’t ask.

Following a pattern similar to the one we established in Buriram, BX and I agreed that we’d shower in our rooms then meet in the lobby in 30 minutes.

I got to the lobby first, and asked the two girls at reception where we could go for some nighttime entertainment.  After a bit of discussion they recommended a nightclub called the Rock, which wasn’t far from the hotel.

I asked for directions, which seemed simple enough:

Turn left out of the parking lot.  Go until you see the Na-waa-DAH Hotel.  Turn right… The Rock.

This sounded pretty simple.

Away we went.  We drove perhaps 3 kilometers and finally saw a large 5 star hotel.  It seemed to have a different name than the girl had said, but I figured this had to be it.

We turned in.  I went to reception to ask if we were in the right place.

Nope.  We were told to U-Turn and go back up the street the way we’d come.  We would see the Na-waa-DAH Hotel on the left.  That’s where we’d find The Rock nightclub.

I was a bit frustrated because we’d come down the street fairly slowly and it was hard to imagine that we’d missed a hotel that would be offered by two different people as such an obvious landmark.  I’m not highly skilled at reading Thai, but normally a three syllable name is easy enough for me to read.  I hadn’t seen it.

We’d passed a big shopping and entertainment area on the way.  I was trying to figure out if the Na-waa-DAH Hotel was before or after that center.

As we drove along I was focused on this question… before or after the entertainment area?

So focused that I almost missed it.  Just as we were passing the driveway for the Entertainment Center I  realized what should have been so obvious.  In English there was a giant sign that I’d read on the way past earlier:

NEVADA HOTEL AND ENTERTAINMENT CENTER.

Nevada.

Na-waa-DAH.

Right.

Of course I was hearing the Thai pronunciation of Nevada.

D’oh!

We pulled into the parking lot, struggled with getting the truck into a parked position that wouldn’t have us stomping through ankle-deep water or walking a very long way in the driving rain.

Blogger X finally managed to get the vehicle sorted, and we went to the front of the club.

It was exactly like a thousand other Thai nightclubs.  Large Johnny Walker Black Label signs out front, dozens of service staff in black pants, white shirt and black vest lounging around waiting for the night to begin.

It was only around 10 p.m.  We were early and we knew it.

We decided to look inside anyway.  It was a very large club with green laser lights, a high ceiling, a stage and lots of tables.  I guess it reminded me of Hollywood in Ratchada.

It was completely empty except for me, BX and the server who walked in with us.  The music was pounding out at ear-splitting volume while the lasers twisted and jumped all over the empty room.

There was no sense in staying around, and honestly, I wasn’t interested in being here when the other customers started arriving.

We asked, and were told that the band started playing at midnight.

We asked if there were any other clubs, coyote dance bars, or anything else interesting.   Our answer was pretty much a shrug of the shoulders.

BX and I vacated quickly, got in the vehicle and decided to drive around town.

With the GPS navigation system we could see the complex of roads quite clearly.  The airport created a northern boundary to the city, and the river created a south and south east boundary.  It was easy to set up a search grid pattern to scout out the city.

Its been said that if you want to find some action in Bangkok you look for neon lights and balloons.  There’s a lot of truth to that.

When you’re outside of central Bangkok, you look for twinkly lights or Christmas tree lights.  We drove the grid and kept our eyes peeled.

We stopped at place where there were two bars sitting side by side.  We went into the karaoke bar on the right.  We were surrounded by customer service people trying to take our order, but we wanted to sort out the situation before we started ordering up drinks.

We asked about the pricing for private room, hostesses, barfines, etc.

We were given identical pricing to the Buriram karaoke club we’d been in the night before.

Okay, that’s fine…can we see the girls?

They brought a girl over.  Not  a stunner, but not terrible.  I told them she could sit with me while we waited for the arrival of the rest of the lineup.

They brought one more girl over.  The papasan was talking fast but he was very very difficult to understand.  BX and I were trying to stress that we wanted to see all the girls.  The papasan (a young kid who might well have been gay) said that he had 6 other girls but they all had customers… at least that’s what I thought he said.

We said that if he didn’t have more to choose from we would be going now.

He suddenly started prattling on about “baby girls”.   I honestly don’t know exactly what he was trying to tell us.  He seemed to be indicating that if we didn’t leave he could bring us some very young girls.

But we were on our way to the door and we didn’t understand him well enough to turn around and go back.

He managed to halt us just outside.  The rain had stopped.

We told him that we wanted to look around town a bit, but that we might well be back in a little while — this was even true.  It had taken us a long time to find this place and I wasn’t sure we were gonna do any better.

We asked him to tell us where we could find some nightlife in Ubon.

We asked about nightclubs, and he told us there were three (including the Rock, where we had just been).  He told us that each one was in a hotel, and he gave us the hotel names.

We asked about coyote dancing.  His response was:  “Ubon no have”

He said that except for the three nightclubs and a few karaoke clubs like his, Ubon City was devoid of nightlife.

Tragic.

We decided to look around anyway.

Neither of us was much in the mood for The Rock or, I think , any other similar nightclub.  I’m not sure exactly what we did want, but I’m sure it was something different.

We decided to start by looking in the bar next door.  It was a sad, quiet little place that doesn’t really merit description.  There were only two girls working — neither of whom you would want to have do anything for you except maybe clean your toilet.

The “mamasan” said that there were six other girls who worked there but, of course, it was raining tonight “so they no come”.

We left.

We finished driving the grid, but there was nothing promising.

But something about the precise way the little possibly-gay papasan had said that we wouldn’t find any nightlife in Ubon city struck a chord.  What if we weren’t in the city?

I was guessing that the other side of the river was probably not part of the city.  BX was ahead of me and was already angling the vehicle to cross the bridge.

It wasn’t immediately obvious, but our instinct was right.   While it wasn’t positively throbbing with excitement, it was easier to spot some signs of night life across the river.  (I later found out that we were in Amphoe Warin, the town next to Ubon City).

We spotted one small club that seemed to be a smaller version of Tawandaeng.  BX was ready to stop the vehicle and go in, but I didn’t really want to .  He said “okay” and we kept on going.

We saw some Christmas lights out front of one place.  We headed straight for them.  It turned out that there was a little hole-in-the-wall bar with a few girls sitting outside praying for customers.  I liked the look of one of them, and we weren’t having a lot of luck spotting opportunities, so we decided to try it on the off chance that we might find something worthwhile.

We call this “nugget hunting”… the process of going into lousy little bars generally inhabited by the lowest quality girls on the theory that every once in a while you strike gold because there’ll be some fresh young beautiful girl who should be earning a fortune at Rainbow 4 but is instead slagging her ass in some shithole; she’s working there because her cousin or best friend works there and she simply doesn’t know any better.

We stopped the car and a whoop went up from the girls.  They raced over with umbrellas to escort us inside.

It had green painted walls and very dim lighting.  There were a few Thai guys near the doorway who looked mildly confused about why we were going in, though I sensed no menace from them.

We sat down and ordered two drinks and chatted with two of the girls. They were pleasant, and they had some game, but they were on the wrong side of 50 kilos and just not intersting enough to justify the expense of a second round.

We paid the check bin and left.  Even so, four girls escorted us outside holding umbrellas over our heads and chatting to us the entire way.

It hadn’t been a successful nugget hunting spot, but the girls had been lively.  This kind of prospecting requires patience.

We fired up the engine and headed off into the rainy night ready to continue our nugget hunting.

We hadn’t gone far when we passed a bar calle The Rabbit.  Once again there were three girls sitting outside killing time.

There was  difference though.  These girls looked pretty good.  The bar looked fairly lively.  And one of the girls looked a hell of a lot like the nugget I’d been hunting for.

I called out for BX to stop the car.  He did.

We received much the same treatment as before.  The Rabbit was a karaoke bar on the same model we’d been seeing already, with the same pricing structure.  The only difference was that when we asked about barfining the girls to go back to the hotel the mamasan said in broken English that it would be up to the girl.  If she liked us and wanted to go along, that was up to her.  The karaoke club wasn’t in the business of pimping them out.

Fair enough.

We decided to choose a couple of girls and take a room.

When talking to Blogger X during the drive earlier in the day I’d been very clear about the fact that I’d been highly motivated by the girl he was with in Buriram with the impish face, tiny waist and bodacious titties.  He agreed that she’d been the pick of the litter in Buriram.

Given that he’d gotten the cute one last night, he told me that I could take first choice tonight.

They only had three girls available, but I was already locked on one of them like a heat seeking missile on the exhaust of an F15.  No lineup necessary for me… I’ll take the girl in the white.

I think Blogger X at that point would have  moved on because he wasn’t all that excited about the remaining girls, but he was gracious enough to grab the cuter of the two remaining girls so I could spend time with the girl in white.

I’m gonna post some photos of her, so I guess there’s no harm in telling you the name of the girl in white: it was Kwang.

My opinion of her at the beginning of the night was very high… I thought she was really sexy.

My opinion at the end of the night was higher.  She was a an amazingly proper girl — in some ways it was difficult to believe she worked as a karaoke hostess — but she was also sexy as hell.  I was seriously impressed.

I’m pretty sure it was a new job for her.  She was waaay too uncomfortable to have been experienced at it.

In the photo at the top of the blog, Kwang is the one in the white, dancing on the left hand side.

Here are a few other looks at her… no single one of the photos is great quality, so I’m hoping that by offering them all together I can offer a decent idea of what the girl looks like:

Opinions will vary on any woman of course, but this girl was 20 years old, about 165 cm tall, 42 kilos, a hard tummy, long lovely legs, a killer smile and a way of moving her bum when she danced that was hypnotic.

Talk about finding a nugget!

This was what I’d come to Isaan looking for.  This girl was a premium model just off the assembly line at the Bar Girl Factory.  She was so fresh that the paint wasn’t dry and she was exactly the compact little sports model that I was looking for.

Kwang hits the Werewolf body specs in a spec-tacular way.  As a bonus, she had above average sized titties that aren’t apparent in these photos.

It’s probably hard to imagine when you look at these photos, which were taken around 1 a.m. after killing a full bottle of 100-Pipers whiskey, but when we first sat down Kwang was stiff and cool.

She was sitting like a girl posing for the cover shot of the Miss Manners Book of Proper Etiquette.  Her ankles were delicately crossed, her legs together, her hands clasped in her lap and she was sitting with a ramrod-straight posture.  She was beautiful but unapproachable.

The only encouraging sign was that she was drinking whiskey and coke at a fairly rapid clip.

I made conversation with her in Thai, since she spoke not a single word of English.  She was polite, but gave me the minimum responses; no small talk and no encouraging body language.

After forty minutes or so I got a bit frustrated and said to her that if she didn’t like me or didn’t want to be in the room she was free to go.

She immediately apologized, and explained that she was riproy… a Thai word that has a variety of meanings.  In this context it means that a girl is exercising proper manners — that she is being lady like.

I pressed the point a little, joking about the situation, and gradually over a period of a few minutes I got her laughing at herself.  I managed to convince her to loosen up.

She had been singing all night — It was a karaoke bar, and she sang with a beautiful voice.  I managed to get her to sink back into a cuddle in my arms while she sang.  It was nice.

It’s not unusual for these girls to get wildly groped by Asian men in these places, so the cuddling that we did was very mild, but I enjoyed it.

Blogger X meanwhile was enjoying himself, but you could tell that he wasn’t really into his girl.

The mamasan brought a third girl in.  Blogger X briefly considered swapping girls, but in the end we just invited her to join us and made it a 5-person party.  Still, BX was just “okay”… he wasn’t digging either of his two girls.

Mine, meanwhile, started dancing and the others joined in.   All of her inhibitions disappeared.  She wiggled her butt like Cameron Diaz in a pair of panties, and between bouts of dancing and singing she was chattering to me at a million miles an hour in Thai.

I had just enough whiskey to really enjoy it.  I was dancing with her, laughing, and generally having a great time.

This girl was a definite nugget.

Eventually closing time rolled around.  Blogger X and I settled the bill.

It was clear that he wasn’t gonna be inviting either of the other two girls home with him, but I was definitely interested in taking Kwang home.  When the room had cleared and Blogger X went out to bring up the vehicle (and shoot a few photos outside) I talked with Kwang.  She told me that she wouldn’t go home with me.  She said that this was a new job for her, and that she was a virgin.

God help me, I believed her.

She gave me her phone number and said she’d be happy to hear from me anytime.  She walked me out to the car and said good night.

It was a crushing blow to be going home alone.

Kwang was really the highlight of this trip for me.

Blogger X and I went home to Bangkok together the next day.  I’ll tell you some of those details in part 5, but it’s worth fast forwarding from Monday night in Ubon to Tuesday night back in Bangkok.

Twenty four hours after I met her, Iwas feeling all warm and fuzzy inside about Kwang.  It was the first time in a long long time that I’d been this excited about meeting a new girl.

But there she was in Ubon and here I was in Bangkok.

However, this didn’t sound so completely insurmountable.

If you show a decent amount of interest in a Thai girl — even in Bangkok where they may have more opportunities and may be a bit more jaded about life – its not that hard to get her to return the attention.  This girl (Kwang) was living up in Isaan and getting desperate enough in her life to start working in a karaoke bar — a sign that she’s probably open to the idea of taking care of — and in turn being taken care of by – a 50 year old white dude.

Big Baby Kenny calls this “looking for Big Whitey”.  I’ve read others who call it hitting the farang lottery.  Its the idea that the girl has found a guy to take care of her and her family.  Her need to work hard (whether in the rice paddies, the karaoke bar or the go go) is over.  She has hit the jackpot.

It occurred to me that for Kwang, I might look an awful lot like Big Whitey.  I didn’t think it’d be all that difficult to get her to come to Bangkok if that’s what I wanted.

Kwang was a great example of the pre-bar girl that I was looking for.  Beautiful, sexy, naive… a girl who could make a mint on the chrome pole but who hadn’t gotten to that point in her life.

She looked like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

But I also figured I wanted to be a little more confident about her and whether she was a girl I wanted to invest time or money in.  After all, I’d only spent 3 hours with her, I’d paid for her time, and I hadn’t even gotten a kiss good night.  Also, there was also the possiblity that I was looking at her through beer-goggles (whiskey goggles?) though I was dead sober when I first saw her, and as Tony the Tiger would say, she looked gggggggggrrrrrreat!

So on Tuesday night I crafted an SMS message in Thai that I sent to her.  Basically it said that I’d enjoyed meeting her, that I thought she was beautiful and “riproy“, and that I’d like to see her again.  I said that I thought I might be in Ubon again in two weeks, and asked if I could see her then.

She called me the next morning.  We chatted for about ten minutes, exhausting my Thai language abilities.  She confirmed that she’d be thrilled to see me if I came back to Ubon.

Apparently that Big Whitey theory holds some water.

I told her that I’d send her an SMS with the date that I planned to be in Ubon, and that I’d call her a day or two before I returned.  She seemed happy with that.

At this point, subject to any changes in my work schedule, I plan to return to Ubon a week from today.  I’m thinking that I’ll spend two nights in town and see if my nugget is worth anything or not.   I don’t mind putting in a little effort to show her that I’m seriously interested if she’s worth the interest.

I’m thinking that she probably is.

We’ll see.

End of Part 4

In Part 5 I’ll finish the story of our Isaan adventure which included a side-trip to Laos ahead of our return to Bangkok on Tuesday.