Customer Reviews

Bars, Babes & Bimbos - nightlife tales from Bangkok, Pattaya, Angeles City, Manila, Phnom Penh and more

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You don't have to read too much in between the lines to see who Al Culler is, which is your stereotypical fat, bald, old white pervert in Thailand doing things he could never get away with back in England. I initially was about to turn away from reading this in disgust, but the fact that Culler essentially owns up to this (as much as he can without confessing to something that might get him imprisoned) gave him enough credibility for me to keep reading.

I was looking for a book on Bangkok nightlife since I will be traveling there in a few months for the first time. While Culler isn't going to give you much on night life where you aren't paying for the women, he gives a very adept run-down of places in Manila, Bangkok and Pattaya for the more red lightish spots there. His anecdotes are sometimes funny, and sometimes he just comes off as a stupid foreign brute. He ends up painting a fairly horrifying picture of these scenes and tells his perception of the backstories to what most tourists don't see in the lives of the girls entertaining in these places that I actually don't doubt are fairly accurate. He tries to do it in such a way to make the reader feel as little sympathy for the girls as possible, but comes off as the same type of farang he chastises that likely got burned by one of them in the past.

The adventures get repetitive after a while. There is one odd passage about a Thai girl that moved from up-country with good intentions and her life that is actually quite poignant, well-written, and provocative that is of such good quality I was wondering if someone else wrote it and inserted it without him knowing.

He also paints these places as fairly dangerous spots to be in. His time in the Philippines always seems marked with potential muggings, stabbings or scams every other minute. He makes Bangkok look like a city over-run with katoey thugs, menacing mamasans and violent pimps.

If you are expecting a point to the book, or some kind of climax, or something you could even call an ending, you will be disappointed. He comes off as a decrepit old pervert that is almost forced by some external pressures to spend everyday trolling the go-go bars and brothels of Southeast Asia. The stories would be far funnier and entertaining if there wasn't such a bitter feeling pervading his words.

I am not trying to sound like a prude ("Tropic of Cancer" is one of my all-time favorite books). Yet, I wouldn't recommend this book generally, but if you are looking for a travel book about nightlife in some of the Asian cities he covers, it might be worth a read...but mostly because he seems to have cornered the market here and I didn't find many options on the same subject from other authors.