Pattaya is a coastal city near Bangkok, best known for its nightlife and as a hugely popular destination for tourists and foreign retirees. It has a reputation as a place where genuine love stories and much murkier situations coexist, and the stories collected here reflect exactly that double face. There are sailors and passing travelers who met someone special in a bar in the city, alongside accounts of people who had to learn, sometimes the hard way, to tell genuine interest apart from someone only after money or a visa.
At 39, an Australian who considered himself a seasoned Thailand traveller met a girl over a game of pool in a Pattaya bar. Ten perfect days, a golf tournament in Indonesia, visits to her family in Isaan. All good until six months of distance for work uncovered that the Scottish boyfriend she said she'd left had never actually gone anywhere.
A 41-year-old British man went in two weeks from a Soi 4 fling to talking dowry and house renovations. He almost sent 400,000 baht. He did not.
A Canadian sailor has been married nine years to a woman from Pattaya and has three kids. Now he faces the hardest question of his life: stay or leave.