“Pattaya…shit. I’m still only in Pattaya. All I wanted was a holiday, and for my sins they gave me one. And when it was over, I’d never want another.”

Apologies for badly paraphrasing Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now, but truer words were never spoke. I just got back from a disastrous attempt at fun in Jom Tien, a short drive south of Pattaya for the inaugural Top of the Gulf Regatta – a five day series of international yacht racing.

So you’re probably dying to know what went wrong? A torrential dose of the shits forced me out on the first day, which compounded by dehydration from sitting in the relentless summer sun for six hours on the second day pretty much knocked me out and into an early retirement, no doubt much to the consternation of the skipper. But when you’re sitting all day on a boat with no toilet, and nature is calling every 15 minutes, well you can do the math and work out that it wasn’t much fun.

The third day of the event was a lay day, and bored with staring at the walls of my hotel toilet I took some Imodium to plug the plumbing and ventured into Pattaya to see what all the fuss was about. Sometimes described as “Disneyland for men”, I was keen to find out what drives tens of thousands of tourists here every year.

Walking along the dirty, polluted beach road I came across the usual array of touts and peddlers selling t-shirts, tattoos, leather goods, and pirated DVD’s. You couldn’t pay me enough to swim in the water along the main esplanande, so I kept walking to see if I could find what it is people keep coming here in droves for.

The traffic on the beach road eventually does a sharp left hand turn, but the road continues straight on into from what I can gather is the main tourist strip – a long thin lane called Walking Street. And there it is, in all it’s gaudy glory, Disneyland for men. Alley after alley, row after row of beer bars and go-gos. The street was almost empty at midday except for cleaners hosing out the floors of the bars while a few early starters lifted their legs to avoid the scum being washed out into the street. But I could imagine well how the place comes alive at night time and the real reason people come here is blatantly obvious – sex, sex, and only sex.

I’m sure there are pockets of culture, refinement, and beauty to be found somewhere in this area, but the obvious and overwhelming in-your-face abundance of adult entertainment completely drowns out any hope of finding it for the day tripper. Pattaya has a huge permanent expat community made up of older retirees, and I’ll be damned if I know how they keep themselves entertained from month to month. Ok, so the sex stuff could be fun in the short-term and call me dull but surely hiring five lithe young women for an all-night root-athon that would make Caligula blush is bound to get boring after the first fifty or so times you do it.

Eventually the Imodium wore off as the exertion from walking around in the oppressive mid-day heat took its toll on my already dehydrated body, and I hot-footed it back to my hotel in Jom Tien. I called the skipper of the boat I was supposed to be crewing on and told him that I was aborting the mission.

The 1st of the 9th Air Cavalry medivac’d me away to safety with Wagner blaring from its loudspeakers (ok, actually it was the 4.30 express bus from Pattaya to Bangkok, and the music was shitty Thai pop music played too loud for the little speakers on the bus to handle) where I barely managed to reach the safety of home and my own bathroom in time to avoid a diplomatic incident in the back of my pants.

The sound and most likely the smell of the demon in my bowels carried down my apartment’s corridors and as I sat on the loo straining away I could once again imagine Captain Willard sitting slumped and half-conscious outside my room, sweat pouring from his brow and gasping for breath as he whispers to nobody in particular – “the horror…the horror!.”