Bangkok City Guide (Soi Cowboy & Nana Plaza)

There are so many adult entertainment options in Bangkok that I’m not even going to try to recommend specific establishments, but I’ll give a brief overview of the city so that you can do some more research on whatever aspects interest you the most. 

Soi Cowboy

There are massage parlors all over town and you can easily pick up a freelance working girl in the backpacker paradise that is Khao San Road or any of the after hours discotheques, but there are really three main red light districts: Soi Cowboy, Nana Plaza and Patpong. 

Patpong is home to the famous ping pong ball shows, but Nana and Soi Cowboy are the premier destinations if you’re looking for sex.  The ping pong shows are basically a circus act, with the girls shooting ping pong balls out of their pussies at paddle wielding customers, so they’re definitely more entertaining than they are sexy.  I visited one, but once they started shooting darts across the room at strategically placed balloons, I decided that I’d had enough of that forever. 

Nana Plaza

Nana Plaza is a four story complex of go go bars where you can have some beers, chat up some girls (expect to pay somewhere around 150 baht each for drinks for the ladies who you want to talk to), and pay the “bar fine” of somewhere around 600 baht (a little under $20 US) to the club to take the girl out.  That fee only gets the girl out of the bar though, so you’re going to have to negotiate any extra services with the girls before you pay the bar fine.  The girls set their own prices, but 2000 baht to take her to your hotel room for an hour or two is pretty typical, and you can take her for the night for somewhere around double that.  Of course, you can also take the girl to dinner or to a discotheque or wherever you want, but you should probably expect to pay about the same amount of money as you would if you were fucking, because they value their time at least as much as they value their sex.  My real recommendation, if you’re in town for a while, is to hire one of the bar girls to be your tour guide to the local’s Bangkok on one of your first nights there, because that worked out amazingly well for me.  No regular tour guide would have had me drinking beer and eating crickets by the river at 4am, but it was one of the highlights of my first trip to Thailand. 

Poster showing the ladyboys working
at one of the Nana Plaza bars.

I should note that, if you’re looking for ladyboys, there are several good bars for that in Nana Plaza as well.  I hear that you really want to take a trip to Pattaya if ladyboys are anything more than a curiosity to you, but they’re not to me, and I haven’t gotten to Pattaya, so I can’t really give specific advice there.  At Nana, though, they’ll provide the same services as the girls on the same bar fine system, but it’s worth stopping into one of the bars for the show and a beer even if you just want to get a peek. I have to admit that some of those “ladies” are stunning.  You really could almost forget that they have male parts, at least until you end up beside one of them at the urinals.  That’s awkward.  

Soi Cowboy is very similar to Nana Plaza, although it has a slightly less pervy atmosphere, and it's just a relatively short walk down Sukhumvit.  If you’ve seen The Hangover 2, you’ll recognize it as the street where the wolf pack causes a riot outside of a ladyboy bar, but basically it’s just a short street full of neon lights and bars. It’s my favorite of the Bangkok red light areas and has lots of places that are solid for drinking beer and checking out the girls, and it’s definitely worth walking down even if you aren’t planning to take anyone back to your room.  If you are, though, it works for that too.  The After Skool bar is a place where you can get a bj while having a beer (so I’ve been told) and Cock-a-too is a ladyboy bar, but pretty much everywhere else on the street is a go go bar that works on the same bar fine model that I described above. 

Tilac (seen in The Hangover, but ladyboy-free in real life), Baccara and Shark are three of the most highly rated Soi Cowboy places, so that's where I’ve spent most of my time.  All of them have dozens of hot girls, but they each have their own advantages and disadvantages.  Tilac has down to earth ladies and my favorite bathroom setup of all time (two way glass above the urinals allows you to watch the stage while you piss), but all of the ladies wear bikinis.  Shark might have slightly less ladies, but their girls do at least wear sheer tops so you can see some nipple.  Baccara girls are the biggest hustlers on the block, but they’re also probably the most attractive, and you can see the most nudity there as well.  They have bikini clad girls on the main floor, but there’s a glass ceiling above you, and the girls dancing on that wear short skirts and no panties, so you can get quite a view if you don’t mind craning your neck and looking like a pervert.  You’re in a bar full of guys who are hoping to spend somewhere around $70 to fuck 20 year olds though, so I wouldn’t worry too much about that.  The ladies upstairs also dance topless at times, and you can sit up there to enjoy that show. 

The bars don’t open until around 7pm, so you’re going to need some other options if you’re looking for daytime action. Your best bets are going to be one of the massage parlors, the Eden club on Sukhumvit Soi 7/1 where you’re required to hire at least two girls at a time, or a blowjob bar like Lolitas just down the second alley off Sukhumvit Soi 8.  A beer and a bj will run you a little under 1000 baht in there, though it’s a little depressing to think about how much those girls are getting for each “job” assuming that the club takes at least half of your $30, so you might want to consider giving a tip. 

As for lodging, Jasmine Executive Suites is right around the corner from Soi Cowboy and is my personal favorite place to stay, but you’ll probably be fine at just about any of the places near Nana Plaza or Soi Cowboy. Just book the room for two so that they don’t try to hit you with an extra guest fee if you take a girl back to your room with you. In theory, you could stay further away from Sukhumvit and compensate the girl accordingly or utilize one of the short stay places near the clubs, but I don’t think there’s any advantage to doing that unless you have business to do elsewhere in Bangkok.

Bangkok can be overwhelming, but everything is cheap enough that you really can’t make any irreparable mistakes (assuming you wear a condom), so you should relax, go with the flow, and have some fun.  Most importantly, though, just go there.  You will not regret it.