If ships are sometimes unloaded at a lazy pace, that is not to say that the flow of action in Klong Toey is slow.
   Like the docks of any big port, Klong Toey is a rough neighborhood, and a slum.   The ramshackle wooden dwellings in the backwaters of the Port Authority area house some of Thailand's poorest urban citizens, and a good many of Bangkok's criminals.
   In the daytime, while longshoremen sweat straining or squatting in the shade on the docks, flocks of children roam the streets and alleys.
   The rest just wander, laughing and playing games. fighting, watching adults caught up in work, begging small change from foreigners loitering over their bottles of beer in the open restaurants.
   Many of these poorest children are illegitimate; in the rowdy life of Klong Toey they seldom realize that that is supposed to be a disadvantage.   Phen Srimuang, a 13-year-old with a young lady's charm just beginning to soften the edges of her tomboy impetuosity, seemed slightly admiring when she told a reporter her mother "had fun with men" to make a living.   Her father?   "Who knows who he is?" she asked as if the question were a silly one.
   As a bar girl, Phen's mother is unlikely to work in Klong Toey these days.

   Before New Phetchburi Road was built, with its glaring neon necklace of bars, massage parlors and cheap hotels, Klong Toey was the wine-women- and-song center of Bangkok, with rows of blaring nightclubs offering a heavier bombardment of the raw nerves of pleasure than any other place in town.
   Now there are only three nightclubs going.   In the Mosquito Bar, opposite the Customs area checkpoint, sailors who have come here under flags from Sweden to Somalia dance with girls from fifteen to fifty under the dim red lights and the tidal wave of vibrations of a rock band magnified by amplifiers as powerful as ships' engines.
   Everything still shakes and roars and shouts at the Mosquito, but twenty meters away at the OK Club, nightlife is in the middle of a lingering death.   Where a hundred girls used to fill the air with a choking cloud of cheap perfume as they trembled to the overpowering music, the five-man band now outnumbers the customers half the time, and the gaudy naked women on the walls outnumber the girls at the tables.
   The one other place, the most luxurious, is the Golden Gate.   The music there is still as frantic and deafening as ever, and there are still enough  customers  to  keep the bar busy

until closing time, but a long lull has set in.   The dance floor is usually empty, and when they leave their tables, the girls with their plastic number badges, buxom or skinny, must dance with each other.
   Although the Department of Public Welfare estimates 90 percent or more have venereal disease, few are tempted to abandon the prospect of money for fun.   Nationwide, the Department trains about 360 prostitutes a year in more productive trades, almost all of them just released from jail.   "Virtually none," an official said, contact the Department on their own.
   Rosie, a pretty 23-year-old at the Golden Gate, brimming with enthusiasm, is not at all embarrassed about selling sex for her living.
   "It's fun," she said, "and I really don't know what else I could do."
   If she becomes momentarily uninterested, there are her two children to spur her on.
   According to officials of the Pearl S. Buck foundation, there are several hundred half-European children in Klong Toey, perhaps 70 with American fathers (and thus of concern to the Foundation which provides them with financial aid and monthly physical checkups).
   The  bar  girls,  police say,  can often convince  the    sailors  and soldiers  who  have fathered

the children to send money for their support.   The money does not come forever, though, and there is no guarantee it is spent on the children.
   While the bar girls who work or live in Klong Toey ensure prostitution its important place in the district's problems, the Port Authority Police are busy with Klong Toey's more serious ills.
    Beyond the mild embarrassment of prostitution, the port suffers from more threatening disruptions - drug addiction and smuggling, pilfering of cargo, and violence among the hard-drinking sailors and longshoremen. .... The drug problem - heroin and opium use - is confined to the workmen on the docks, with foreign sailors rarely involved, the Port Authority Police say.
   The essence of Klong Toey is not losing, but finding - women poking through heaps of foods in the morning market, bar-girls waiting for taxis with their sleepy lovers four hours before dawn, and above all the day-long torrent of foreign goods carrying new habits and colors into a fast-changing country.

      The Bamboo Bar at the Oriental Hotel was for decades one of Bangkok's mainstays for live entertainment;

      The Florida Hotel's Caravelle and the Chao Phaya Hotel's Boom Boom were in an unusual see-saw battle for customers.   The Florida was an R&R hotel, while the Chao Phaya was an Officer's Club for U.S. military stationed in Bangkok.   (Ordinarily those on R&R and those stationed in Bangkok would never mix.   This seemed to be one of the exceptions - the Thermae was another.)   And, yes, there was a 'round-about' at the Sri Ayuthaya Rd - Phya Thai Rd intersection.

      Duke's (Patpong 2) stretched their hours of operation for the Holiday Season to 04:00 hrs (which they were doing anyway if there were customers).

December 1968

      The Le Metropolitain was the "new kid on the block" at Gaysorn Night Entertainment Area.