A week in Phnom Penh (27 Apr 05 May)
This is my fifth trip to PP in the last 3 years and this time I stayed at yet another new hotel, Tao Riverside Residence. A separate report on the hotel will follow.
Disclaimer My post is simply a reflection of my observation, I personally hold absolutely no grudge or bias against any individual, community, nationality, colour, race, economic background or sexual orientation.
Top Ten Highlights.
1. The market is distinctly dominated by groups of young to middle-aged Chinese men, flush with money to blow. And the market is responding.
2. This dominance is slowly but surely spreading into the mongering world too. In my last visit here in Aug 2018, this was not so prominent (except in Nagaworld), but this time almost every single bar, disco, club, or lounge had a significant Chinese population who were indulging the top girls and having a ball, throwing around money like it were going out of style.
3. The older (read above 60) Western monger has been relegated to a distant third spot, having to only satisfy his urges with the ugliest available women. Purely my observation. Disagreements are welcome. It's one man's view of the world.
4. That leaves the shallow middle to every one else. This means younger Western dudes, well dressed, well groomed, well behaved Indians, Malaysians, Arabs, etc.
5. A disturbing fact I encountered with several girls in my conversations (in specific places only) a three-tiered pricing structure seems to have emerged. The standard ST of 1 hour, negotiable to 2 hours with 1 pop. The LT which we all expect to be a long and leisurely session usually lasting overnight with 2 to 3 pops is now being interpreted by the girls as 4-5 hours, with no more than 2 pops. Which means, girl comes in at 12 midnight, wants to leave by 4 am or 5 am. And this gives passage to the third price point presenting the "Overnight", for which the girls ask for even more money. And we think the girls are dumb! Of course, some of them do come back to earth once they know you are not a pushover, but there are the divas and golden pussies who don't budge. So while the basic service and price has not moved much at the lower end, the higher segment's services have been redefined and a repackaged service at even higher price segment has been introduced. Marketing genius.
6. The food in PP continues to enthrall me and I am an absolute sucker for Asian food. Although on this trip I did not get to sample too many new places. Just 3 new places. At other times I stuck to some tried and tested places.
7. There is nothing to do in PP till the bars start opening up and girls start coming in by 7 pm. This is purely from a hobbyist's perspective. If you like those rub and tug massage shops, or places like LE Cyrcee then more power to you. Not my gig. Pickings online are very very slim. Recommendation would be to build up a small reliable list of girls who can come in the afternoons to help beat the monotony. Or you manage to keep the overnight picking long enough (won't happen).
8. Expect at least 40% to 50% of the girls in bars to say NO to barfine. This is a growing trend, one that is dangerous and has the potential to completely disrupt this market for us. The reason for this is often repeatedly discussed here ad nauseum. Hence, my recommendation would be to ask the girl that captures your fancy right up front, about her willingness to go out with you. Else, you will be poorer by $10 to $12 on each encounter, with nothing to show for it. You might think it's a kinda dick move to ask the girl up front without building chemistry, as PP is not Pattaya or Angeles where girls are more realistic about their line of work, they need to be made comfortable, yadda yadda. Your choice.
9. Pontoon has has a new owner and with that comes new rules. More on this later.
10. Petty crime rate is probably up. More than 70% of the girls I spoke to said they had either themselves been a victim of phone or chain snatching or they knew a very close friend or relative who was a victim. So if you are on ground stay sharp, never take your phone out on the road, do not dress flashily (some folks need a serious upgrade though), never carry more cash than you need and never trust anyone you speak to for the first time.
Over an eight day period I managed to meet several girls from different sources bars, clubs, online, etc. I won't go into details of which girl came from where and what we did and how much I paid her. All that is YMMV frankly. But I will write about my observations of each place I visited and of course my opinions and recommendations. I base my opinions on a few criteria in the order priority for me.
1. Quantity of girls.
2. Quality of girls.
3. Aircon and general cleanliness.
4. Staff friendliness.
5. Pushiness for drinks.
6. Pricing.
7. Added attractions like a pool table or live band.
Based on these, I think Darling Darling wins hands fucking down by a mile. Except for the prices, they have it all and more. Frankly, its like comparing a Ferrari with with a Proton Saga and there is nothing quite like it in Phnom Penh. But there is an emerging contender IMHO, and has potential. More on that later.
So let us move to the bars, which are accountable for 80% of the working girls in Phnom Penh. I am breaking it down into best bars, middle ground and worst bars to keep it simple.
The best bars.
I think in terms of both quantity and quality among conventional bars the top prize goes to Tokyo Bar and Alaska Bar, both sitting side by side on St 136. The ladyboy mamasan in Alaska can be terribly annoying and you just have to deal with that, no way around it. Even if you buy him / her a drink he / she will continue to behave annoyingly. The girls at Tokyo Bar look exceptionally young, if you know what I mean. Be careful, use your common sense and rely on evidence alone. Lady drinks are $3. 5. A draft costs $1. The pool table at Alaska is bad. Aircon is just OK in both places, maybe because they are not fit to handle the crowd that comes in each night. Every night they were packed wall to wall with girls and customers. Hard to get a place to sit sometimes.
Not quite in the same league but I would include bars like Xanadu, Angry Bird, Intoxica, OneThreeSix, Corner 136 Bar, and Route 136. Although, Corner 136 Bar is a total rip off and quality is far more worse than average in Route 136. OneThreeSix bar has a live band playing 3 days a week, girls are quite nice and friendly. There is a stunner there who continues to elude me for over a year now, says she does not barfine and this statement has been corroborated by other girls at that bar. Intoxica has been in the press for all the wrong reasons in the past, this time they were OK, girls are a bit pushier than other bars here.
The wide and shallow middle bars.
This is where 80% of all bars will fall, instinctively. Firstly none of them have more than 8 to 12 girls at any point in time. Not more than 2 to 3 of them will be worth buying a drink for. Probably 1 or 2 of these will agree to a barfine. Almost all of them have similar infrastructure in terms of seating, aircon, cleanliness, staff behaviour and so on. But we aren't ranking bars, we are grouping them. I must have gone inside 80% of the bars on Streets 136,130, 118,110 and 104. You do the math. A few that I remember (for obvious reasons) are Dream, Jacky, Helicopter, 69 Bar, Tiger, Crazy Dog, Yellow, Top Ten, Na Na, Rodeo, Utopia and Honeypot. They were probably the better ones among this lot, for varying reasons.
The worst bars.
Now these deserve to be grouped among the worse simply because they perform very poorly on each of the above criteria and you would wonder how they are still in business. I know this might offend some folks, but here goes.
1. Airforce This bar should be shut quickly. Situated on St 104, this place smells like a dungeon. The women inside look like prisoners. Staff need some lessons in how to smile even when they don't want to. Prices on par with other bars.
2. OneZeroFour This used to be a great bar back in 2017 when I was there, but now this place is a shithole. Its on St 104. The fat mamasan will get herself a drink even when you tell her no drink. Bill can be padded. You can stay and argue, I consider my time more precious. One of the days I went there, and 3 girls followed me inside. Couple of them were OK. I asked them "Do you barfine? They did not even reply, just turned and walked back out.
3. Rose Bar I never thought I would ever say this, as Rose was my top bar last year in PP. Sadly they have just fallen off a cliff. One day while at St 104 I peeked inside, there were 5 girls (if you can call them that), 1 customer (the poor sod), no music, no aircon. Why will anyone want to look any further?
4. I Get You Bar St 136. Uggghhhh! What did I just see? One of the ugliest collection of girls. End of story.
5. Frog Skin Bar St 5. Just 1 doable girl, who does not barfine. Why stay in business?
6. Bird in Hand St 5. A name like that generates hope. But that is as far as they get. And the music is WAY too loud.
7. All the bars at Golden Soraya Mall in the new Pub Street complex. What an abomination.
Moving on to KTV's. I simply wanted to explore what might be available but quickly realized that I wasn't about to get any poon in these places without dropping a decent dollar. Plus some of the larger places are good only if you are in a group, willing to blow money, out to have a good time and have a local guide of sorts who can speak the language. Else you won't know what hit you.
Next up, clubs and discos. Apparently ownership of Pontoon has changed hands and the new Chinese-Cambodian owner is out on a mission to gentrify the place. So, grandpas and grannies out. Guys in shorts and flip flops out. Provocatively dressed working girls out. I wonder who is left, who might go to Pontoon. By the way all this information is coming from an assortment of the girls I met during my stay. All of them together would not lie.
I could not find time to go to Epic, Paradise, Club Love, etc. In any case, picking up a drunk chick from a club and 4 am is not my gig.
And finally, the rising star, the worthy competitor to Darling Darling I mentioned about earlier. Secrets on St 136. Very classy club by PP standards, spacious, clean, great aircon, excellent toilets, superb sound and visuals, live band (a bit off key but that is pardoned). A bit pricey, a draft is $3 while a JD+Coke is $5. Hendricks is $7. A Guinness is $5. Now onto the scene of real interest. I sat for a while sipping on my beer to take in the surroundings and understand how things work here. The club or super-bar (as one waitress referred to it) has been open for around 8 months now. There are 2 categories of girls who are on the club payroll. One are the waitresses in smart black skirts and crisp white shirts. These girls are strictly waitresses and they do not go out with customers. Then there are several girls in a black and red figure hugging sleeveless dress hanging about. You can buy them staff drinks at $4. 5 apiece. If things click between you two and you want to take her out, you have a buy a special staff drink for $20. Aka barfine. What you pay the girl is between her and you. Some very hot girls in there, a few would actually give some DD girls a run for their money. And finally, I am told, freelancers come into the club later as it stays open till 5 am. Naturally, for these FL there is no lady drink rule or barfine rule. I did not hang around to find out if the FL information was true. I did buy a hot girl a couple of drinks to glean all this information and also verified this with the bartender with a well-timed tip. This was a reconnaissance trip to Secrets for me, as I see a lot of promotion on FB for this club, but I have not seen any reports. I like what I see and I will be back here next time.
So that is all folks. Enjoy reading!
To Answer Blanquiceleste.
[QUOTE=Blanquiceleste;2327494]Hey Sam. I am really keen to know which bars you visited. I was on ground probably 4 weeks ago, and not one girl asked me anything more than $70 for LT. As for ST, I believe $50 is a fair rate so I did not bother to bargain. And in most places local draft beer is still $0. 75. If that is considered expensive, I am wondering what should be called economical. And if I remember right, 20 months ago was not that different. Hell, even the girls were the same in many bars. I have written reports in Sep 2017, Oct 2017, Apr 2018. They were not so different in pricing. I am wondering is I am missing anything.
The only place I got quoted $100 for LT is Secrets. But I thought the girls there looked better than the ones in the surrounding bars. With a bit of haggle they might have accepted $70-$80. I did not pick from there though.[/QUOTE]I don't think you are missing anything.
Unfortunately, I only visited about a half dozen bars and only on Street 136. Advanced arthritis severely limited my travels on foot. If anybody saw an old fart hobbling around with a cane, it was probably me. LOL Should've had a cortisone injection before my trip. Also, a case of the shits kept me sidelined for a few days. The bars I patronized were the Pussy Cat, 69 Bar, Candy Bar, Moonrise, Sweetie and one or two others. Didn't try Secrets. I was aware of the pricing there. If you are missing anything, it is maybe the recollection of what the pricing has been historically in PP. Sure, the price of pussy has gone up everywhere. But it just seems like the prices in PP have escalated disproportionally in PP compared to other venues. I only barfined once. Cute 19 year old, 2 weeks on the scene. She was quite thankful for the $60 I put next to her purse in the morning. I, personally, did not get quoted $100. But my wingman was quoted that at 3 different bars. Yeah, the girls who quoted that were one of the top 2 (in my opinion) in each of the bars. You are right about $. 75 beers. Can't be beat except at a convenience store. LOL Fortunately, a former Soi Cowboy dancer I've known for 3 decades flew over to visit for a few days. And my married Khmer "girlfriend" of 22 years stopped by when she could. I'll be 78 in a couple of weeks, so I have about 50 years of fucking my way around SEA. Old school. With indelible memories of when "sanuk" was really "sanuk" and not like buying / renting a used car. I don't need a Ferrari to get me from Point A to Point be. LOL.
SS.
PP. Best Vaule for Mongering in SEA.
[QUOTE=Blanquiceleste;2327946]I am relatively an infant to the PP scene, so my experiences are not clouded by history. For me, PP is currently the cheapest place to monger conventionally in SEA.
#RESPECT for the Golden Jubilee of your career. Keep it going.[/QUOTE]I'm older, but not yet senile. I can still recall my "infant years" of mongering and cherish them. And you and others here will also. Rarely, does anything stay the same. When I compare the current P4P scene with that of yesteryear, I don't complain. I accept it for what it is. In many ways the scene is much better: nicer venues, more options, the convenience of electronic communication, and the ease of getting a blow job. LOL.
In the 70's, getting a go go dancer in BKK who would give head could be a very real challenge. (True). Even in PP a decade or so ago, mongers used to complain about the Khmer girls not giving headthus one of the reasons the Viet freelancers at Martini were often favored. The Viet girls knew how to perform and did without hesitation. Now, it seems the gals in both BKK and PP would rather suck than fuck, and that suits me fine. LOL.
So guys in PP in their 30's, 40's, and 50's should appreciate what they are experiencing at the moment: the lowest cost for mongering in SEA. For, in another 20 or 30 years, the bars will probably be outfitted with "virtual" bargirls and cost $300 per hour. (I'm sure the Japanese are onto this already. LOL).
SS.
Visiting PP for 3 days contacts please
Hello all,
I'm new to this forum.
I'm visiting to Phnom Penh next weekend and appreciate if you can share some contacts. Interesting to meet khmer girl.
Seeking advice where to stay and where to go.
I will start contributing once I make this first visit.
Thanks in advance.
