I’m in Seattle now thinking about how Shangrila Pattaya brings the fountain of youth to old men.  As I  look out from the Days Inn parking lot at the nearby hotels all of them close to the airport and onto the street. It’s night time and I see all around me an emptiness in sterile surroundings compared to where I’ve just come from, and thankfully where I’ve been living for the past eight years.

Pattaya is in Thailand.  But the guys who are fortunate enough to live here should be calling it Shangrila Pattaya

In contrast, the streets in Shangrila Pattaya are alive.  Being full of people from all over the world.  Here in Shangrila Pattaya there are restaurants everywhere. Thai restaurants, German restaurants, Russian restaurants, Swiss, French. You name it and Pattaya’s got it. And so many so closely packed together, and this is not to even mention as the bars, and all the street vendors peddling their goods up and down the street and into the bars, from women’s clothing, shoes, watches, street food, friend grasshoppers and other insects, street food, and gadgets of all kinds.

Some of the vendors carry their goods on foot while others carry their small shops side car style mounted on small motorbikes. There’s Atms everywhere, and Family Marts and Seven Elevens, sometimes up to half a dozen of them all within two blocks of each other. I will enjoy renting a car here in Seattle and being able to drive in Washington and Oregon’s beautiful mountains, but I can’t wait to get back, and I’ve only been away for twenty-four hours. Who wouldn’t want to get back if they were already living in Shangrila?

 The 1937 movie “Lost Horizon” compels me to call my new home Shangrila Pattaya

Two nights ago I watched the movie “Lost Horizon” for the first time. Shot in 1937 this classic was about a small group of Westerners who are barely able to escape from a mob of Chinese bandits in Shanghai. Luckily the group is able to barely escape with their lives by getting on the only available passenger plane at the airport.

Unknown to the small group of passengers, the plane’s new pilot overpowers the pilot.  Who then hijacks the plane and kidnaps its passengers who he flies to a mysterious valley in the Himalayas. But he doesn’t quite make it. The plane crash lands in the mountains and the kidnapper is killed during the crash landing. Facing starvation with no hope of escaping the small group of passengers are rescued by an expedition of Tibetan porters who escort them through the hazardous narrow mountain passes to a beautiful city where the sun always seems to shine called Shangrila.

At Shangrila the passengers find there’s more than enough gold for everyone living there.

In the movie, Shangrila has a mild climate, there’s no war, crime or envy there. There’s more than enough of everything because its inhabitants can trade an endless supply of gold trade for whatever they need to the outside world.

The passengers soon learn that the residents of Shangrila live to be hundreds of years old, so long as they remain in Shangrila. One of the group is a terminally ill prostitute who’s been given less than a year to live. She will recover, however due to the miraculous life extending capacity of Shangrila.

Meanwhile, two brothers fall in love with two of Shangrila’s female residents. Unfortunately, the younger brother falls for a woman who is possibly Shangrila’s only disgruntled resident, a beautiful Russian woman who appears to be still in her twenties but who is actually well up in her sixties. The Russian woman is able to convince first the younger brother, and then the older brother, that the leaders of the Shangrila community have lied to everyone, and that Shangrila’s ability to extend the human lifetime is a complete sham.

But the other passengers become so content with Shangrila that the two brothers are unable to convince them to leave.

The Russian woman and the two brothers set out through the hazardous passes in the mountains with a group of sherpas they’ve hired to take them back to civilization. But the sherpas are all killed in an avalanche, and the Russian woman reverts to her true age. Without the strength to climb the high passes of the Himilayans she dies of exposure, and the younger brother commits suicide now that he’s learned the real truth about Shangrila.

The older brother is barely able to get out of the mountains alive after being rescued by a group of Chinese, and eventually he is repatriated in England. For weeks he is unable to remember anything about what has happened.   Eventually when his memory returns he disappears. At the end of the movie there’s a lot of speculation that he went on a quest to once again find his Shangrila, and that eventually after a couple of years he finally found his way back again through the mountains.

The men discussing his disappearance ask the man who’s just returned from a two year search looking for him, “Do you really believe in such a place as Shangrila?” to which the storyteller replies, “I believe it because I really want such a place to really exist. And for all of us, we must all forever hope that for each of us that such a place really exists.”

So what does this movie have to do with Shangrila Pattaya and my having lived there for eight years?

At 7:00 a.m I’m sitting at a hotel near the Seattle airport about ready to get on my next flight.  And I’m thinking how much I’d rather be living in Pattaya than anywhere else.

I also cannot think of many Westerners who’s lived in Shangrila Pattaya for very long who would trade it for anything. All those American, English, German, and other European expats dread the thought of ever having to move back to their home countries. I will admit, however to having one American friend who’d much rather be in the Philippines rather than in Thailand where he owns a condo. And I know of one Swiss, one Spaniard, and one Englishman who have either moved to Malaysia or who are hoping to go there in search of greener pastures. All of them, I think, are deluded.

The fountain of youth really exists in Shangrila Pattaya.   Although in a different way than most of us think of the fountain of youth.  Or the way it exists in the Shangila movie, “Lost Horizon”.

Last week while swimming in our condo swimming pool I encountered a  29 year old Russian man who  married a Russian woman last month.   Who then brought his wife to Thailand for their honeymoon. The man told me, “We Russians have thought it so strange to be seeing all these old European and other Western men all walking down the street holding hands with these very young Thai women and how the Thai woman oftentimes wind up living with all those old men.

And then the more I thought about it, I thought, “Those old men back in their own countries are only just old men. They sit there doing practically nothing only being old men.

And then they come here and suddenly all these young beautiful Thai women keep telling them they are attractive.  So what happens is all those old men actually start behaving a lot younger than they are.  And they have fun, and enjoy themselves.”

And of course, I’ve had many men in their fifties, sixties and even seventies tell me, “Look, back home you can’t get such women to even look at you, and if you try to have anything to do with them, they see you only as being dirty old men.”

But what happens is all of those incurably old men come to Shangrila Pattaya and suddenly they start to feel as if they are twenty again.

Have sex with twenty year olds? No problem. Have a twenty or thirty year old girlfriend stay with you for years, again, no problem. Want to have another child only this time with a woman who’s twenty, thirty or even forty years younger than you? No problem at all. The woman’s all for it.

What happens is the young Thai women make the older man feel attractive and virile again.  His mind tells him he’s a young man again.  And then he becomes what his mind is telling him.

His mind  operates a lot quicker.  He regains his sex drive.   His step  becomes more youthful.   While his confidence jumps from rock bottom to what he had when he was just 18.   Before other men snatched up the best looking women.

If I were to say that for every attractive Western woman there’s a hundred good looking Thai women, I’d be lying. I’d be lying because the ratio is more like 200 or even 500 to one.

And it’s not only that. Most of them, or at least the ones we are likely to meet in such places as Pattaya are available to all of those “Old Men”. There’s massage places everywhere, and it only costs six bucks for a one hour full body massage. And trust me, there’s nothing like a one hour or two hour Thai massage or oil massage where one gets a woman’s full 100 percent attention.

One can drive a motorbike everyday of the year here. Even if it rains and one gets wet on a motorbike one usually dries out in a hurry. And if a man wants to stay dry he can always carry along a light weight rain suit. Although many of us have cars as well, nearly all of us expats drive small motorbikes, and believe me, there’s nothing like driving small motorbikes to make a man feel like a little kid again.

Pattaya’s got great infrastructure. There’s an eight line highway all the way to the main Bangkok airport, a drive which usually take just an hour and fifteen minutes or so. There’s a lot of great shopping here and the place even has some excellent bookstores. It’s got great hospitals and in general health are that’s just a fraction of what it costs in the U.S. and it’s so much more efficient.

In the U.S. and in most of Europe if you go to a bar about all you have to look forward to is getting a DWI which involves spending a lot of money and probably having to spend at least one night in jail.

Who needs that? Last week I put away god knows how many beers, and when I looked at my watch it was three minutes until 2 which his my curfew. After all, I do have a girlfriend and she expects me back at 2, so believe it or not I got home on my motorbike in just two minutes driving perhaps 4 kilometers. At that late hour the traffic was nearly non existent.

The last thing I  worry about is cops because I have never seen a Thai policeman ever pull anyone over because he was drinking and driving. Now don’t get me wrong, I never drink and drive my car here because I feel it’s too risky.  I drive my motorbike instead.  So the only person I think I’m going to kill is myself.  And with the late hours traffic so non-existent,  I can drive that bike of mine  with both of my eyes closed.

I’ve got a beach 150 yards from me and a great health club to exercise in.

If the climate ever seemed too hot for me, I think I’ve pretty well acclimized myself by now. I’m flying to St. Louis in a few hours and I can practically guarantee you that St. Louis on August 1st is going to be hot and a lot more uncomfortable than it is for me in Pattaya. I’d say that if the year round climate where I live averaged just 3 degrees cooler that it would be just about perfect.

As it was for the people of Shangrila money really is no real object for me here. It simply goes a lot further than it does in the United States which enables me to have an even more comfortable lifestyle with access to infinitely more women, with far more night life and bars around me, and I’m still able to save a lot more money than I ever was before.

Is Shangrila Pattaya perfect? No way. There’s hardly any sidewalks here.  The place is awfully corrupt, and the ocean is a bit too polluted. But the corruption hardly ever affects me, and it’s still a beautiful ocean. If I want to swim in it all I have to do is take a 40 minute ferry ride to Koh Larn. As for the lack of sidewalks and all those amenities. Well…one could say it just makes life more interesting.