But the beach is good and I feel myself unwind. I watch hairy Germans, with tight, white thongs stretched between their beer guts and spindly legs, strut down the beach like flightless wading birds, doomed to extinction. There are newly-weds, never-weds, and once-weds-but-now-in-some-kind-of-ill-defined-living-together-arrangement-with-their-much-younger-secretaries. And we're all having fun. I go swimming and the water seems warm, clean, clear and comfortable. I'm not thinking, I am just floating with the current and watching the sky - an intense, beautiful blue sky. Everything is sharp, bright, high-definition. Beach, water, sea, sky. Now this, this is nice. This is a holiday.

I feel stupid, and contagious

The air is filled with the glare of neon and the smell of fried rice. There are stalls full of knock-off designer clothes and coloured mobile phone covers, stands with chicken and satay, and a mall where I will, before I leave, watch a bewildering Thai film about a crocodile. Mainly, however, there are bars. A huge number of bars. There are beer bars, restaurant-bars, there are even actual "Go-Go" bars, which I didn't think existed outside of '60s gangster movies. But they are here, each one offering a unique themed development to the basic "unhappy nearly-naked girl dancing on a box" formula. You can have unhappy nearly-naked-girl dressed as a nurse (Emergency A-Go-Go), unhappy-nearly-naked-girl dressed as a schoolgirl (Classroom One Go-Go), and unhappy-nearly-naked-girl dressed as err... a Tahitian Queen (Tahitian Queen Go-Go). Looking down a street and seeing "Cats" and then "The Doll House" splashed outside buildings I briefly think I've stumbled into some incongruous theatre district before I notice the "A-Go-Go" tacked on the end, and realise that whatever is drawing people inside probably isn't a shared passion for Eliot or Ibsen.

I steer away from the Go-Go bars and head for a normal looking bar-type bar full of people whose first names are probably Eliot and Ibsen. And here is where it gets difficult because pretty much everywhere is predicated, with varying degrees of formality and intensity, on selling sex, either directly or vicariously. It isn't necessarily pushy; everything is pretty laid back, there is pool, there is beer, there is Premiership football on big screen TV, there are lots of people here just having a drink, including plenty of couples, but it is impossible to ignore the fact that sex is present, and it's fairly integral to how everything works.

The bars employ a lot of women, who act as bar staff and hostesses. They attract people into the bar with a mixture of shouting, flirting and force. The customers then buy them drinks, and may or may not ask them to go home with them at the end of the night. If a girl says yes to someone, the guy pays a fee to the bar and they leave. Some of the customers are straight out of Sex Tourists central casting - big tattoos, chunky gold identity bracelets and heavy moustaches on the kind of faces that blankly stare all too often from the covers of tabloid newspapers - but many look fairly unremarkable. Some are unfailingly polite and friendly, some are embarrassed, some of them are here purely to do business. The male-to-male interaction is weird and uncomfortable. Bar girls launch into animated conversation with each other, while their respective men smile weakly, establish a nationality and try to forget each other's faces.

The hostesses smile and laugh and play a lot of Connect 4. I don't know whether the manufacturers realise it, but Connect 4 is essential kit for the average Pattaya beer bar, which faces the problem of trying to forge fun and connection between men and women who speak very little of the same language. And that's what I'm uncomfortably playing now, my appalled liberal sensibilities feverishly sublimating my desires into creating the airtight Waterbeach Variation, the Sicilian Defence Opening of Connect 4 strategies. But I am playing with the professionals. One of the other girls takes pity on me and starts helping through raised "Are you sure you want to do that?" eyebrows. I hit my stride, developing a patient, trapping style which takes a while to unfold but often leaves my opponent ceding victory as they realise that not one, but two four-in-a-row opportunities have just emerged from the warp and weft of my grand design.

The girl helping me is called Da, she is 24, and has worked at this bar for about five months. We chat falteringly and she tells me that she prefers it to her previous bar because the people here are a lot more friendly and tend to look after each other, which I can believe. There is a lot of laughter and smiling; yes, some of it is for the benefit of the clientèle, but a lot of it seems to be for each other. And although business dictates that no-one can be too picky, I do notice that there is a subtle process in place to check whether someone is a "good man" or not. Although the tourists hold the power, there remains some scope for controlling the form that these interactions take. It's not great, and will always be limited if you're a poor slightly built 5' 2" woman working in what is effectively an export processing zone for western male sexual fantasy, but it is something. I guess what I am trying to explain is that my preconception of Thai bar girls as powerless victims is as unhelpful for thinking about this as is your average sex tourist's perception of them as exotic sex objects. Beyond that... well, I don't know. Get rid of capitalism and replace it with something nicer, as the slogan goes. Where's Kurt Cobain now?

While I'm trying to make sense of all this, Da totally kicks my arse at pool. Mainly, I have to say, by jabbing her cue between my legs whenever I'm trying to make a particularly difficult shot but also, I have to admit, by demonstrating a superior grasp of geometry. But still, I'm having a good time. Byzantine drinking games start where, for complex and unclear reasons, I have to buy the entire bar round after round of thick, red drinks served in very small glasses. The haze thickens.

Now it's different. I feel ill. It's late. And the atmosphere has changed in the course of the past hour. Paired off punters are slipping off into the quiet night. My head is spinning and nothing is making any sense. There are arms round me. There are expectations now. Dark eyes look into mine. But I can't do this. It's too much. The mindlessness and vapidity of the beach seems a thousand years and miles away, too far for me to comprehend. This was stupid. Too many contradictions and too much alcohol. It is time to go home. Because I am a tourist here and, all of a sudden, the label doesn't fit so easily.

Postscript

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