Back in 2003 I was working for FARANG Untamed Travel magazine in Bangkok. Like any struggling journalist I was driven by one enduring goal: to scam free alcohol. Sales manager Andrew Morgan and I concocted a two-pronged scheme, to get funding from the company for a night on the sauce and to get bar owners to pick up the tab otherwise.
The scheme never really worked out that well, we usually ended up well out of pocket by the end of the evening, but from the ashes of finances rose a new form of journalism: Bartripping.
It may not sound very novel to go out for an evening and write about a bunch of bars, but that was never our intention. Bartripping isn’t about the places we went, the decor of the bistro or some hotel lobby bar’s signature cocktail, it was about the night, the adventures we had.
Others have tried to pick up the form but have always fallen into the trap of kissing the ass of the PR manager signing the bar chits. You can’t write a funny story from a press release, but then again, most bar owners don’t like hearing the truth – we could tell by all the threatening phone calls and cancelled advertising.
Sadly FARANG went tits-up back in 2007 and that was the end of Bartripping, this writer hung up his beer-goggles to return to a career in IT, but it’s a fun look at the Bangkok nightlife scene of a decade ago. Names have not been changed in order to condemn the guilty but take any other information found here with a grain of salt and a slice of lemon. it is literally ten years or older.
Messages of praise and death-threats can, as always, be sent to the site’s admin: bartripping@danielcooper.name.
Haha…I still have some old issues in my library