Pattaya, part 1
Pattaya is 147km (92mi) southeast of Bangkok, about a two-hour drive. Very frequent bus services (several buses every hour from the Eastern Bus Terminal on Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok from the early morning to the late evening) link Pattaya and Bangkok. There are also direct buses from and to Bangkok’s Don Muang Airport.
In 1950 there were only a few houses in Pattaya as it was a small fishing village. Unspoiled but also unsophisticated, with no tourists comforts nor infrastructure. In 40 years it has become not just a resort town but actually a city. The development started when during the Vietnam War, the US constructed and heavily used a nearby base at Sattahip. US warships still visit the base occasionally and then, thousands of sex-hungry sailors storm the city. The base nowadays is mainly used by the Royal Thai Navy, and there are often many Thai soldiers in town though their pay does not allow them to indulge in Pattaya as the Western tourists do.
Today, Pattaya is Thailand’s premier beach resort and annually attracts hundreds of thousands of pleasure-seeking tourists from all over the world.
A great variety of water-related activities await visitors who can windsurf, water-ski, parasail, swim, sunbathe, snorkel, sail, or take trips to offshore coral islands (where there are bungalows for overnight stays) by ferry, hydrofoil or hired boat.
One can rent water scooters to explore Pattaya bay, or motorcycles and jeeps to travel to neighboring beaches such as the increasingly popular Jomtien Beach, just south of Pattaya, where there also is a wide range of accommodations.
Tennis enthusiasts can have a ball at hotel courts, and golfers can tee off at the Siam Country Club, the Panya Resort Golf Course, the Royal Thai Navy Golf Course and the Bangphra Golf Course, all within 30min from Pattaya. Bowling alleys, billiard halls, shooting galleries and archery ranges offer further entertainments of skill.
Away from the beach going inland, there are different kinds of things to do and see: visiting orchid farms, orchards and botanical gardens; riding through the lush countryside on thoroughbreds or just horsing about to the many small villages in the hill country surrounding Pattaya.
Further alternatives are a visit to a hill tribe village on North Pattaya Road, the Nong Nooch Village, just southeast of the resort, the Elephant Village and Pattaya’s Elephant Kraal, where one may watch trained elephants at work or performing feats they have been taught for the entertainment of tourists.
The week-long annual Pattaya Festival, usually in early April, is celebrated with a broad range of entertainment spectacles, including parades, beauty contests, concerts, food festivals, fireworks and an exhaustive calendar of sporting events and contests. These include, for example, a Grand Prix and go-kart racing, sailing regattas, windsurfing competitions and fishing contests.
Changing the Image
Despite the wide range of excellent facilities for tourists with legitimate interests, Pattaya in particular has, like Thailand in general, an image problem, caused by the so-called sex industry. Reports in the international media have long overemphasized the sex-related negative sides of the resort, and these reports (some genuinely critical but others just printed because sex-related stories make newspapers sell well) have been fueled by a number of local reports which also have presented the darker sides of Pattaya, such as the crime that always accompanies the sex industry, rather than the resort’s many advantages.
The nightlife columnist of the Bangkok Post, Bernard Trink, for example, has listed in his column of June 29, whom he believed to be "attracted to the resort" - aside from "honest restaurateurs and tradesmen, hoteliers and publicans":
* Those running from the law in their homelands.
* Those in search of drugs.
* Football hooligans.
* Foreign con men who cheat tourists and locals.
* Perverts.
And who is to blame for perverts coming to Pattaya? Trink verbatim: "The sensational Press abroad has made much of the ‘sex industry?in Pattaya, enticing perverts to come with the sole purpose of bedding pre-teenagers of either sex. Alas, there are locals who make such children available to them."
Fact is that regardless of whether in the past the social segments listed by Bernard Trink have been attracted to the resort more than to other destinations (a number of South American countries have a longstanding reputation to be havens for criminals), writing that they are attracted is suitable to attract them, even if they haven’t been attracted before.
The Beachcomber column in the Bangkok Post of February 28, 1991 added another group of rather negative elements attracted to the resort: cynical Western journalists who on the one side deplore conditions in Pattaya but on the other side take personal advantage of exactly these conditions. The writer of the column suggested that Pattaya may be in store for some more bashing from the foreign press. As reason he gave the death of a 47-year old female German tourist. The Beachcomber writer talked to a German correspondent who was obviously happy with the case because it gave him an excuse for a research trip to Pattaya. The German correspondent is quoted verbally with the following statement: "Who wants to write about murders in New York or Los Angeles when we can have get an expense free trip to Pattaya and write about the local scene here and live in luxury hotels at the expense of our newspaper as well as having fun with some of the local girls."
But if rhetorics in Pattaya business and local government circles are an indication of things to come, Pattaya will undergo some major changes in the next few years. While beyond any doubt, nightlife was what in the past made Pattaya big, many in the city feel that the future is in wholesome entertainment for families.
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