With its murky sea, streets packed with high-rise hotels and touts on every corner, Pattaya is the epitome of exploitative tourist gone mad. But most visitors don’t mind that the place looks like Torremilinos or that the new water treatment plat has only recently stopped businesses from dumping their sewage straight into the bay – what they are here for is sex.
The town swarms with male and female prostitutes, spiced up by a sizeable population of transvestites (katoey’s), and plane-loads of foreign men flock here to enjoy their services in the rash of go-go bars and massage parlors for which “Patpong on Sea” is notorious. The ubiquitous signs trumpeting “Viagra for Sale” say it all. Pattaya also has the largest gay scene in Thailand, with several exclusively gay hotels and a whole area given over to gay “sex” bars.
Pattaya’s evolution into sin city began with the Vietnam War, when it got fat on selling sex to American servicemen. Tempted by dollars, outside investors moved in, local landowners got squeezed out, and soon the place was unrecognizable as the fishing village it once was. When the soldiers and sailors left in mid-1970s, foreign tourists were enticed to fill their places, and as the seaside Sodom and Gomorrh boomed, ex-servicemen returned to run the sort of joints they had once blown their dollars in.
Almost half the bars, café’s and restaurants in Pattaya are owned or managed by foreigners, specializing in home-from-home menus of English breakfasts, Sauerkraut and bratwurst, hamburgers and chips.
More recently, there is said to have been an influx of criminal gangs from Germany, Russia and Japan, who reportedly find Pattaya a convenient centre for running their racket in passport and credit-card fraud as well as child pornography and prostitution.
Yet Pattaya does have its good points even if you don’t fit the lecherous profile of the average punter, as attested by the number of families and older couples who choose to spend their package fortnight here. Although very few people swim off Pattaya’s shore, the beach itself is kept clean so lots of tourists make use of the deckchairs and parasols that line its length, stirring only to beckon one of the iced-drink vendors. Pattaya water sports facilities are among the best in the country, and there are masses of tourist-oriented theme parks, cultural attractions and golf courses within day-tripping distance. Holidaying here is not cheap (with no makeshift, low-budget bamboo huts for backpackers, and few bargain footstalls), but travelers on a modest budget can find good accommodation at relatively low cost.
