Pattaya

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Trip Start Aug 31, 2008 Previous
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  Pattaya, Thailand
Sunday, January 4, 2009

The bus ride from Bangkok to Pattaya left around 9:45 and cost us 113 baht each.  The ride is a little over two hours along a busy highway that was rather uneventful.  The bus station in Pattaya is quite a way out of town though, so we had to find a ride to the downtown area once we got there.  Inside the bus station itself, all the sawngthaew drivers wanted quite a bit more money than we expected, but once we left the station and started walking down the street we were able to catch a ride on a sawngthaew to the start of "walking street" for 30 baht each.  From there Lisa and I walked to the hotel which we had reserved nearly six months earlier, the Pattaya Hillside Resort.  This was one hell of a walk with our bags, but we needed the exercise and knew there would be a shower and swimming pool waiting for us at the end.
We arrived in Pattaya on December 28th, which meant we would be here for both my 35th birthday and for New Years Eve celebrations.  Pattaya in Thailand was best described by the words we read in the Lonely Planet Guide:  "A heavy-breathing and testosterone-fueled testament to holiday hedonism."  The city follows the coast and is lined with a thin beach packed with vacationers in their lounges and umbrellas during the day and by crazy night clubs, bars and restaurants at night.  The water did not look particularly inviting, although the beach did not seem nearly as dirty as some people described it.  All-in-all the beach experience was probably not one of the main reasons why people come to Pattaya, but the night scene was every bit as wild as you can imagine.
Reserving our room on hotelbookers.com turned out to be a very wise decision because we got a really good deal for peak season Pattaya rooms.  The Hillside Resort was by far the nicest place we had stayed at on this trip so far.  Our room included a refrigerator, wireless Internet, satellite TV, hot showers, A/C, room service with affordable prices and the building facilities included a pool with deck chairs and lounges.  Since we had reserved this room via hostelbookers.com, we were paying only 600 baht a night vs. the 1000 baht a night it would've cost had we just showed up without reservations.  We liked the room so much that we tried to extend our week-long stay by a few more nights, but since they would only offer it to us at 1000 baht/night, we moved on according to our original plan.
Our usual itinerary consisted of lounging around the pool and hotel during the day and then heading out to the clubs and street vendors of Walking Street during the evening.  We ate lunch and dinner at one of the local Thai restaurants that surrounded our Resort, which offered dishes of fried noodles and rice with chicken, pork or beef and a spicy papaya salad for around 40 baht a plate.  The Hillside Resort offered free coffee and tea before 10 AM, but I rarely was able to make it down to the lobby for that hour.  Pattaya is a livelier place at night than during the day after all.  It is not hard to find a night club that caters to any taste and Lisa and I had no problems in finding good techno music to dance the night away to.  We also often ate dinner at the food stalls of walking street, where a donair sandwich could be purchased for 60 - 70 baht and meat sate sticks at 10 baht (20 baht on NYE though).
Since our room came with a fridge, we kept it well stocked with beer.  I sampled a few different brands while in Pattaya and found quite a few that I liked.  Federbrau was a German beer, brewed under license in Thailand, which adheres to the purity laws that make so many of the German beers nice to drink.  Federbrau is one of the more expensive beers available in Thailand, but it is also one of the best.  I also tried two different flavors of Beer Chang:  Beer Chang Light and Beer Chang Draft.  Surprisingly both of these beers cost slightly more than the considerably more potent original Beer Chang.  They were both lighter beers (around 5% alcohol) than the original (6.4%) but still a great bargain at only 37 or 38 baht each at 7/11 and Family Mart (vs 36 baht for Beer Chang itself).  I have changed from drinking Beer Chang to the Beer Chang Draft as my default beer in Thailand now, although Federbrau, Heineken, Singha and the original Beer Chang are still consistently part of my diet here.
We did not do a lot of sightseeing during our stay in Pattaya.  However one day we decided to walk around the town to see what attractions there were for me to photograph and we found a few interesting sites.  The first site was a giant Buddha which is located on the same hill that the Hillside Resort is.  Near the Giant Buddha is a Chinese Taoist temple complex where we ate lunch that day.  Although the meals were cheap there (40 baht/each), they were probably the worst we've had in Thailand so far (but still very edible compared to some of the meals we had in Indonesia).  From the Taoist temple it is a short walk to a lookout point which was the best place to take pictures of Pattaya.  There were plenty of Thai visitors to this lookout point and many of them were buying firecrackers to ignite near a statue of a Thai military man.  I sat up at this lookout point for sunset and got some great pictures of Pattaya as all the lights started coming on.  On my way down I found the best deal on juices and desserts that I had yet seen in Pattaya as well.  Frozen fruit drinks for 10 baht and banana & egg roti pancakes for 20 baht was the same pricing we had seen in the north of Thailand.
Thailand has proven to be place where plans are hard to stick to.  Originally we were supposed to fly in on Nov 27th, 2008, but since all of Bangkok's airports were closed due to political protests, we ended up flying in on Dec 9th instead.  The second obstacle that we encountered we found out about while staying in Chiang Rai: the Visa rules had changed.  We were planning on making a trip from Chiang Rai to Myanmar, mostly so that when we came back to Thailand we would be granted an additional 30 day Visa which would allow us to stay in Thailand as long as we had planned.  The day before we intended to go to Myanmar, we found out that Thailand had changed their Visa rules so that anybody (except Malaysians) would now only receive a 15 day Visa if coming in to Thailand by land. 
People flying into the country still received the 30 day Visa, but doing the popular Visa runs in Thailand was now a lot more inconvenient in that you would only receive an additional 15 days.  I feel bad for all the folks that were diverted to Kuala Lumpur, due to their flights to Bangkok being cancelled, that were now taking the train from K.L. into Thailand.  All of these people were going to run into Visa problems due to Thailand's recent decision to make tourism in their country even more difficult.  The rules changed on December 5th but nobody that we spoke to in Malaysia seemed aware of this new rule.  Although I can imagine some good reasons for Thailand to make this change, it must also be yet another blow for their tourism industry that is already hurting from the political unrest in the country.  The timing behind this rule change is questionable at best and it will definitely lead to Lisa and I spending less time (and money) in Thailand than we had intended to.
Anyhow because of the change in Visa rules, we now had to make a "Visa run" at a later date and adjust our plans in Thailand again.  Since we had reserved our room in Pattaya six months earlier and they wanted nearly twice the money to extend our stay there, we figured on going to Bangkok for those extra two days and then head to Ranong which was on the Myanmar border and on our way to the south of Thailand.  On January 4th, 2009 we had our last chicken fried rice, noodles and papaya salad at the restaurant next door (which makes the best papaya salad I've had yet) and then negotiated with an unmetered taxi hanging out in front of our hotel for a ride to the bus station for 120 baht. 
Once we arrived at the bus station, we booked a ticket to the southern bus station of Bangkok for a cost of 113 baht each.  Unfortunately there were a lot of people heading to Bangkok that day, so we had to wait around the bus station for a few hours until the 16:00 bus was ready to leave.  It would've been smarter to eat lunch at the bus station, rather than eating it at the restaurant near our hotel in hindsight.  The bus started loading around 16:45 and left the station 5 minutes early.

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Beach strip	Hillside resort	Walking street	Walking street 2
Walking street 3

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