Surely it’s time to stop bashing Pattaya
Pattaya’s Walking Street in the 2020s and in the 1980s, but has the city really changed?
PATTAYA, Thailand – The last few weeks have seen a veritable explosion of negative news about Pattaya in both mainstream and social media. The main emphasis has been on the loutish behavior of tourists (often Brits) variously found peeing disgustingly in public places, attempting copulation on the beach with varying degrees of success, attacking strangers or policemen in a drunken stupor and getting badly beaten up. The professional name for such news is doomscrolling, though it’s actually click bait or enticement to click on the story. Pattaya Mail is certainly no exception.
The most recent moan is that the 60 days visa-exempt policy is responsible for a decline in the number of quality tourists and a rise in the arriving hordes of riff-raff. Yet there is absolutely no evidence that naughty boys need two months to create mischief, or that a reduction to 30 days visa exempt would reduce their quantity. In any case, these guys could easily double their 30 days visa exempt to 60 days by obtaining an easy extension at local immigration. The belief that shuffling round how many days tourists can receive on entry will actually improve the respectability of arriving visitors is a doomscroller’s fancy.
Pattaya or Sin City, of course, is well used to being rubbished in the media. The shock-horror began in the 1970s when the News of the World found out there were actually brothels for foreigners in Walking Street. In the 1980s, the magazine Your Travel predicted that the advent of AIDS would drive the cesspool Pattaya back into the stone age. Next came the unsavory publicity about underage boys servicing pedophiles via bars in Sunee Plaza (all of which were permanently closed by 2014). The COVID crisis of the early 2020s also gave rise to the Facebook clairvoyance that Pattaya would remain a permanent ghost city.
City Hall’s attempts to reorientate Pattaya’s future have been mostly ignored by doomscrollers: they don’t want to know about luxurious condos and hotels, family entertainment venues, the expansion of sports facilities, international music festivals and high class restaurants to rival those in Bangkok or most other Asian capital cities. Critics have also ignored the establishment of the internationally-funded Eastern Economic Corridor which has already transformed Pattaya’s hinterland with circular roads and improved communications. To the doomscroller, nothing much has happened to change Pattaya since the end of the Vietnam war, except the influx of Chinese and Indian tourists who are invariably seen as bad news.
Nobody denies that night revelry and commercial sex are still part of the vibrant Pattaya scene. But many of the traditional playgrounds have been knocked down in redevelopment programs, whilst Walking Street has radically diversified and now contains many fewer gogo clubs actually still open. These days the main night spots are Soi Buakhao and Soi Six, whilst the gay crowd can relax in Pattaya’s Boyztown or Jomtien’s Complex. Mayor Poramet Ngampichet believes that the sex trade has declined substantially, as a percentage of gross revenue, and stresses the region’s economic growth potential for both Thai and foreign investors.
Of course, Pattaya’s transition is far from complete. Many of the same historic problems, flooding in particular, remain in parts of the city. Chaos on the roads is getting worse as traffic police retreat to clamping vehicles and towing away motorbikes rather than actually being on duty. The “new” or “neo” Pattaya may be years away from completion. But the idea that the city is sinking into the abyss is as ridiculous as ever it was.
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