Naklua and Wongamat: Pattaya's Old Fishing Town and Its Quietest Beach
Naklua and Wongamat: Pattaya's Old Fishing Town and Its Quietest Beach Every city has a direction it grew from, and for Pattaya that direction is north. Before there was a Beach Road, a Walking Street or a skyline, there was Naklua — spelled Na Kluea on the official signs, which means salt fields, after the salt pans that once glittered behind its shore. Naklua was a fishing village and a salt town when Pattaya was still a quiet bay the boats passed on their way there, and the remarkable thing, seventy years into the resort era, is how much of that older town is still standing in plain sight: the morning fish market, the wooden shophouses, the Chinese temples, the small piers, and families who have sold seafood on the same streets for three generations. Attached to its western edge, curving away from the fishing quarter, is Wongamat Beach — also written Wong Amat — a kilometre and a bit of sand with no beach road behind it, no jet-ski roar in front of it, and a line of resorts an...