East Pattaya and Lake Mabprachan: Life on the Dark Side of Sukhumvit
East Pattaya and Lake Mabprachan: Life on the Dark Side of Sukhumvit Drive east across Sukhumvit Road and the Pattaya of the postcards ends within about five hundred metres. The high-rises thin out, the neon stops, and what replaces it is the Pattaya that most visitors never see at all: housing villages behind neat gates, Thai neighbourhoods that were here before the resort boom, school-run traffic in the morning, golf courses in every direction, and — at the centre of it all — a working reservoir called Lake Mabprachan, ringed by a road that fills with runners and cyclists at dawn. Locals call everything east of Sukhumvit the Dark Side, and they say it with affection. This is not a tourist district and it does not try to be one. It is where a large share of Pattaya's Thai families and long-stay foreigners actually live, where the rents buy houses instead of hotel rooms, and where an evening out means a lakeside restaurant full of people who were there last week too. This guide e...