Pattaya Floating Market: The Four Regions Market on a Lake of Its Own
Pattaya Floating Market: The Four Regions Market on a Lake of Its Own Pattaya never had a floating market. The old canal markets of Thailand grew up on the rivers and khlongs of the central plain, where farmers paddled their produce to market long before there were roads — and Pattaya, a fishing village on a dry stretch of coast, was never part of that world. So in 2008 a group of private investors simply built one: a pond dug out of swampy ground beside Sukhumvit Road, wooden pavilions on stilts around it, boats brought down from Ayutthaya, and several hundred shops arranged as a tour of the whole country in a single afternoon. The Pattaya Floating Market — the Four Regions Floating Market, after the North, the Northeast, the Central plain and the South of Thailand — covers about 109,000 square metres, some 27 acres, cost around 350 million baht to build, and is described as the largest floating market on a man-made body of water in the world. It is easy to be sniffy about a market ...