Pattaya Thailand Guide

Khao Chi Chan: Pattaya's Buddha Mountain, the Golden Buddha Carved Into the Cliff Drive twenty kilometres south of Pattaya, past Jomtien and Na Jomtien, and the flat coast road suddenly gives you a mountain with a Buddha drawn on it in gold. Khao Chi Chan — Buddha Mountain — is a lone limestone hill in Na Chom Thian, Sattahip district, whose flat northern face carries the outline of a seated Buddha about 109 metres tall and 70 metres wide, on a lotus base about 21 metres high, so the whole composition stands roughly 130 metres from base to crown. The lines are cut into the rock and inlaid so they shine gold against the grey stone. You can see it from a long way off, and up close, from the lawn in front of it, the scale is hard to take in: this is one of the largest carved Buddha images in the world, drawn on a cliff. It is free to visit, it takes most people less than an hour, and it combines naturally with Wat Yansangwararam, Viharn Sien and Nong Nooch, all in the same corner so...

Pratumnak Hill: Big Buddha, the Pattaya Viewpoint and Pattaya's Green Headland There is one place in Pattaya where you can stand in the shade of a temple tree, look north over the whole curve of Pattaya Bay, turn around and look south over Jomtien, and have an eighteen-metre golden Buddha at your back while you do it. That place is Pratumnak Hill — spelled Phra Tamnak and Pratamnak on some signs, and called Khao Phra Tamnak in Thai, which means Palace Hill. It is not high, at about 98 metres it is simply the highest natural point in the city, and it is not far, sitting on the green headland between Pattaya Beach and Jomtien Beach, about two kilometres south of central Pattaya. But in a flat, fast, vertical city, this one wooded hill changes everything. It is Pattaya's viewpoint, its most important temple, its fitness park, its quietest residential streets and some of its prettiest small beaches, all stacked onto a single headland. Almost every visitor photographs the hill wit...