Pattaya Thailand Guide

Pattaya Beach and Central Pattaya: The City Bay Between Beach Road and Second Road Pattaya Beach is the beach everybody pictures first, and also the beach everybody has an opinion about. It is the city's original front room: a gentle crescent of sand about three kilometres long, curving from North Pattaya Road and the Dolphin Roundabout in the north down to Walking Street and Bali Hai Pier in the south, with a palm-lined promenade on one side and the Gulf of Thailand on the other. Behind the promenade runs Beach Road. One block inland, parallel to it, runs Second Road. Between those two roads, and in the sois that stitch them together, sits Central Pattaya — the densest, busiest, most convenient square kilometre in the city, holding its biggest beachfront mall, hundreds of hotels in every price range, and more restaurants, bars, massage shops and convenience stores than any visitor could work through in a month. This guide does the centre honestly and in order: what the rebuilt...

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...

Jomtien Beach: Pattaya's Quieter Six Kilometres of Sand Every visitor to Pattaya finds the beach in the middle of town first — the famous curve of Pattaya Beach, with its speedboats, its promenade and its non-stop hum. Fewer find the beach that local residents, long-stay visitors and Bangkok families actually use, and it is only ten minutes away. Go south, over the green shoulder of Pratumnak Hill, and the city exhales. The towers thin out, the road calms down, and a long, straight, tree-lined beach opens up and runs for about six kilometres toward the horizon. That is Jomtien. Jomtien Beach — Hat Jomtien in Thai, sometimes spelled Chom Tian on road signs — is Pattaya's second beach, and for many people it is the better one. The sand is wider than in the centre, the water is generally calmer and cleaner for swimming, the sunsets face straight out over the Gulf of Thailand toward Koh Larn, and the whole strip has a lived-in, unhurried feel that central Pattaya never quite ma...