Pattaya Thailand Guide

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 ...

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...

Nong Nooch Tropical Garden: Pattaya's French Gardens, Cactus Garden and Dinosaur Valley Most day trips from Pattaya head out to sea, to Koh Larn and its beaches. Nong Nooch goes the other way. About twenty kilometres south of the city, on Sukhumvit Road at kilometre 163 in Na Jomtien, Sattahip district, stands one of the largest botanical gardens in Southeast Asia: a privately owned, family-run garden of roughly 1,700 rai — about 2.7 square kilometres — that mixes a serious plant collection with clipped French parterres, a Stonehenge replica, a skywalk through the palms, cultural shows, and hundreds of life-size dinosaurs. It is big, it is hot, and it is more theme park than quiet garden, and that is exactly why it works. Plan it well and it is one of the best half days in the Pattaya area, with children or without them. This guide does it in order: what the garden is and how it started, the gardens worth seeing first, Dinosaur Valley and the Garden in the Sky, the shows and the ...