High Season along Pattaya Beach Road

• By Street Stroller
• Inside Pattaya | Opinion | Pattaya Focus
• 123 days ago
• 1

Recently I braved the market of tat on Pattaya Beach Road, which was held over the holiday fortnight, walking from the Dusit to Walking Street and back, right the way through the market one afternoon.

It didn’t amount to much. Except for some excellent food and drink stalls, and the odd craft outlet, it was just rubbish really; stuff you can find in any night or day market in Pattaya.

The new beach demographic

But as I strolled along, wondering where all the freelancers and ladyboys had been displaced to, and momentarily distracted by the sight of two topless foreign women brazenly disporting themselves in full view of the promenade (both with horribly fake boob jobs, unfortunately), I realized this market was an absolute master tactic from City Hall.

Like the market or loathe it, City Hall has managed to turn a nocturnal freelance hypermarket into a high season mainstream tourist attraction, which is no mean feat.

Without the market, for two weeks of the highest season the powers that be must have been worried that the whole area would be crawling with even greater numbers of freelancers, ladyboys, drug dealers, robbers, gangs of punters etc., who cannot be permanently removed.

As a consequence, Beach Road might not have looked much like the Cannes of Asia, a myth that Pattaya's boosters have been furiously peddling to overseas markets.

So what better way to pretend the beach area is better than it is, for a short time at least, by dumping a market on top of the whole strip for a few weeks, to disrupt the usual commercial activities of the Coconut Market.

Of course, normal service has since been resumed, much to the relief of many, but even in mid-afternoon of high season I was offered drugs by a heavily tattooed Thai man skulking opposite Central, afternoon freelancers were squeezed into non-stall space, and the Russian invasion of the beaches seemed unstoppable.

The beach moves up to the promenade

Unfortunately, equally unstoppable seems to be the erosion of Pattaya Beach at the northern end, and this has become so severe at high tide that vendors now spread their deck chairs high above the "beach,' on the promenade.