Arie Goes to Pattaya

Thursday morning, last day in Cambodia, first of a long vacation. We loaded our luggage into a taxi and headed over to the airport to find that 1) there's a 32 kilogram (70 pound) weight limit on each individual suitcase; and 2) you pay $4 for every kilogram over 16. The Biggest Suitcase in Cambodia weighed 50 kilograms (110 pounds), so we did some hasty repacking and got it to 35kg. The guy at the gate said close enough, weighed them all, and concluded that our bags were 40 kilograms over. He took out a piece of paper and wrote, 4 x $40 = $160, and just as I started pulling out money, he wrote, "just give me $100." I did, and we got on the plane. A good last memory of Cambodia--bribery.

First thing we did on arriving to Thailand was find their left-luggage room. I was not familiar with these things before I started traveling, but most ports of call have a room where you can leave your luggage while you travel. I thought the whole point of luggage was to have it with you, but this worked out nicely--I checked our giant suitcase and jumped into a taxi.

We wanted to spend a few days on the beach before the traveling began in earnest, so we picked Pattaya. Pattaya is a little town a few hours out of Bangkok that has a sort of mixed reputation. It's known as a center of sex tourism, but it's trying to reinvent itself as a family-friendly resort destination. We stayed at the Hard Rock Hotel, which was exactly as awesome as it sounds like it should be. It's a very child-friendly place (at least, if your child never leaves the hotel), with hourly activities at the pool, various video games and foosball in the lobby, etc., but because it's in Pattaya, there are condoms in the rooms and it has a very permissive overnight guest policy. This being the high season, Pattaya was absolutely crammed with tourists. It gets more than five million visitors every year (a lot for a city of 100,000 people).

Pattaya itself is not a very attractive town. It reminded us of the Jersey Shore--lots of fast food, bars, convenience stores, neon, cheap motels. If not for the people, you wouldn't know you were in Thailand--it could just as easily be any small beach town on the east coast of America. For unclear reasons, it's very popular with German tourists, and so the town is filled with German pubs and restaurants. I can't imagine what sort of traumatic things you have to do to a person to make them choose German food over Thai food, but I hope they're never done to me.

The Pattaya beach isn't especially nice either. It's covered in umbrellas and chairs, which you can rent for 40 baht or so, and while you sit there, a constant stream of hawkers tries to sell you tattoos, deep-fried seafood, a ride on a jet ski, etc. We sat there for a bit and then moved on to the pool, which was enormous and well-designed, although the music from the Hard Rock Hotel was competing with the music from the Hard Rock Café next door--you'd think they could coordinate.

We took a walk down Soi 6 ("Street 6"), which is apparently one of the brothel blocks. It's easy to spot the brothels because the women are lined up outside them, and as you walk along, they call out to you (or at least, I assume they would have called out to me if I weren't walking with my girlfriend). I'm not sure what the legal status of prostitution is, but clearly the police aren't interested in stopping it. Some of the bars have comical names, my favorite was "Pan.T".

A little uncomfortable, we sought out someplace for dinner that was not filled with prostitution. Finally we found a restaurant that was more or less filled with families with children. One bite and we could tell why--the food was horrible. We ran to a place with few prostitutes and excellent food. After dinner, I made a discovery--Pocky, my favorite candy from Japan, is available in Thailand. Other people come to Pattaya for the prostitutes, I come for the Pocky.

We got up at around 8am the next morning, which made us the only people in Pattaya awake before noon. The restaurants and the beach were deserted, as was the hotel pool. We took a taxi back to Bangkok (had to give directions to the driver in Thai, thanks, Lonely Planet).

While in Pattaya, we found out why the Internet has been unreachable: Apparently there was an earthquake in Taiwan, and it snapped the cable that connects Asia to the rest of the world. I'm not sure exactly why all of Asia has only one cable to connect it to North America, but there it is.

Overall impression of Pattaya: Unless you're there for prostitution, it's not worth visiting. There are brothels everywhere, the beach is barely worthwhile, and it's difficult to find Thai food. The people who bring their children here are crazy, anywhere else in Thailand would be better.