Cruising Beach Road

[PattayaOneTeam]

Pattaya Focus

Pattaya Beach Road

By Street Stroller

For the next few editions we will be focusing on Pattaya Beach Road (or PBR as I shall call it). Not just on its scammers, strollers, hustlers, hassles and ho's, but also on its gentler sides, its art, its palm-fronded pavements, and much more besides.

However, we should add a word of warning to anyone tempted to whip out their camera and start snapping down there as we have done recently.

With all the freelancers, their minders, drug dealers, jet ski scammers, pickpockets, drug addicts, thieves, teenage gangs and other assorted dodgy characters swarming over Beach Road day and night, you need to be very careful where you point your camera.

Luckily Street Stroller has avoided any confrontations, but I have been eyed suspiciously a number of times, as some people on PBR seem to be increasingly camera shy and nervous when they see a foreigner taking photographs, even when they are not anywhere near the shot.

This might be a reaction to recent internet and local media publicity of some of the dodgy dealings down there.

As an introduction to PBR, I thought we should consider what image best sums it up, and I have a few suggestions in mind, for your consideration.

For example, and starting right outside Walking Street at the sewage pumping station, given the foul, disgusting odours from it, should any of us be surprised to see fetid sewage seeping up from the drains and into the street?

Would this foul photograph (fortunately a life-threatening stench cannot be photographed) accurately sum up the evils of PBR?

Worryingly, one longtime resident commented: “it's still better than before the sewage station was built, when all this shit went into Pattaya Bay, untreated.”

But if that's what's coming out on the street I wonder what's leaking into the sea? Perhaps it's best not to know, but this grim sight and stench is what greets tourists heading to and from Walking Street , and it makes an inauspicious start to a PBR stroll. [more…]

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-- Pattaya One 2010-12-24