Things to Do in Pattaya, and the Odd Thing About the List

Pattaya’s attraction list is short, and it has a quality that no other destination on this site shares. Almost everything on it was built to be an attraction. Not adapted, not discovered, not left behind by anybody: designed, funded and constructed so that people would come and look at it.

That is not a criticism, and one of the results is genuinely remarkable. It is just an unusual fact about a place, and it explains most of what visitors find surprising here.

The oldest thing on the list

Consider the object people photograph most: Khao Chi Chan, the enormous golden Buddha on the cliff face south of the city, 109 metres tall on a limestone hill. It looks like something that has been there for centuries.

It was made in 1996, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the King’s accession. The outline was etched into the rock with a laser and then inlaid with gold. It is younger than a great many of the people standing in front of it.

That is the pattern, not the exception. The Sanctuary of Truth was begun in 1981. Nong Nooch opened its garden to visitors around 1980. The floating market was built in this century. The aquarium, the 3D art museum, the waterparks and the ice attraction are all younger still. Ayutthaya has ruins from the fourteenth century and Chiang Mai has temples from the thirteenth. Pattaya was a fishing village until the 1960s, and its sights arrived after its visitors did.

So this page does not rank them. It sorts them by what they actually are, which is the thing that decides whether you will enjoy one.

Built, and worth the trip anyway

The Sanctuary of Truth, at Naklua on the northern edge of the city, is the one thing here that would be worth a detour anywhere in Thailand. A hundred metres or so of carved hardwood standing on the shore, begun by a Thai businessman in 1981 and still unfinished, built of wood alone with the claim made for it that no nails were used. Every surface inside and out carries figures from Hindu and Buddhist cosmology.

It is never going to be finished, and that is deliberate. Teak weathers on an exposed coast, so parts are replaced while other parts are still being carved. Visitors wear hard hats inside, which tells you what kind of building it is.

Allow an hour and a half. Go in the morning, before the light flattens on the sea side. It charges admission and we publish no figure, because entrance prices at Thai attractions move without notice and a stale number is worse than none.

Khao Chi Chan takes twenty minutes and is best combined with something else on the same road south. It is free to look at, it photographs well from a distance, and there is not a great deal to do once you have looked at it.

The one that is not built at all

Koh Larn, seven kilometres offshore, is the exception to this entire page and the best day out from the city. It is a small island with several beaches and the clear water that Pattaya Bay, a working anchorage, does not have.

Ferries leave Bali Hai pier at the southern end of Pattaya Beach and take about 45 minutes to an hour; speedboats take 15 to 20. The island has its own page, including the last boat back, which is the fact the day turns on. The near beaches absorb the day-trip crowds and the far side does not. It is very busy at weekends, when Bangkok arrives, so a weekday improves it more than any other decision available to you.

Why the mainland water is the way it is, and how the three beaches compare, is on the beaches page.

Green space, and a long garden

Nong Nooch, about twenty minutes south, is a large botanical garden with formal grounds, a cycad collection of real botanical standing and a good deal of topiary. It is better than “a garden near Pattaya” makes it sound and it absorbs half a day comfortably.

It also runs elephant shows and elephant rides, which is the part to know about before you buy a ticket. See the section below.

Wat Yansangwararam, on the same road south, is a large temple complex in grounds, quiet, and almost empty of visitors compared with everything else here. If you want an hour that is not a queue, it is the one.

Indoors, and why that matters more here

Pattaya has an unusual concentration of indoor attractions: an aquarium, a 3D trick-art museum, an ice attraction, waterparks, several large malls with cinemas and food halls, and a run of smaller museums and novelty venues along the southern road.

Most travel pages treat indoor attractions as a wet-weather fallback. Here they are a genuine argument, and the reason is measured. Pattaya takes 249mm in September and 229mm in October, its two wettest months by a distance. On an island those two months mean a boat you cannot take and a beach you cannot lie on. Here they mean a day that moves indoors and still happens.

That is also why the malls in this city function as public space rather than as shopping: air conditioning, somewhere to sit, and a plan for a wet afternoon.

The floating market, described accurately

Pattaya Floating Market appears on almost every itinerary sold here, and it is worth knowing what it is before you go. It was built as an attraction. There is an admission gate, the boats and the stalls are part of the product, and it is not a working market that visitors happen to be able to walk around.

Judged as a built attraction it is pleasant enough: water, wooden walkways, food, an hour. Judged as the thing its name promises it disappoints people every single day, and the disappointment is entirely avoidable by saying this in advance. The Bangkok day-trip page takes the same position about the floating markets sold out of the capital, for the same reason.

The animal venues, named

Several of the most heavily advertised attractions in Pattaya are animal venues, and the most searched attraction in the entire city is one of them. We are naming them rather than quietly leaving them off a list, because you will be offered them at every hotel desk and you should know what you are buying.

Tiger Park Pattaya sells entry into enclosures to pet, hold and be photographed with tigers. The packages are sorted by the age of the animal, from cubs upwards, and bottle-feeding the cubs is part of what is sold. That is the product, described as its own operators describe it. We do not recommend it.

The dolphinarium and the elephant shows and rides at Nong Nooch belong in the same paragraph, and so does anything else here that sells contact with a large animal.

The questions to ask are the ones we set out in full on the elephants page, and they transfer directly:

• What do the animals do when nobody is visiting? A venue whose answer is a night enclosure and a chain is telling you what the rest of the day looks like.
• How many visitors per animal, per day? A photograph queue is a working shift, and the number is the welfare question.
• Where did these animals come from, and where do they go? For a cub-photograph operation this is the question the whole model turns on, because a cub is photogenic for a matter of months and the animal lives for twenty years.

We are not going to tell you that you are a bad person for going. We are going to tell you what it is, decline to recommend it, and decline to earn anything from it: there is no booking block on this page, which is deliberate and is why.

What the month decides

November to April is the season and it is the driest run of any beach destination on this site. December takes 16mm across four rain days. Everything on this page works, the sea is at its flattest between October and February, and Koh Larn is a certainty rather than a hope.

May to August is wetter without being difficult, between 136mm and 158mm a month, which is less than most of the Andaman coast takes in its driest monsoon month. The boat to Koh Larn still runs on most days.

September and October are the two to plan around, at 249mm and 229mm. This is when the indoor half of the list earns its place, and when the sea, oddly, is at its calmest of the year: October averages 0.20 metres of wave height, the flattest month there is.

The full year, and why this coast is drier than either of the famous ones, is on the Pattaya guide and on the best time to visit.

If you have two days

Day one: the Sanctuary of Truth in the morning, Naklua and the north end of the coast afterwards, and the beach in the afternoon.

Day two: Koh Larn, on a weekday, on the first boat.

That is the city’s genuine list. A third day takes Nong Nooch and Khao Chi Chan on the road south, and a fourth is a beach day rather than an attraction day, which for a place with the driest weather in the country is not a waste.

Where to be based for any of it is on the beaches page, what the evenings are is on the nightlife page, and getting here is on the route from Bangkok.