Pattaya, Thailand: coming to terms with it all (2) - Travel Writing from Travel Insights

Seeking Nirvana (page 2/3)

THE story of Pattaya is, I suppose, one of many ambiguous twentieth-century development successes found all over south-east Asia, the Mediterranean and the Caribbean: the "30 Years Ago This Was Just A Tiny Fishing Village" resort. Only in Pattaya it is taken to dizzying extremes. A former GI hang-out during the cold war, now over a third of all visitors to Thailand visit Pattaya at some stage - a figure which, as I gaze out of my room over the nine-hole golf course, seems incredible given both the unprepossessing nature of the place and the apparent diversity of Thailand. But here I am along with the many tens of thousands of servicemen, business people and other tourists who flock here over the course of a winter season to swim, dive, golf and party; to stuff themselves with seafood and to burn and peel in the winter sun. And the strain is starting to show. You can see it, smell it, taste it. To see photos of Pattaya in the 1970s - a moderate palm-fringed town with a few bars on stilts - and compare it with the neon sex-and-cocktails theme park that it is today, is to realise that its popularity has come at a price, a price paid by both tourist and resident. Nor has this gone unnoticed by the local authorities, who have attempted to rehabilitate the town's image by cracking down on, or at least geographically concentrating, the more blatant street sex workers and improving the quality of the water in the bay. Or at least the quality of the sewage that goes into it.

The Lair of the Scorpion Queen

There are other things to do in Pattaya. About half an hour north is the Si Racha Tiger Farm, combining a tiger breeding facility with a crocodile farm and other animal attractions. There I watch a show where performers insert their heads in the mouths of crocodiles which are either Codeine-doped or clinically dead.

One can also visit the lair of the Scorpion Queen who is not, as I imagined, a huge super-intelligent demon Scorpion ruling her vast empire from an impregnable underground fortress, but simply a Thai woman covered in about 100 scorpions. Although on reflection, these are scorpions we're talking about and that's probably impressive enough. And if anyone is still craving crazy animal thrills after all that, you can watch pigs race whilst doing long division. Tiger farm aside, there are numerous diving schools and go-kart tracks, none of which I can vouch for.

Out in the countryside are monasteries and temples, and a vast Buddha outlined on the side of a cliff which you can see from about four miles away. These I can vouch for, and indeed will, by saying that they look quite impressive, although the ones in Bangkok are better.

I can't make up my mind about the place. As I mooch around, I start to think that I actually quite like Pattaya. Or I don't like it. Or at least I'm not sure about it. I can see the attraction, yet cannot abandon myself to it. Or I can abandon myself to it but not necessarily feel good about doing so. Or something. It's comfortable, fun, easy, and as hedonistic as you want to make it, but it is also placeless and generic, and upsetting and, well, sad-making.

With the lights out, it's less dangerous

But for now, away with the melancholy. I'm still very much in the beer and tanning business as our MPV pulls up to the front of the Asia Pacific Pattaya Hotel. I've shared the transfer from Bangkok with three other Brits, all of whom are very nice, none of whom I have anything in common with. We share smiles and awkward "you-can't-drink-the-water" talk about food and toilets.

According to my companions, buying food from street vendors is extremely risky, a hazard second only to reckless tap-water tooth brushing in this part of the world, and I couldn't quite bring myself to point out that, by this stage, I'd been throwing down satays, sticky rice and chicken legs for about a day, and the only thing I'd noticed about them was that they'd been delicious. Mind you, one of them had also said that Thai motorway service station toilets were "nothing to write home about", a statement which, with its tacit implication that he had once come across a nation, possibly Sweden, whose highway conveniences had merited a long, glowing correspondence, led me to believe that we were operating from very different perspectives on the whole travel thing.

I am briefed by two of them that the hotel is "adequate, but no more". It looks reasonable enough to me - the architecture is redolent of that slightly upscale concrete modernism of the 1960s, but it surely can't be that old. It is described with words like "nestled" and "secluded" when words like "dominating" and "eyesore" would be more appropriate. But it is home. Or so I think. I hand over my ebookers.com hotel voucher to the receptionist. It is sharply printed, well-designed, clearly written and almost totally useless as no-one has actually thought to tell the hotel that I'm coming or who I am. The hotel staff do know who my travel company is, oh yes, which is why they will later insist on taking an imprint of my credit card because, despite numerous calls and e-mails, they are yet to get any response from the London office, and are not that confident that they'll ever get the money otherwise. [ed: Despite repeated phone calls following the holiday, Simon is yet to be reimbursed. E-bookers, if you are out there, this is BAD]

They let me in, and everything you could need or expect is there: pool, beach, bars, gardens, beautician, massage, several restaurants and that mini-golf course. The place looks busy without being packed. The weather is cloudy but warm. I'm tired, jet-lagged still, and the sight of savage, iridescent, cancer-tending sunburn victims around the pool makes me anxious not to roast like a pig on my first day. I shower, smother myself with factor 30 in preparation for an afternoon by the beach and then immediately fall asleep on my bed.

Here we are now, entertain us

I wake up much much later in greasy sheets. I have that weird waking-dreaming, slightly unreal feeling that you get when your sleep patterns have been thrown for a loop. I feel sedated, but edgy. Everything is at once too bright and then too dark. My eyes feel like they're humming. I'm hungry but cannot yet face downtown Pattaya so settle on the hotel's Clifftop Seafood Pavilion restaurant.

It is, reassuringly, a pavilion on a cliff that serves seafood. It is also completely empty. Pattaya receives over one million visitors during the high season and it cannot be a happy sign that not one of them has chosen to eat with me here tonight. In fact, the whole hotel has emptied. A single guest sits in the lobby in flip-flops watching a film about an angry man in a helicopter with one, possibly two, Baldwin brothers in it (although the second brother could just be the first one wearing a hat). Primeval looking shellfish distrustfully eye the waiting staff from the bottom of their tanks. None of this is helping my state of mind.

I work my way through fish and a beer to the whirr of aquarium filters and the muffled crash of waves when, from the Neptune Suite, resident function band "Chocolate" launch into an off-tempo version of Nirvana's "Come As You Are". In an empty restaurant, in an empty hotel, in a land far away from the mists and murk of the Pacific Northwest, the harrowed ghost of Kurt Cobain is working his message of despair through a flamboyant Filipino cabaret singer. And the worst of it is that I'm here with him, trapped in this, the David Lynch Leisure Experience.

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