Pattaya, a weird, wonderful world of the brazen and the bizarre

When Ripley’s Believe It or Not! opened in Pattaya, in 1995, there was one question on everyone’s lips: why bother when the immediate surrounds are so much more incredible?

A couple of decades on, the seaside-city resort is Thailand’s premier adventure playground, pulling in close to a million visitors a month and serving up a phan­tasmagorical entertainment cocktail containing rather more than sun, sand, sea and the other thing.

Just as Monopoly players end up on Go, at one time or another all travel articles about Pattaya land on Walking Street, known to those of a philosophical bent as the Old Kant Road. At the southern end of Beach Road, Walking Street’s agglomera­tion of go-go bars, clubs and all-you-can-guzzle eateries are prowled by a random sampling of humankind, encompassing poet Emma Lazarus’ wretched refuse of a teem­ing shore, marauders from Mad Max 2 and the remnants of that notorious 1960s pop group The Losers. It’s adults only, and only those of a hardened disposition.

Rather more family-friendly, and vying with Ripley’s in the tried-and-tested stakes, is Tiffany’s, a theatre at the other end of Beach Road that has been wowing cabaret fans for the past four decades. Its one-hour, thrice-nightly programme canters the gamut from the Folies Bergère to Korean and Chinese folk songs with an eerie Tina Turner impersonation adding a little grist to the mill. The choreography may be a tad stilted, the lips not altogether synced, but the show is undeniably entertaining, all the more so when “Les Girls” – teeth bared in a rictus of delight and palms firmly out­stretch­ed – pose with posses of bemused punters outside at the end of the performance.

Slightly ironically, much of the best of Pattaya lies away from the centre of town, especially for the mum, dad and 2.4 demographic. Ripley’s is but one of a cohort of themed arenas that includes a Cartoon Network waterpark, Mini Siam’s bonsai version of Thailand, the 4,500 fishy inhabitants of Underwater World, Art in Paradise – which claims to be the biggest illusion-art museum on Earth – and, sticking with the superlative leitmotif, the largest botanical garden in Southeast Asia, Nong Nooch Garden.