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Pattaya Beach is located on the Gulf of Thailand 150
kilometers southeast of the kingdom’s capital city
Bangkok. The beach resort is one of the most popular
tourist destinations in the world today and each
year over four million visitors enjoy the uniqueness
of the Resort City.
Pattaya Beach was once a small fishing village on
the Gulf of Thailand until the Vietnam War. With the
war came thousands of American GIs looking for a
place to get away from the death and destruction
that wars bring and so Pattaya Beach became an
official R&R center for the U.S. military forces in
Vietnam. The GIs were flown into U-Tapao airport,
which was built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
for their use at the time. Shortly there after
hotels, restaurants and entertainment venues grew
quickly to meet the demand of this large influx of
free spenders and their money.
By the late seventies Pattaya Beach was already a
thriving resort community just in time to meet the
unforeseen boom of tourism in the mid seventies with
the first groups of European tourists that has
escalated ever since. In the mid eighties the wealth
of the Middle East oil fields brought a new wave of
Arab tourists to the resort. The tide of tourists
seamed to turn again in the early nineties when the
Japanese discovered business in Bangkok and golf in
Pattaya Beach. By the mid nineties another tide of
tourists washed ashore from Russians and other
eastern European countries that were all part of the
communist block that didn’t permit their citizens to
travel. Now the tide is turning again with an
appearance of tourists from China and other Asian
countries like Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia.
This should provide be a thriving tourist industry
well into the twenty-first century.
Pattaya Beach is a palm-fringed sandy bay with a
pleasant view of tropical islands on the horizon.
Along the coast nearby are cliffs and other beaches
like Jomtien to the south and Naklua
to the north. In all there are nearly fifteen-kilometer
of beaches while inland, the area is rich in
agricultural products including sugar cane,
pineapple, tapioca, fruits, and fast growing trees
and bamboo. |
