Pattaya was a disappointment for me. I'm an asian girl and i was traveling alone in Pattaya. Does this alone necessarily mean i'm looking for someone??? Pattaya's swarmed with dodgy old blokes and putas. I really disliked the atmosphere there and ended up staying in the hotel's swimming pool for 4 days! Pattaya is an oversized red light district. Unless your interest is in prostitution, go somewhere else!

While in Pattaya, you must attend the Alcazar Cabaret Show. It's performed by lady-boys. No way to guess that those gorgeous, talented people are men unless somebdy tells you. The show is brethtaking and extremely rich; the songs, the light, the decoration, the clothes are bewildering. The show is divided into several parts that take place in different countries. When you go out you can take photos with the lady-boys.

Whenever possible in pubs or bars, order your drink in uncorked bottle and never take your eyes off of it. Even after just one beer you may end up waking next morning with no money and no recollection of last night. I learned this lesson in hard way.

I thought Pattaya was lots of fun. It gets a wrap of being a sex tourism town but there is a lot of fun to be had that does not involve prostitution.

Simply don´t go to Pattaya! It´s horrible and backpackers have nothing lost there... Go to Ko Samet!!! My favorite island!

Take a short boat trip to coral island, Koh Larn, great beaches and excllent snorkelling. watch out for the big black spiny urchins with blue eyes - they actually move around the sea bed. Watch out for the ladyboys too in Walking Street, some of them are difficult to spot.

if u r a girl..be careful! strange guys hitting on me or following me through malls...has happened.

@men: just because she's pretty and smoking hot, doesn't mean that she's actually born as a girl!!

To get to Ko Lan, go to Pattaya and take one of the many speed boats from the beach. The speed boat will usually be around 3000 - 4500Baht.

Pattaya Beach is a place which has managed over the years to earn itself the unfortunate title "Patpong by the sea", due to the huge amount of Go-Go bars and girly shows that have sprung up at the southern end of the strip. This reputation is probably a bit unfair, and has its roots in the Second World War, when randy young sailors would pull into port looking for a good time. Now, however, Pattaya attracts families by the thousand, and if you ignore the most southern end of the strip and stay by the beach, you probably wouldn't even know there was anything seedy about the place. Of course, I've never seen a holiday show on television which remembers that anything exists south of the shopping center, but that's hardly to be expected.
Again, my travel agent back in England seems to have checked me into three days of unashamed luxury. My hotel invoice describes what I have in front of me at the moment as an ocean view, and they aren't kidding; if it weren't for the horizon, I'm certain I'd be able to see all the way home! My room on the fifth floor has a set of French doors onto a balcony overlooking a wide view of the bay and the hotels private beach, with palm trees, guys on surf boards, the lot. Later on my journey, I will be going to Hawaii - and I can't imagine it could look much different from this. The pool, which is directly below my balcony, has a huge flower engraved into the bottom of it, the symbol of the Dusit hotel chain, and the hotel itself seems to be slightly smaller than the average airport. Each floor is circular, and all the walls are comprised of huge picture windows looking out on to a panoramic paradise. It really is such a shame that so much expense is spent on making sure tourists can spend several days visiting a place as culturally diverse as Thailand and pretend that they are on a beach in California! I wouldn't have been surprised if somebody had told me the whole building actually revolved. I went out. It was mid-afternoon so I figured I would take a leisurely stroll around the bay and see what Pattaya had to offer. I acquired a local map from reception and set off along the beach road. The trouble is, there is no scale on the map - Pattaya beach is a two mile bay, at either end of which are the two main places of interest in the area, one wholesome and family oriented and the other, well, not so much so! I strolled along, the Sun setting over the clear waters, and marvelled at the range of shops and street stalls I was passing, selling both Thai souvenirs and western delicacies such as donuts and pizza. The Northern end of the strip is certainly very much aimed at the tourist in us all. Restaurants displaying large signs advertising delicious food (have you ever seen one advertising revolting food?), Gem shops, tourist TAT (which, interestingly, is the name of the Thai Tourist Authority), and one place that wanted to offer me a physical massage. I can only imagine this to be the opposite of a surreal massage, where you stay at home all day and imagine that somebody is stroking your back with a wet fish! After about an hour of walking, I decided that it was just too hot to be attempting such a trek during daylight hours. I arrived back at the hotel in a quivering, steaming heap, and enquired at reception about any other way of getting further along the beach road in one piece.
"Have you tried our fitness centre, Sir?" the receptionist asked, that ever present Thai smile refusing to give away whether she was genuinely worried about me or had simply had so much experience of western tourists that she had mastered the fine art of British sarcasm. Undercover of darkness (Insert James Bond theme here), I returned to the Beach Road and carried on walking-eventually reaching the point that I had reached earlier. Shortly beyond this point, things like Burger King and McDonalds started to spring up. I knew I was getting towards the night life. Sure enough, four hundred yards further on the road ended, and was replaced by a mile long pedestrian walkway over the entrance of which was a huge marble archway on which was written "Only sexual deviants beyond this point". Actually that's a lie-what it said was "Welcome to Walking Street, South Pattaya". Nonetheless, I'm sure they were still one letter out, because I've never seen so many Go-Go bars in my life: and just in case you forget for a moment what the excuse for all this is, the archway is topped off with a big picture of a winking sailor! Clearly, the word subtle hasn't yet reached these shores! The entire length of the mile was crowded with Thai families out for an evening's stroll, indicating that the locals don't see anything wrong with any of it. I am led to believe that it is not unusual here for girls, when asked at school what they want to be when they grow up, to reply "A prostitute like mummy" - and since it is clearly one of the few easy jobs with a steady wage out here, I can well believe it. I may not understand it, but I can believe it. Every store front is a bar, in which the most striking nymphets in long red dresses crowd around all the bars waiting to pounce on any red blooded male who sits at their bar stool. At least a proportion of these will be the ladyboys you've heard about on TV (pun intended) - men either dressed up as women or having gone the whole hog and had the operation... and believe me, anybody would be hard pressed to tell the difference. It's not like in the West where a man dressed as a woman normally stands out a mile; here, the only way you're likely to know is by asking. I'm told by a young male group in the hotel, who are clearly here for all the wrong reasons, that it is difficult if not impossible to tell the difference until it's too late, which really makes the mind boggle. The Thai's have turned transvestism into an art form! But here's the thing: I didn't see a single girl (or whatever) who looked remotely tacky. No standing around on street corners wearing skin tight leather and f-me boots here, they were all perfectly dressed, they were all beautiful, and they all had smiles from ear to ear and seemed to be out for a night on the town. Up and down the street, families with young children were stopping to look, or to eat at street side stalls, if you didn't know what was going on behind the scenes courtesy of the bars and the mama-sans taking care of the girls, you could almost think this was a top nightclub district and nothing more. It's all illegal, of course, but widely tolerated. Guys stand outside each bar, looking out for the local constabulary - by the time the police get into any of the establishments, everybody is innocently sipping their drink and saying "Can I help you, officer?". Inside the bars, according to John (name changed to protect the guilty), one of the sexual athletes staying in my hotel, the girls are looked after not by dodgy east-end pimps but by the mama-san, who is essentially mother to all the girls. The girls will drink with you, dance with you, and you can buy the girls "lady drinks". If you want to take the girl away with you, you pay the mama-san an exit fee which relieves the girl of her obligation to work and she can leave with you. You can then either take the girl to a dodgy hotel, of which there appear to be many, or you can pay a bit more for "long time" which means she will stay with you all night and, if you like, be your companion for several days. In fact, I'm led to believe that many of the girls become so attached to their clients that they spend weeks with them. According to a local guide, girls have even been known to commit suicide upon realising that their client doesn't really love them and isn't coming back for them the next week as promised. I think I'll leave it there. A full debate on the rights and wrongs of what happens here is beyond the scope of this journal. Depressing, yes. Wrong? You decide.My complete travel journals can be found at www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer

I notice this morning that somebody has hung a sign on my door during the night which reads "Please no molest". Always nice to know the management has my best interests at heart... I'm already quite at home in this hotel. To get to reception from the street, you have to walk along a private driveway which makes me feel like royalty. After experiencing the dilapidated condition of the streets beyond the hotel, it's like stepping into another world: the trees play lift music at you from hidden speakers, and at any moment you expect a little man to appear from nowhere shouting "Da Plane, Boss, Da Plane..." and for Ricardo Montalban to emerge from the trees to fulfil your every dream. But I digress. I'm staying on the 5th floor. On the 4th floor, rather puzzlingly, is the lobby, and then on the lower levels we have the two Olympic swimming pools, fitness centre, two private beaches, Shopping Mall, five restaurants, Thai Massage Suite with ten private rooms, Conference facilities, Ballrooms, Banqueting Hall, two full size indoor squash courts, three tennis courts, and a partridge in a pear tree. I awoke this morning to the sight of the sun rising over the sea outside my balcony, and wondered briefly where Thailand had been all my life. After a while, I dragged myself out of bed and headed once more for the beach road, where I ended up at 10.00 this morning sitting in a shop with the quaint and not altogether authentic local name of Mister Donut. Cup of coffee and box of Donuts packed away, I felt like I could finally face the day - So I headed over to the travel shop to book a day trip tomorrow to the beautiful nearby island of Koh Samet, which my trusty guidebook of Thailand promises me will be a trip I will not forget. I've also extended my stay here until I leave for Phuket in five days time, courtesy of American Express, so I can kick back and relax for a while without having to worry about returning to dreary Bangkok on Saturday! A typical day here in Pattaya goes something like this: "Oh what a pleasant day, think I'll go for a stroll... My, it's a bit hot out here, probably should've worn a hat... Where did that mirage come from?... My legs appear to have stopped functioning... Please call me an ambulance for these third degree burns!"
Around mid-day, the sun decides that it's about time it made an appearance, and it suddenly goes from being hot but tolerable in the morning to being like Death Valley on a bad day. Still, nobody tells muggins here this, do they?
So, like mad dogs and Englishmen, I went out to find somewhere to get my first roll of film developed and to buy some more for Koh Samet. I should have suspected what was coming from the fact that even the dogs were laying in the street, tongues hanging out, lapping hopefully at puddles and barking "Kill me now" as I passed. I'm not going out in the mid-day sun again without a ten gallon tank of water strapped to my back, I can tell you - And I have the third degree burns to prove it. Much to my surprise, the shop said that my film would be back in two hours. This impressed me - Back home, the current situation is that if you take a roll of APS film to be developed in a small local chemist, the shopkeeper looks at you as if you have just told him that you intend to make love to his daughter and does he know the fastest route to the local Ann Summers store, and then he has to consult with somebody else on the phone to decide how much to charge. Then he informs you that they don't know what APS is and that developing my film will involve sending the film to Thailand for processing where they can do it in two hours(1). So, what are my impressions of Thailand after the first week? Well, apart from Bangkok with its all-enveloping smell of Sulphur from the drains, I could spend a lot longer here. The only mild irritation is all the street vendors trying to sell me stuff I don't want wherever I go - And if one more beautiful nymph grabs me by the arm on the street and says "I come with you now - We go Focky-Focky", I think I shall scream. And there's something you don't hear me say every day. (1) Obviously, since writing this journal we've gone from APS to Digital photography so this situation has not only got better but the whole concept of taking film to a shop to develop is becoming pretty much obsolete. This also explains the lower quality of photographs on this trip than on my later travels, as all film taken here had to be developed and then scanned and converted to digital later.