Walking

Walking around Pattaya is an adventure. It also helps to have eyes in the back of your head. Walking is great exercise and you get to see more of the finer points of the place but Pattaya has a temporary shortfall of pedestrian-exclusive footpaths. Due to continuous and applauded efforts to beautify and upgrade the bountiful charms of this quality city, walkways where they do exist, are often uneven, potted or loaded with obstacles for the unwary. Be patient and careful.

Avoid standing on any of the thousands of drain covers throughout the city. Although they are being replaced at an enviable rate, the metal in some of the older ones may be corroded or the concrete may have deteriorated leaving them unsafe when weight is applied. Your 45kg Thai girlfriend may experience no problem but the cover may give way under a 100kg plus farang frame. Jagged steel and concrete makes a mess of human flesh. There is no ‘public liability' here so, should you injure yourself falling through a drain, your medical bills are your problem. For lawyer-happy American readers, if you think you will be able to sue anybody for damages, think again.

Whenever forced to walk along the edge of a road, make it a point to always walk against the flow of traffic. Not always foolproof, but it does allow you to anticipate potential problems and affords time to take evasive action if necessary. More importantly, it provides the opportunity to look directly into the homicidal eyes of the mad motorcyclist just before he sends you to oblivion.

In England and Australia , a pedestrian crossing means the pedestrian has right-of-way and vehicles must stop. In some countries, however, pedestrian crossings are only there because, once the men marking the centre line and other lanes had finished, there were several gallons of paint left over. Rather than waste it, one of them got the idea of painting zebra crossings across the road just like the pictures in foreign magazines. You could find yourself severely dead if you believe that any vehicle will stop for you at a pedestrian/zebra crossing.