It's safe to go back in Pattaya Bay

It's safe to go back in Pattaya Bay

By Peter Janssen

PATTAYA, Thailand (DPA): Pattaya beach resort, notorious for
its sleazy nightlife and polluted bay, has been a tough sell for
respectable hoteliers for the past decade or so.

Now, with the completion of a 1.8 billion baht (US$42 million)
waste-water treatment plant in November, 2000, Pattaya promoters
finally have something "wholesome" to crow about - the resort's
once polluted bay seems to be swimmable again.

According to Thailand's Ministry of Science, Technology and
Environment, which monitors the pollution level at Pattaya Bay
every month, a dip in the resort's surrounding sea no longer
poses a health hazard.

Pattaya, Thailand's first international class beach resort,
has more than 200 hotels with about 30,000 rooms, most of which
dumped their waste straight into the surrounding bay for years.

But with the startup of a $48 million wastewater treatment
plant last November, with a capacity to handle 65,000 cubic
metres of sewage per day, the bay's water is reportedly well on
its way to cleanliness, although you might still refrain from
brushing your teeth in it quite yet.

"Now, not a single drop of wastewater is discharged into the
Pattaya Bay," claimed Yuwaree In-na, director of the ministry's
water management division of the Pollution Control Department.
"It's all collected in the wastewater treatment plant."

Just two to three months after the plant went into operation,
the level of coliform bacteria dropped to 1,000 MPN (most
probable number) per 100 milliliter of water, compared with more
than one million MPN a few years ago.

Coliform bacteria, a count of which indicated the amount of
fecal contamination in water, is admittedly only one indicator of
whether or not Pattaya Bay has come back from the near-dead.

"Actually, coliform bacteria is only the parameter that can be
observed quickly, but there are other factors such as the whole
ecological system in the bay," admitted Yuwaree.

But getting the effluent out of the water is at least a
welcome start in Pattaya's oft-started campaign to clean up its
image, which has been badly tarnished by three decades of
spectacular and largely unplanned growth.

Pattaya, only 90 kilometer southeast of Bangkok, kicked off as
a beach resort in the early 1970s - a rest and recreation spot
for American GIs fighting in nearby Vietnam.

When the GIs went home, the resort was discovered by European
tourists, many of them in search of the three S's - sun, sand and
sex. Pattaya offered all three, and quickly won notoriety for
being Asia's prime bar and brothel on the beach.

The notoriety didn't stop it from being a huge financial
success, until the early 1990s when finally the rampant
overbuilding caught up with it and turned Pattaya Bay into a "no
swimming" zone.

"Let's face it. It's not surprising that Pattaya became a
little bit stuck in developing the mainstream tourism market,"
said David Holden, marketing director for the Royal Cliff Beach
Resort - Pattaya's prime five-star establishment.

Holden freely admits that his hotel, despite its exclusive
beach and considerable distance from Pattaya proper, has been a
hard sell in recent years.

"A beach resort where its inadvisable to swim in the sea is
awfully hard to market," he told Deutsche Presse Agentur.

The marketing challenge posed by an unswimmable resort is
that, at least for so-called "mainstream tourists," it is hard to
justify a trip to a resort notorious for its "adult
entertainment" when you can't even say you are just going there
for the sea and sand.

Holden blamed the once polluted bay for getting Pattaya into
its downward-inclined trend. "If you don't have a sea to offer,
that means its difficult to sell to attract mainstream tourists,
and then obviously the resort starts top depend on tourist who
aren't so mainstream," he euphemized.

Although Pattaya tourism authorities and hoteliers like the
Royal Cliff have refrained from launching a "clean Pattaya"
publicity campaign at this years International Tourism Bourse
(ITB) in Berlin (March 3-7), they are gearing up for a campaign
at next year's show.

"Next year we will really promote Pattaya at the ITB, when we
are confident about the water," said Tourism Authority of
Thailand (TAT) Pattaya Office director Manit Boonchim.

The TAT admits that Pattaya may also require some other forms
of cleaning up, before it can really sell itself as a greener
destination. For instance, something needs to be done about the
traffic, and a trash incinerator may be needed on Lan Island (a
popular daytrip) to keep the mounds of trash from drifting to
Pattaya beach every day.

But hope springs eternal among Pattaya hoteliers, all 300 of
them.

"Like some of the mature beach resorts in Spain, Pattaya has a
chance to reinvent itself," crooned Holden. "Cleaning up the sea
gives us an opportunity to develop along a different path."