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."