Down from Big Buddha Hill to the alley in South Pattaya

How people actually make this trip

• By motorbike taxi

  This is the one route where the vehicle choice is not about time. The hill road climbs, and a motorbike taxi is what people take in the uphill direction; downhill, towards the shop, walking is realistic.

• By baht bus

  Baht buses do not loop the hill the way they loop the beachfront, so a shared ride here is a matter of catching one down on the main road rather than expecting one at the temple.

What you pass, in order

1. The temple terrace and its stairs
2. The hill road down towards the town side
3. South Pattaya Road (Pattaya Tai) at the bottom
4. The numbered alleys off the main road

Where this goes wrong

The hill has a road down each side, and the seaward one delivers you to the pier end rather than the town end. From the wrong side you end up walking the length of the seafront to get back to the same main road.

Daytime and evening are not the same trip

The temple is a daytime destination and the descent is done in the heat, which is why the trip down feels longer than the trip up costs. After dark the hill road is poorly lit and quiet — a different proposition entirely from the lit main roads below.

Uphill and downhill are not the same trip

Going up, people take two wheels almost regardless of the distance, because the gradient rather than the length is what decides it. Coming down, the same stretch is a realistic walk for most people, and the vehicle stops being necessary. That asymmetry is why a visit here often uses one mode in each direction, which is unusual anywhere else in the city.

It also means the return half of a visit to the temple is the half worth planning around the heat rather than around traffic. The descent is done in the open with the town below in view, and in the middle of the day that is a warmer walk than the flat routes near the beach, even though it is going downhill.

The hill has two roads down, and one of them is wrong

Roads leave the summit on more than one side. The seaward one takes you towards the pier end of the seafront; the other brings you down towards the town side and the main road that runs inland. Both are legitimate roads and both look like the way down, which is precisely the problem: the decision is made at the top, where the consequence is not yet visible.

What makes this the costliest decision on the route is when it is taken: at the summit, before anything about the consequence is visible, and by a person who has just spent an hour looking at a view rather than at a map. Every other mistake on these pages is correctable within a block or two of making it.

After dark this is a different kind of road

The temple is a daytime destination, and the hill road is not the lit, busy, shop-lined kind of street the rest of these routes use. It is quiet and poorly lit once the light goes, and quiet in a way that has nothing to do with the beachfront's version of evening. Anyone who has only travelled Pattaya's main roads will find the contrast sharper than they expect.

The practical reading is simple: if you are combining the temple with anything at the bottom of the hill, do the hill part while it is light and the flat part afterwards. The flat part keeps its lighting and its traffic long after the hill road has neither.

Questions people ask about this route