Royal Garden Plaza

The guide to Royal Garden Plaza in Pattaya opens on the mock airliner bolted to its facade, wings and fuselage frozen mid-impact above shoppers below, and traces why it's there: when the mall opened in 1993 as Pattaya's first shopping center, its owners needed something no other building in town had. It follows that gimmick to the Ripley's Believe It or Not entrance it announces, and back to Robert Ripley's own career chasing oddities since his 1918 cartoon and 1933 Chicago World's Fair Odditorium. Look for what waits under the lights just past the doors.