Walking Street

This guide to Walking Street in Pattaya starts with five hundred American soldiers arriving on a nearly empty stretch of Thai coastline in 1959, and follows how the Vietnam War turned a fishing village's bamboo drinking shacks into a strip of bars and cabarets. You'll hear what happened after the troops went home in 1976, and how a nineteen-nineties traffic problem reshaped the street into what you're walking now. Listen for where its blunt nickname actually came from.