Pattaya - Festivals and Events

Festivals and Events

• Chinese New Year (varies from late January to early February) is celebrated by Pattaya's large Thai-Chinese community with dragon parades, lion dances and fireworks.
• Burapa Pattaya Bike Week is Thailand's, and one of Southeast Asia's, biggest motorcycle event held in Pattaya each February, drawing motorcycle enthusiast from all over Southeast Asia and further abroad. The 2010 event was held over two days with local and international live music acts.
• Pattaya International Music Festival is held annually in the month of March. It attracts huge crowds to the different stages along Beach Road and Bali Hai Pier, and presents several styles of music performed by Thai and international artists.
• The Pattaya Songkran festival, locally called Wan Lai, takes place each year in mid April. It differs from most other Songkran festivals of Thailand in several aspects. It lasts several days longer and, besides the water throwing, the event includes beauty pageants, musical performances, cultural shows, fireworks, and water sports competition.
• Top of the Gulf Regatta is a week long sailing event held at the end of April and beginning of May.
• The Miss Tiffany Universe beauty pageant is held mid-May each year. During the 4 day pageant, Thailand's most beautiful transgender persons and transsexuals vie for first place with the final evening broadcast live on Thai TV for an audience of, on average, 15 million.
• Pattaya Marathon, featuring several race categories, is held each year in July.
• Pattaya Classical Guitar Festival, held annually on the last weekend of October by the Thailand Guitar Society.
• Loi Krathong, a light festival held during the full moon of the twelfth month in the traditional Thai lunar calendar and which usually falls in November, is celebrated in Pattaya, as in the rest of the country, that evening with people floating krathongs (small, candle-lit floats made from elaborately folded banana leaves) on the waters, as well as releasing khom loi (candle-fired hot air balloons) in to the night sky.
• Every November Pattaya hosts the Miss International Queen election, a yearly international pageant for transgender persons and transsexuals. In 2007 the event drew an estimated 25 million viewers on national TV.
• Pattaya Pride, Pattaya's Gay Pride festival, is held each year at the end of November with a series of parties and events, culminating with a float parade on 1 December, on World Aids Day. All proceeds go to HIV/AIDS related charities.

Pattaya regularly stages other music events such as a dance party with world-renowned DJ Tiesto, which was held in February 2010.