We decided to spend a few days in Rayong, which is on the south east coast of Thailand. It’s about an hours drive from Jomtien where we had been staying previously, and was easy to get back to. There is not much in Rayong, other than a large (it appears) Japanese expat community. Whereas in Jomtien and towards Pattaya we had seen a large Russian expat community, here in Rayong that had flipped to Japanese.
We did find a couple of large shopping malls, which had many western brand name shops. Yes, these were the real thing and not cheap rip offs. Other than those shops there were plenty of Japanese restaurants to be found. There were some other western restaurants also; like KFC, McDonalds, Burger King and Sizzlers.
On the first night we headed down to the beach road area which was a nice ride up and down. (The great thing about Thailand is I can hire scooters everywhere, legally.) We stopped and watched the sunset which was really good, and a parrot club letting their parrots out for a fly. There must have been at least six parrots out with their owners for a fly around the beach. Other than that the beach was quite quiet.
The following night we decided to go back to the beach to watch the sunset again, and it was at the point we arrived that we figured out the first night was Monday, and everything had been closed. Now, on Tuesday, the bars were open and there were tables and chairs on the sand ready to serve customers cool beer and a great sunset; so we obliged! And we obliged the following night as well before we left the day after.
Rayong is an industrial town, with (I think) petroleum manufacturing plants on both sides of the city. So as well as watching the sun going down, and enjoying a beer, we also watched the many ships out on the horizon and the fishing boats from the local port.
