Mini Siam has a collection of
miniature replicas of places from
around the world and around Thailand.For those of you who have never been to Pattaya, and have thus never driven by the monstrous Mini Siam sign on road into town, it is located on the East side of Sukhumvit Road, about 1 kilometer north of Pattaya North Road, across the way from Bangkok Pattaya Hospital.
Epril In Paris.Entry fee is 100 baht for brown-skinned people, 150 baht for white-skinned people who can produce a valid work permit, and 250 baht for white-skinned people who are just visiting. (Nice try on the "we're not discriminating too much" pricing structure... but it is still a 'fail'.)
This is my third visit to Mini Siam, and I can manage to enjoy the place for about 10 minutes. That is because the front half of the park where you start your tour is called "Mini Europe", and there are quite nicely-done miniatures of some of Europe's most famous buildings. Honey Mae and Epril got a very nice introduction to a lot of places that they never knew about, but should have. The workmanship here is quite excellent.
Now: If admission price was just 50 baht for Thais and foreigners, and all there was to see was "Mini Europe", this place would get high marks. Unfortunately, it keeps going.(I have to apologize: My camera's batteries died at this point.)
The back half of the park is dedicated to miniatures of places in Thailand. It starts off sort of good (though hardly as good as out front) with some temple ruins in Buriram province, a miniature of the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, The Golden Mount, the King's Palace, and a very interesting recreation of the destroyed old capital city of Ayudhya.
However, the folks who created Mini Siam still had another 2 or 3 acres to fill in, and soon you are walking past "The Women's Liberation Monument, Erected in 1984 in Pratchanburi Province", or "Channel 3 News Headquarters", or a not-even-close reproduction of Don Muang Airport (built to entertain the kids with its model 747 creaking around a chain-loop track), or a god-knows-why replica of a container port.What is personally annoying to me is that these are the same old chipped and faded replicas, with the same old worn and scattered plastic toy blue Lambhorginis and grey Porsches sitting in the parking lots, and the same old illegible sun-bleached signs. Other than cutting the grass and trimming the hedges, not one scrap of maintenance or upkeep has been done on this place in the 5 year span between my first and this most recent visit.
I personally find it a little offensive that the owners of this place earn busloads of money from busloads of tourists every day of the year, and yet have not put a single baht back into the place to improve it or make it better. If I'm paying to see the Mona Lisa, that's a good thing. If I'm paying to walk by the tracks of a broken model railroad that hasn't seen a train in half a decade, that's not a good thing. (Heck: They are so cheap, they didn't even pay to keep their website up.)
Granted, for all the people who have never been to Mini Siam before, complaining that the place is always in the same (tired) condition each visit doesn't matter a lick. I suppose 30 years from now — barring the scourges of time and weather — Chinese tourists will still be enjoying their first visit, eagerly striking an arm-raised pose while standing next to the Statue of Liberty, and staring puzzled at the miniature gas station next to the Phra Kin Klao Bridge and wondering why something like that is so important as to merit a miniature replica of itself here in Mini Siam.
I'll still think it's rubbish... but then again I'll be thrilled that my kids or grandkids will get to see the Acropolis and the Arc de Triomphe. And as much as I bitch about it here, they'll probably go nuts at that same China Airways flight, still crawling slowly around the same tired rusty course outside of the same old airport. So yes, I'm sorry to say that I'll probably be back eventually.
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