Bang Pu Recreation Center

Bang Pu Recreation Center

Expansive oceanfront locale with many seagulls, offering a Thai restaurant & souvenir shop.  Famous for its scenic walks, mangroves and observing the thousands of migratory birds (Mongolian and black-headed gulls in huge numbers) that congregate here from late October until March or April.

If you are looking for a very local experience as well as a quick city escape, jump on the eastern Skytrain line out to Kheha, and then take a taxi from there to the Bang Pu Recreation Center. Bang Pu is known by Thais for its history, as it went from an early seaside resort to later on being the place where the Japanese landed on the same day they launched the Pearl Harbor attack and entered WWII. However, these days, Bang Pu plays host from October through March to one of Asia’s greatest gull migrations, where thousands of gulls from an array of about a dozen different species call in here on their great northern-southern hemisphere migration.

Serious bird lovers will have a field day here, as there are pedestrian-only walkways that run along the coast offering great birdwatching opportunities, but for most of the folks that come here, it’s just a really fun escape from the congestion of downtown, the air is a lot cleaner, and the pier that leads out to sea also has an assortment of excellent seafood restaurants to have lunch at. It gets very crowded here at sunset, with loads of families coming to feed the birds and take selfies with them, and it really is a very local experience, as you’ll see few foreign tourists making it out this far. Best of all, other than your transport out here, it’s entirely free.