Rayong Old Town (Yomjinda Road)

Yomjinda Road is Rayong’s old commercial street, a roughly 700-metre run of century-old shophouses on the south bank of the Rayong River. It’s free to walk any day, but it comes alive on Saturday evenings, when the road closes to traffic from around 16:00 for the Yomjinda Walking Street market.

Thailand was never colonised, so the architecture here isn’t colonial — it’s Sino-Portuguese, a style Chinese trading families brought with them when they settled this stretch of the river in the early 1900s. Two-storey shophouses line the street with timber shutters, patterned ceramic tiles, and colonnaded ground floors that once doubled as covered market space. Several of the old houses have been converted into cafes, small museums, and craft shops rather than left to sit empty, and murals depicting Rayong’s fishing and trading history have been added to blank walls along the way as part of the town’s restoration push.

Insider Tip: Weekday mornings and Saturday evenings are the two times this street actually works as intended — mornings for the shops and cafes trading normally, Saturday night for the walking-street market with food stalls and live music. Visit on a quiet weekday afternoon and you’ll find a fair number of shutters down.

The street is short enough to cover on foot in under an hour, though the cafes and side alleys reward slowing down. A handful of buildings display information boards on their history, and it’s worth ducking down the narrow sois off the main road, where older residents’ homes back onto the river. This isn’t a manicured heritage district — some buildings are freshly restored, others are visibly worn — which is part of what keeps it feeling like a real neighbourhood rather than a set piece.

Watch out: Outside the Saturday evening market, food and drink options thin out considerably. If you’re visiting on a weekday, plan to eat in central Rayong rather than counting on Yomjinda Road itself.

Pair the walk with the nearby City Pillar Shrine of Rayong, a short walk away in the same Tha Pradu riverside area, or Wat Pa Pradu for a quieter temple stop. Both sit within the same old-town pocket of Rayong, making a half-day loop easy to string together without needing transport between stops.