gearbox

The emergency health care is free for Oz citizens and PRs, and that's what costs a lot and matters. One can stay in ICU as long as is necessary, and pay nothing. The elective procedures won't break the bank. Many are also free in the public hospitals but there is long waiting list.

AUD is a dog at the moment, it is at 14 years low against the Euro. You would think there is a war in Australia not in Europe. Between 2018 and early 2020 it went down nearly 20% against the Baht. The OP thinks it will go up in an year, I'm not so sure at all.

AUD.

Mygov is easier to use with the Mygovid app, once set up you can use it with the fingerprint on your phone. From recollection it scans your passport and driving licence to verify identity. Can be used on 2 phones so you can have a backup.

Aldi Mobile, top up once per year with the minimum top up amount of $15. You can use the top ups to buy a monthly plan when visiting Oz. If you travel a lot it may not work everywhere, for example it didn't work for me in Albania. I have 2 Aldi Sims, one is spare in case I lose my phone.

We were 2 foreigners, my mate was a tourist, he paid the foreigner's price, I paid the local rate. However similar to the immigration offices different rules are probably applied at the different Nat Parks.

I have the pink ID card and was charged Thai prices at 3 different NP in the south last Jan/Feb.

Seems the OP is travelling with a Thai female, I would say close to zero chance to convince her to do 1500km bicycle trip. For a starter most of them don't like sun exposure, and there would be plenty in a typical cycling day. Long distance cycling or "bikepacking" is not popular here compared to Europe, and most of the people I've met on the road were foreigners. You can cycle hundreds of kms without seeing another cyclist, in Europe there would be many more. Folks in the villages are not used to see people travelling with bicycles, you would hear from time to time "farang ba leo!" when passing.

No it is not appropriate to walk over dead bodies, but then again Everest is a special case. It is attempted by a lot of people who are not real mountaineers in spirit, but trophy chasers. You won't see them in the Annapurna or K2 area.

It takes around 3 years of preparation and climbing lower peaks, nobody is allowed to climb Everest starting from nothing. The info from a friend who was planning to do it, the whole thing of 3 years costs around 200k AUD beginning to end. This was a while ago, probably higher with the inflation now. I stopped going to higher peaks at 5600m, I don't handle well altitude sickness. It is difficult for outsiders to understand the mountaineers and what drives them to go higher and higher, sometimes resulting in death.

Thai tiger mother... probably not a common case here. Usually in Oz they are from Chinese descent. If you divorce you won't have any problem finding a new one who's is too busy with her FB selfies and have no time left to force your next kid to study.

You need mid to long term strategy in order to come back to Thailand and enjoy life with an adequate financial buffer. Do you have any marketable skills? I've read the unemployment in UK is very low now. The best is to find a job with a local employer, which can be also done remotely from Thailand.

All the "external people" can be contacted and chatted with online. I've hired people before to do graphic design and marketing materials from Nepal, China, Croatia, Russia. Replying to emails with proper reply-to recipient is trivial. And as this seems to be a tourist oriented business the customers may leave reviews on Google or TripAdvisor which may need answering. If his wife hires locals to do that stuff it would cost her way more than the money saved by hubby doing low skilled work. Best is that it can be done sitting alone at home, zero chance to get caught by the immigration. There are many thousands here working full time online without any permits, and the immigration can do nothing to stop this.

He can...as long as the authorities are not able to pin him. For example doing the bookkeeping, internet marketing, replying to guests emails and reviews etc. Definitely not meet and greet or anything where a pic or video can be taken.

Picking up was 5 min, you just go straight to the counter 4, they take a photo and give you back your passport. The submission is longer, however when I went back to get my passport there was a very short queue downstairs, so it probably depends on your luck how long to wait to submit.

If you use Linux you can boot from a live USB key and use a tool called "shred" to shred the whole disk from sector 0, no mucking up with partitions needed. You can choose how many passes to overwrite with random data.

Even the governments don't use that many passes. With the 21st century large capacity hard drives 3 passes are enough.

If properly wiped they _may_ have some content detectable via electronic microscopy, but I doubt your hard drives are that valuable. Hit them with hammer or drill holes to expose them to air, then submerge in a bucket for a week, all gone, the magnetic media doesn't like water.

For many reasons...e.g the fridge is full and electricity goes off. Or security cameras are required to be on all the time.

Asking them to leave? Good luck with that... https://apnews.com/article/religion-mike-pompeo-middle-east-baghdad-iran-182bae76452d7565b0a3d840ff0369cb

To attempt is to achieve...good to see the Thais spending money and effort on physics than submarines and jet fighters. However the chance of them getting ahead of the others is miniscule. Still knowledge would be gained.

I don't know where your friend gets his eggs, but a tray of 30 eggs in Australia below $10 (230 baht) is very difficult to find. In Woolies a dozen of free fange eggs typically salls above $7 which is upwards of 140 baht. https://www.google.com/search?q=30 eggs site%3A.au&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-m

If the Chinese killed every single Tibetan they would have killed 1.23 million people, the whole Tibet population in 1959. Definitely not millions. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12321528/ Whatever the Chinese did was not right, but that massive inflation of numbers doesn't help but erode the Tibetan cause.

Taiwan is not a sovereign country, whether you say that lie once or hundred times. Most of the UN members recognise only one China including all the western countries. There are a handful of countries recognising Taiwan as independent state, and that recognition was funded by Taiwan. However it appears that recently the Chinese have more cash, so even these countries are jumping ship. This is how a major war will start in Asia, the Chinese will be goaded on attacking Taiwan by a certain country all of a sudden saying that things have changed and now there are two China states.

First, thanks to everyone for replying. Your experience mirrors my experience. The free global super economy packages are getting distributed via post everywhere, I got tracking numbers from Malaysia and Vanuatu, once they enter Thailand it is the end of it. I once tried to enquire at the local post office but the only thing they are interested is a tracking number, and once the parcel enters Thailand looks like the tracking number, if any, changes and the Thai post office tracking site doesn't recognise any previous numbers. From now on either I'll try to get the same item on Lazada - never had issues there, or bump up the count of items, hopefully at some point it will go out of the "super economy" range. I did manage to get a full refund from AliExpress for some items.