sandrabbit

the best rates are normally with fx companies, from the UK I use hifx.co.uk. I have had an account with them for a number of years and there is a fee if you send below £3k but no fee above that. surprised that bkk bank is slow as it's the clearing bank, I have a kasikorn account and it usually takes 3 to 4 days for the money to reach me using hifx.

I love Rayong, able to go 20kms for 20baht in songthaew although a little bit smelly near IRPC and Maptaphut.

good advertising for Thai Watsadu, the entrance sign is in the middle of the pic lol.

as an aside we were sitting about 6kms south of it having a beer on the beach when it happened, no noise of an explosion and there wasn't so much smoke so we didin't know anything major had happened till we saw it on the news.

I have UK car & motorcycle licences and Rayong licence centre accepted both so only had to do the colour blindness, reaction & depth perception tests. I was told that if you have a licence in English it is acceptable and an international permit required for non English licences just for the translation. I just missed having to sit through the 2 hr movies when I got my 5yr licence so will have to sit through them in 5 yrs time.

amazing Pakistan

I'm on the plane.... What?... I AM ON THE PLANE..... WHAT?.....

Sent from my C6902 using Thaivisa Connect Thailand mobile app

I was going to post something similar lol, I'm fed up of people getting off the plane into the bus then someone shouting down the phone 'I just got off the plane!' etc. Similar thing on trains & buses.

In a curious but positive coincidence. The delay in paying the farmers coincided exactly with the delay in the rainy season. They now have the money to plant again, just in time for the needed rain to fall for planting.

Sometimes things fall together well in unexpected and good ways.

Nobody gets credit for this one, but good news is good news.

my wife's father hasn't been payed, he's number 3000 in the queue. I expect him to get paid and if he needed the money i would have lent it but he's very proud.

You wouldn't know there had been a coup here in Ban Phe, Rayong and the curfew isn't being strictly enforced (I've heard the police quietly tell you to go home plus we have stayed in 1 bar till 1:30) so I would presume it's non existent on Samet and it should be cancelled by October,

I'm industrial trained electrical & electronics and coming from the UK I am used to the earth coming into the house along with the live and neutral, I don't like the 2 wire system here and the earth being connected to the neutral in the distribution board if there are 3 pole sockets in the house on older properties. I'm currently having a house built and there will probably will about 4 earth rods as I want to connect the metal roof joists separately to ground in case of a lightning strike, want it running to ground directly without it running around the house earth although I still don't think that's safe enough for me. I was recently working in Australia and a sparky there told me about a rare way of getting power in the outback, there is only a live cable run to the property so neutral is through earth although the neutral is grounded on the star side of the HV to LV transformer anyway in most countries. I was staying in a guest house once where the breaker for the electric shower was inside the shower cubicle with me.........

it is steaming here in Rayong, it must be around 40C outside and it stays above 30 till late in the evening but Ban Phe area is supposedly the driest part of Thailand.

I use dtac and if you pay for the higher monthly packages, 650 baht for 3GB of data for the month, you have free access to city wi fi where it's available. I would recommend that you use a data package as it works out expensive if you just top up without a package. see below

http://www.dtac.co.th/en/prepaid/products/Happy-internet-package.html

I see they've changed the data limits now, more data for the same price.

what rainy season, it's baking hot here in Ban Phe Rayong?.

About ten years ago in Samet at the Northern part of the Island where there is a 'cliff' just past Had Sai Kaew there was a huge gaggle of Thais pointing excitedly at the water, wherein was a huge ten foot long shadow was drifting around about ten feet away. One boat captain claimed it was a Tiger Shark before racing off to get in his boat and try to harpoon the beastie. Thankfully the shark buggered off when some backpackers began throwing rocks at it to try and scare it off much to the chagrin of the assembled Thais who no doubt were looking forward to a whopping shark meat barbecue that evening. Put paid to my swimming for that week I can tell you.....

Going back about 3 years ago my Thai ex's brother was snorkeling off Samet and 2 tiger sharks came to investigate what he was doing. A couple of days ago a guy I know caught 3 sharks whilst boat fishing about 20klicks off Rayong. Don't see many fishing boats close inshore here, mostly squid boats on the horizon, so I suspect there are a few sharks close to shore.

mobile phone or tin roof on the shed?

My money is on tin roof on the shed.

The wife just showed me pictures from a Thai news site and it's not a tin roof, it's a wooden frame with what looks like some sort of fibre board roof. She also told me that people here are scared of mobile phones attracting lightning so won't talk on them during a thunderstorm.

If any of you have metal roofs and brick or wood walls then you can have a discharge without actually being struck by lightning, it charges up like a capacitor then discharges when the potential is high enough so it should be earthed.

wasn't there a H1N1 outbreak in Chiang Mai the beginning of the year and there were a number of army cadets who were infected?.

I have to say I found it hard to eat sometimes when working in China, sitting with groups of workers as they spit their food out and pick it up and put it in their mouths again while making lots of slurping noises. I don't mind the food but the eating habits put me off but I found the people themselves to be very polite in work.

Bet those fishermen never pollute anything eh?

Thai fisherpeople are the dirtiest of all Thai.

Just come and see the beach where I live in Rayong with all the rubbish thrown overboard by the squid boats including huge sodium lamps and the occasional Cambodian fisherman who's family will never know what happened to him.

We went there to avoid songkran last year and succeeded . It rained every day.

Sent from my GT-S7500 using Tapatalk 2

Wrong place to go to avoid Songkran lol. It is the driest part of Thailand and I live on the mainland, can't remember much rain last year and Songkran day itself (16th in Ban Phe) was baking hot - not that I went far as the drunken drivers scare me.

To be honest you are going to get all kinds of answers here with the lack of info. You are saying dinner like it is suit and tie job and then want to go dancing. Ploy bar is the main place to go but it is noisy and full. If you like fire shows, live music and a dance after this then go there. If you want peace and tranquility go to one of the resorts in one of the coves.

Agreed, if you want a quiet dinner in a bay full of candle lit dinner tables then go to Wong Duen although in the daytime it's busy full of day tourists from Pattaya (mostly Russians). Later you can then get a songthaew to white sand and ploy and later on to silver sand but as it's a full moon silver sand will be a gay full moon party ( no hassles even then). The further South you go the quieter it gets. If you get fed up of the island then Rayong city has some classy night life and you can make an arrangement with one of the taxi drivers outside of the 7/11 in Ban Phe opposite the pier to take you there and wait for you, the guy on nights is usually someone named Lek and completely trustworthy ( as are most of the guys on the taxi rank). It has been busier than it has been for 3 years at the moment so Koh Samet will be absolutely full so if you haven't booked a room you might be stuck although as it's a national park you can camp (don't know if it applies to foreigners as well though). Hope you have a good time!!

just wait and see the state of beaches all over Thailand when the Songkran holiday crowds return home, why walk a few metres to a rubbish bin when the beach still has plenty of empty spaces to drop. this is not exclusive to Thailand, just see a Brit city centre when the nightclubs have closed and the punters throw their kebab wrappers and waste food on the pavement.

you Pattaya guys are a little bit kamikaze anyway so no big surprise

Nothing Kamikaze about it. Most airlines have lost a plane at one time or another, including British Airways, Singapore Airlines, Air France,Lufthansa.

They are still considered safe airlines.

Yep, I flew across the Atlantic 4 times to South America with Air France after their mishap, would be very surprised if their crew made the same mistake again now they know what happened. Did about 12 flights last year with MLA, very nice.

I had to travel to Bangkok last year to get the letter, Rayong immigration required it. The reason for the letter is, as explained to me by immigration, because the passport has been posted from the UK and it could be stolen and they ignored my protests to look at the pictures and you can see it's the same person. So in my opinion the passport may as well be posted to the embassy and picked up personally as you have to go and get the letter.

I travelled back to the UK last year on my old passport because my visa was in it without any problems after I had received my new passport, the clerk in the embassy was quite surprised about it and thought it shouldn't have been possible. I flew via Amsterdam so had my passport checked 3 times each way with no problems lol.

I know it's not on your list but there are some beautiful empty beaches to the East of Ban Phe in Rayong and one of the nicest beaches on the mainland is there at Laem Mae Phim although you are a lot more more than 10mins from a big c or lotus. If you could put up with a dirtier beach and busy on weekends and a nightmare during songkran then Maerhumphung a couple of klicks to the West of Ban Phe is ok and 20baht by songtaew to the big city of Rayong so you have sort of the best of both worlds but not the best beach and it is cheap withThai prices. It is also convenient for the airport being to the SE of Bangkok.

I have heard good mentions about Rayong area lately. I guess I should come and take a look at some point.

I liked it so much I moved there, own a condo on the beach and in the process of building a house with my Thai wife. The beaches to the East of Ban Phe to Laem Mae Phim are fantastic and empty but you need transport as even though the songtaew service is improved you still have long waits and there is no service at night. It's a couple of hours to the Cambodian border as well for those needing to do visa runs. For some people, myself included, it can be too quiet so I've compromised by living in Ban Phe.