simon43

I'm staying in the 'luxury' of a back-alley soi 4 (Nana) guest-house right now (I'm a cheapskate...) All the massage 'ladies' plying for customers are (to put it honestly), fat, old and ugly. Is this what the new kind of tourist demands? Or is there a dire shortage of slim and pretty young women who have already been snapped up by the beer-bars and gogo's? I very much doubt that these rotund women have any formal training in massage, (and I'm not risking my frail body to find out...)

A short video report from the BBC website. I wonder how he managed to get into Myanmar to make that report. http://bbc.com/news/videos/cn08w9ye38yo A few days ago in Taunggyi/Inle Lake region, I saw queues of perhaps 200 motorbikes and 2km of cars/tractors queuing for fuel at petrol stations.

I go in and out of Thailand on Visa-free 'tourist' stamps all the time... no IO has ever asked me why or caused me problems. They simply stamp me in and stamp me out. 3 weeks ago I entered Thailand, stayed for a few days, flew to Myanmar, then flew back to Bangkok Don Muang and was stamped in again, then I'll fly out to Cambodia in a week, then will re-enter Thailand a month later. No questions, no hassles, no request for proof of funds or other documents - what am I doing right? :)

It seems that this snake DID want to stay near people :)

IMHO, Thailand is no longer an attractive retirement destination for 'Mr Average', because of the requirement to tie up 800,000 baht in a Thai bank, (plus of course the 90-day report, re-entry visa costs when leaving the country etc). I'm Mr Average, and now use Cambodia as my home base, with no bank deposit required and only $300/year for my annual retirement visa, and NO 90-day reports, and NO re-entry permit costs etc. It's not ... er..... rocket science is it? :)

I didn't spot him, but I did see the pilot of my plane arrive at the airport 30 minutes before take-off, cycling on an old rusty bicycle.... The waiter at the nearby cafe suddenly changed jobs when some passengers arrived for the plane, quickly donning a 'porter' vest and helping with suitcases for a small fee. Rumour has it that the pilot also has 2 jobs - pilot and local statistician.....

I don't remember if I posted the link to my YouTube channel, where I'm posting short videos about this trip. Here it is: www.youtube.com/@simonfrancisluttrell5818

And so back to Yangon and then Bangkok... Flights from Heho Airport (Taunggi/Inle Lake) were suspended due to lack of fuel for the plane! When they restarted, I decided to bring forward my return date to Yangon and Bangkok. The reason for this was not only because I didn't want to get stuck 'up-country', and perhaps needing to pay for an expensive taxi back to Yangon -but also because I had big problems maintaing a reliable internet connection from my laptop for my online science lessons. Of course I was aware that internet access can be 'flaky' in Myanmar, but my on-the-ground experience was that mobile network data internet using my Android phone was good, but too slow from my laptop. Therefore, I had to resort to doing my Zoom lessons from my small-screen phone, which worked reliably, but was a challenge to manage the share screen etc. But this was useful feedback for me! On my return to Bangkok (on an ungodly hour 6am flight from Yangon), I visited Fortune Town and came away with a 9 inch screen Android device, with built-in Sim card support, wf-fi etc. Including a free sturdy metal stand, the price ws 4,500 baht, which I think is a bargain. Therefore, on my next trip to Myanmar, I'll take my laptop mostly for offline work (video/image editing/creation), and use the large screen Android device for my Zoom classes. I also bought a 20,000 mAh power bank for my old laptop, and one to charge up my android, mobile phones and led light, so as to avoid disruption when the mains electric is switched off. Every time I pass through customs with my 12v/220v inverter and car battery charger, I get pulled up and grilled, especially about the iffy-looking (no case, just the transformer and soldered wires) car battery charger. Leaving those items at home will be good. Here's the Heho to Yangon plane :) "Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain. Thank-you for heeding the advice of Myanmar International Airlines for each of you to bring 1 gallon of fuel for our plane. We regret that this will not be enough to complete our journey to Yangon. Our plan is to take off and fly as high as we can with our fuel allowance, and without you all dying from oxygen-deprivation in this non-pressurised plane. We will then gracefully glide towards Yangon Airport with our fuel depleted, and expect to crash-land somewhere around Bago or Taungoo.."

What I mean is that the government internet 'gateway' throttles the internet speeds down to a snail's pace if a laptop or computer tries to access a website (any website), whilst the same connection from a mobile phone is not slowed down. So I wondered how ;they' do this. I tried spoofing a mobile device user-agent on my laptop, but that made no difference. So I edited the TTL value on the laptop to 'remove' the extra hop from my tethered phone hotspot/USB tether/Ethernet tether), but that also didn't make a difference.. So indeed, I'm interested from a techie POV how 'they' manage to do all this! This throttling is not the blocks on social media such as Facebook - my mobile VPN solves that problem. @IsMeUno - there ARE Chromebooks with LTE available, just none on Lazada :) I can order one from the UK, but then I run the risk of the customs departments 'kidnapping' the computer and holding it for ransom - and it might not solve the problem anyway! I think it's better to try to use my existing Android solution and add peripherals to make it more easy to manage in a lesson.

Thanks for the advice and comments. I'm in Yangon right now, flying to Bangkok tomorrow. Interestingly, there is no block/throttling of laptop internet speeds in this location.. I thought about this and the reasons. Several Myanmar people at Inle Lake said that laptop speeds are throttled because the pdf (civilian fighters) in this Shan State use laptops to control their drone flights to drop bombs! They don't use mobile phones. This could be a true explanation, because the pdf don't drop bombs in Yangon. Anyway, I still need to find a solution. As others have said, using a Chromebook with LTE might not actually solve the problem becaue of the IMEI. Yesterday, I managed 2 online lessons using Zoom and sharing my screen with pdf documents on my mobile phone. It was a challenge, but the lessons went fine and the internet speed was good. Perhaps it would be better to improve this scenario by adding an external bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and also linking the mobile phone to my Asus laptop display. Perhaps even buy a large screen Android device (if they exist - I'll check tomorrow MBK).

None of those Lazada Chromebooks seem to have lte support...

Yes, that's what I want, but nothing on Lazada Thailand etc. Looks like I will have to buy it on Amazon UK and then ship it to Thailand (therefore probably being 'kidnapped' by the tax police and a huge ransom demanded...)

I used to own a small drone without a camera that I used to pull up my wire ham radio antennas over tall supporting trees. Unfortunately, the drone was damaged beyond repair when I accidentally flew it into the side of a cow.....

I think the guy in the pick-up was muff-diving and accidentially bit her....

I need to explain the scenario - I'm sure that this is NOT a problem with my laptop :) I'm in Myanmar for a few days, and the internet connection is very unreliable for my online lessons, (I knew this before my visit). Specifically, the internet speed using my laptop is 'throttled' back to a snail's pace, BUT my internet speed directly from my mobile is about 30 MB/sec. If I tether my mobile to my laptop using either the hotspot, USB or ethernet, then the 30 MB/sec drops to perhaps 0.5 MB/sec. That leads me to assume that the military government is identifying that I'm trying to connect to the internet from my laptop. To try to resolve this problem. I'm spoofing my browser user-agent (using the Chrome extension) to be an Android device. But although the download speed has improved to about 2 MB/sec, I think this is because of the simpler webpages being delivered to my browser by the website. I also configured the TTL value to be 65, as suggested on some websites, but no change... Can anyone suggest other things to try? Cmd pings from my laptop to google.com are about 87msec, so I don' think it's a DNS resolving problem (I switched to Googles 8.8.8.8 but that made no difference.. Thanks!! PS - My reason for wanting to resolve this problem is to allow me to do my online Zoom lessons from my laptop (as usual). Otherwise, I will have to do them using Zoom on my mobile phone, but that does have some limitations, so using my laptop is much preferred!