Old Croc

Will these be built before the previously proposed "worlds highest" ferris wheel and the 3 kilometer long cable car project to name just two pie-in-the-sky tourist attractions? Not to mention all the infrastructure projects that have been mooted over the years, but have yet to eventuate (light rail, Patong tunnel, water pipeline, airport freeway, etc.)

Some old guys spend too much time on TikTok.

One way to avoid a follow-up, Karen.

I lucked out in 2012, I moved a very large sum to cover a house purchase and the 800k in the bank. The exchange rate was 32.34.

Are covid extensions still a thing considering Thailand is throwing open the borders and downgrading the impact of the pandemic?

Putin has just stated that the first bomb is destined for London so I have mixed feelings. Do you follow world events or just like to make petty comment on my posts?

I don't complain about cost increases here. My foreign income still goes a hell of a lot further than it would back in the west and allows me a quality of living unachievable in Australia. Locals on a local wage certainly feel the pain, especially considering how the epidemic has cruelled the economy here. For many, wages haven't risen for sometime and have even ceased altogether. Prices still rise. I can understand their complaints. Small economies like Thailand are greatly affected by outside factors such as radical politics, wars, oil prices, currency and stock market manipulation, disease, tariffs and big business putting profit ahead of the looming global warming catastrophe. I have no financial complaints about my decision to retire here. I just hope the radioactive clouds don't descend in my valley when everything hits the fan.

The AUD was buying 1.05 USD in April 2013. My superannuation scheme has just announced a rise of 3.5% following interest rate rises in Australia.

Thailand - quixotic Australia - moribund

It's probably worth getting a bump on the head to have local pollies visiting with plastic baskets of bird spit soup.

Are the tourist police also issued with drunken tourist control sticks?

I should have known that as soon as I write something like this.......... A big black cloud has come over the hill and started dumping on us, it's pissing down. The dust has changed consistency and I wont have to water the plants for some time. Whether or not it's the arrival of the wet remains to be seen.

Hilarious video! Initially I thought they were going to Segway the guy down, but they ended poking at him with big sticks. It was nice of the drunken berserka to hang around while they had a conflab about tactics. They had to use a foreigner as for the bad guy because a Thai would have completed his slaughter and gone home to mum long before the meeting reached a consensus. Video sponsored by TAT who predict 75 million tourist to arrive before years end!

Floods in one place in Thailand are not a harbinger for seasonal change. Storms can be localized in the tropics. Where I am, near the northern border, the soil is dust and plants are withering, I spend a lot of time hand watering, wondering when the hell the wet will arrive. Nothing seems to be on the horizon.

When I first came to Thailand I was pleasantly surprised to find people who actually put fuel in the car for me and collected the payment at my window. I didn't have to get out to operate the pump nor walk inside to pay! I was happy to tip 100baht each time. Then one of these people stole from me by failing to put any fuel in when I was in a hurry, I was lucky to make it home with a near empty tank. I never tipped them again and calculated that about every tenth fill-up cost me nothing thanks to that one thief who cruelled it for all. I still don't bother to pick up change coins at a restaurant.

I've had black and white accepted without comment one year, but coloured wanted the next. Same office, different officer.

What a grampy (sic) and unnecessary reply. Thanks for stating the bleeding obvious, and shouting about it, always very helpful. My post was about alternative methods of land possession common with families in rural Thailand. Sorry for offending you by suggesting something other than the exact parameters of legal land ownership. (sarcasm)

Do you have problems comprehending simple statements. I said "without involving the Department of Lands." I never said it was official. I was discussing cultural actualities outside legalities.

Things are different in Thailand. Land can divided, inherited or passed down to children without involving the Department of Lands. Very often the family member holding the Chanote doesn't necessarily own the land. Sometimes the one named on the title may do so only because they were the one who had a job when some other family member wanted a bank loan. They may have never lived on it nor paid for it. In this case your wife should just use the land until the SIL makes contact.

Reading the linked article he stated he honked and expected her to stop. Like the French woman recently this Canadian lady crossed in front of a speeding, idiotic, Thai driver. You can't do that here, they don't have the skills, nor reflexes, to avoid collisions! "He admitted to officers that he had been driving at speed and said he had, first of all, seen the Canadian man crossing the road on his bike. He later saw the Canadian woman begin to cross the road on her bicycle and honked to warn her that it was dangerous. Expected the woman not to cross after he honked at her while travelling at speed, could not stop on time and hit the Canadian, killing her instantly However, the woman did not stop and when he attempted to brake with his vehicle it was too late to avoid colliding with Ms Marine who was killed instantaneously when she was hit by the pickup truck at speed."

Definitely wasps. A quick spray of Chaindrite white ant killer would kill all in a small nest very quickly. I use it on the tiny red fire ants that nest in the ground on my Isaan property. The wasps would die quickly and not have a chance to attack. Hornets (also a wasp species) are much more dangerous. If allowed to dry this stuff keeps killing for weeks. (Toxic stuff - stay upwind and best not used inside.) Don't kill bees, they have a vital role in plant pollination and are endangered in some places. If wiped out we will eventually follow.

Bigotry, particularly when based on ignorance, tends to get me going.

Quite the speech! You try to get a little bit of everything in there as part of your rebuttal of my statements questioning an article stating the geographical size of Thailand to be massive. Your suggestion that wasteland areas (your version) in Australia shouldn't count when measuring the size of the country, is bizarre. Would you also deduct desert areas from other countries when considering area? Tibet, Namibia and all in North Africa are just a few I could think of immediately. Some of your other statements are even more bizarre or perhaps just ignorant. You consider large parts of Australia "uninhabitable by humans" and then exclude indigenous people from that description! You state "where the only viable and useful natural resource is coal" !!! Let me educate you about a few things that you seem to believe you are an expert on.. Coal mines are mainly located in habitated areas of the continent, not the arid areas. I'm not a geologist, but I would surmise that coal is formed from forested area vegetation over millennia. I have trouble knowing where to start with your ridiculous highlighted words above. I've extracted this from a mining website: "Australia is one of the world's leading producers of bauxite (aluminum ore), iron ore, lithium, gold, lead, diamond, rare earth elements, uranium, and zinc. Australia also has large mineral sand deposits of ilmenite, zircon and rutile. In addition, Australia produces large quantities of black coal, manganese, antimony, nickel, silver, cobalt, copper and tin." Most of these industries are in "wasteland" areas, coal is an exception. As someone who lived and worked for some time in an Iron ore mining town in what you describe as a wasteland, I can tell you there wasn't a piece of coal within several thousand kilometers. Some of the most beautiful country I've seen are in these arid areas and tourists flock there these days (unfortunately). In your wastelands, I've stayed on, or travelled through, scores of pastoral leases providing food for the world. The biggest in Australia is larger than Israel. This post is long enough I wont start on your attempts to only blame Australia for global warming/climate change. We are no innocents in this, but it's world wide problem. If you actually did some research you would know the main extinction threat to the cuddly koala is not bushfires. Why do the naïve only talk about the cute animals? Australia has had mass extinctions of wildlife ever since the British invaded, colonized, plundered and murdered much of the local population. Their introduced toxic animals thrived, and remain a major threat to native wildlife to this day!