Tropposurfer

yes it is sad and infuriating at the same time to me

I mean come on folks !!!!! ???????? George Bush is still walking around so is Trump so what hope do the People of LOS seeing any justice for the uber rich, corrupt, corrupting, and powerful?

I get where Onemorefarang is coming from. If you visit from another nation far removed in culture to Thai, even your home region in LOS where you're living and ensconced then Phuket is a shock to the wallet in some respects. Yes, renting a place is a renters market here too, especially for short term visits and prices shock especially those from up-country or even savvy BKK expats. But beachy places are always like this. Go to Positano and rent a tiny hotel room with zero view and see how much you'll pay OMG! ???? Tourist stuff like boat rides to islands is costly, likewise the tourist traps of elephant abuse rides and other cr@p. Paying 500 baht for a Harley Davidson t-shirt at a night market is also CRAZZZZEEEEE! but normal here if you are a tourist and don't know where to go to buy. If you live here its different. Yes it is somewhat more expensive than other parts of LOS but as you say its cheap as chips compared to my extremely expensive home-nation too. Delicious gaffee buran for 20 baht! Amazing!! The life here is idyllic for me/us. Golfing is insanely reasonable, chill, and truly superb. Food is delicious and varied etc etc. If we don't want action we stay home and local and its super quiet and glorious. The BS taxi rubbish is never an issue for us as we have cars, and even locals to call upon if we need anything transport. I get it too, if you live anywhere in LOS and simply don't travel much, especially not overseas to different climes and cultures occasionally then 'going 'troppo' as we Aussies say is quite possible. Going troppo can lead to grumpiness and walking around with a raincloud following you everywhere you go. It's definitely a nail in the sandal of tourism and a turn-off for tourists to arrive and be smacked about the chops with insane mafia-taxi fares who drive like maniacs from the airport to their hotels. Nice introduction huh?!! Then after you survive that nightmare you walk to the local open-air mom n pop restaurant from the beachside hotel and get charged 300 baht for a plate of pad thai and 100 baht for a 50 baht beer! ouch!

I drive a big mother SUV of 2.5 tonnes with beautiful note loud horns. I use that beautiful German horn as I see fit and don't seem to have much trouble with bikes of any sort lol ???????? They seem to just cr@p themselves and get outa' da' way pronto-presto!

I've never trusted a Crustacean that carries its eyes underneath it shell. Decidedly suspect and sleazy !

The silly girl should have known walking about in those wooden clogs would giver away lol ???? As for the would be Muhammd Ali's ... jail their a@ses, throw them out, and ban them for 20 years.

The silly girl should have known walking about in those wooden clogs would giver away lol ???? As for the would be Muhammd Ali's ... jail their a@ses and throw them out and ban them for 20 years.

Had a bout of the vapours as the old Victorians used to say. 8 years what a legend ! Iraqi huh ... given the sh!tshow that place ended up in after the two trumped-up, illegal wars and the total mayhem afterwards I'd have bl@@dy b#ggered-off too.

Same same Koh Chang ????

I would agree with blackab. His synopsis of the process seems to be in line with accepted Immigration law and procedure here and worldwide. You're in a nasty situation, but so far you have respite, and so far you aren't being forced to murder another nations people and destroy their country for an evil madman. I hope your nation can find a way to rid yourselves of the evil that had befallen your people, walk out of the darkness that has been drawn over you all, and join hands with your European brothers and sisters.

There aint' no uptick in these ethnicities buying in the estate we live in at the far north of Layan. I'm sure there are villas in the moderate to lower end being sold (e.g. 1/4 to a million AUD but in our estate there has been not one Russian or Chinese buyer, nor in the 2 estates bordering us, and I'm an are going and observant b#gger so I'd have noticed. A bit south I've seen more activity with folks coming n going from the larger dog-box condo's and high walled squeezed in villas who look decidedly Slavic. But, not having stopped and said goodaye I'm guessing as to what nationalities they might be. We visited friends at Trisara the other day and there were a few Russian families and couples (draft-able age males) who'd arrived for what my buddy said were short stays. It's not surprising the lower end villas and of course cheap, (well with exchange rates cheap) condo's are being grabbed. But these will not be lived in permanently as the Ruskies (up to this point, and what appears to be the projected future) wont be allowed to stay indefinitely just as all who do not hold the appropriate visa's aren't. On that note I wonder what sorts of pressures will be exerted by the US and Euro nations on LOS as the war carries on and the bite of no gas and grain problems and funding the war have on the West and how this will impact these relationships regarding Thai neutrality and open door/business as usual policies to Russia and its citizens? Anyone care to venture opinion or insights on this question?

Yep AOT are very good, quick turnaround at the AOT counter (as you come out of customs - blue and white AOT sign and a round shaped counter desk) bags to car by efficient nice porter, designated area for all limo's so quiet and not frenzied. We always got a lovely roomy E class each time. Iced water, chilled hand towels, safe drivers too. Its been about 3 years since we did that so the price I offer might be wrong now. I think to Asok, Siam, and riverside hotels it was about 2500 back then but I could be wrong on that.

If the government invested in co-op tillers, and rolled them out across the nation, also slashing machines for the rice fields and other farmed areas with free or subsidised diesel for them and education around collecting and composting all this green fertiliser much could be done to amend this ancient practice and improve the bio-content of the soil and amend the leeching that takes place because of heavy rains. My family worked for the CSR for 3 generations so I have some understanding of that industry. As for cane field burning this was the practice in Australia until approximately 30 years ago. It is banned in many regions of the Aussie north due to pollution laws, better understanding of cane growing, newer ways to maximum harvest, and the introduction of mechanical harvesters instead of hand harvesting. Cane farmers still burn in Oz, but there are some caveats in doing so, and it is not at all a normal practice now. Now the base of the plant is left in the soil undisturbed to produces another crop next season. The milled waste is rowed composted and used as fertiliser and mulch products. Burning was/is done to make harvesting easier by the cutters. Cane has a sawtooth edge to the leaves and scratches and cuts you very readily, hence the burning practice. If it runs across your face - big scars, across the eye - it will blind you. Not to mention the really poisonous Aussie snakes that love to live in the cane fields and their oft pray field rats. It was also said burning the foliage of the cane increased the sugar yield from the cane but now with newer strains of cane this need has been made obsolete. Surely the Thai government and sugar companies, who make insane profits from the cane that enters their mills, could buy purpose fit harvesters for Thai conditions and use them co-op style thus a huge proportion of the yearly burn could be ended.

I live in anticipation of the day when i can sit amongst my ancient wrinkly peers and truly bask in being able to call myself an old fart lol ????

They could have simply visited my house every morning and paid homage and left merit contributions of fruit and veg instead of standing in the hot sun inna dusty field lol ????????????????

Eagle Freight shipped stuff for me to Australia some years back (home ornaments, antiques over 5 years ago) good mob, decent rates, safe, insured, helpful, with packing etc. I went to the Pratuman main offices, easy to park in their driveway/bays and unload. https://eaglesthai.com/

At what chronological point does one become an "old fart" ? I am 66.5, which is quite close to this chaps age, and if I qualify per your nomenclature then I protest most vigorously, well as vigorously as an old fart can, to being a possible candidate for said descriptor.

Maybe they could give Senator Jim Jordan a call ... He'll surely get to the bottom of what happened hahahahaha ????????????????

I lived as a child, teen near Manly Beach in Sydney. The place was awash with Aussie and foreign tourists so I can understand the local folks becoming jaded and cynical and cranky. Thank the gods for icy cold schooners of Tooheys New and cheap gunja back then lol ???? Took the edge of everything just nicely. On the island I am now settling in as a long term retiree quite nicely and find myself avoiding the tourists as much as possible. Especially the large portly Eastern Europeans who shall not be named, overflowing in grotesque lardish ways from their way too small bikinis and Speedos hahaha ???? How is it my dear compadres that these folks don't seem to see that walking into a bank with your entire lunch showing isn't appreciated and way uncool? Maybe I recoil to the uncluttered uncrowded quiet simply because I'm past 60 and am moving inexorably towards the abyss of becoming a grumpy old men as inexorably as cosmic matter is drawn into the event horizon of the black hole, or maybe its because I'm seeing the same crappy tourist attitudes and am once again recoiling from same. Is it that the time? Oh my the sun gas been down for an hour already and way past my bedtime ! Time for my milk of magnesia and off to bed hahaha ????

Me too

Yeehaw!! Wild West stuff lol ???????????? Reminds me of my first rip to LOS in my early twenties back around 1974 I think it was and on a train to Chiang Mai for a look see, as us backpacking youngsters were apt to do. In the dining car was a policeman with the biggest nickel plated US military type 45 he was showing it to us young fellas and he was up to the eyeballs with cheap whisky, waving the thing about red eyed and red faced. Bl@@dy shock for a beachside, Aussie boy from a nation that had very few guns except in the hands of police and farmers back then. He told us to sleep on the floor of our sleeper as people shot at the train sometimes. There were bullet holes in some of the windows in the dining car !!! Crikey mate ???? !!!

If you look to history apart for the horrifically obscene violence perpetrated by all religions, almost every person who was created and is part of such zealous entities came out of rigid, religious neurotic family and communal systems e.g. The Crusades, The Spanish Inquisition and King Philip of Spain,Nazi Germany; and almost all of the leaders of that movement including Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Tito, Nicolae Ceausescu, Victor Orban, Slobodan Milosevic, Milan Stojadinovic & Milan Dedic (Serbia (1939, both superbly effective Nazi fascists), Idi Amin. The list is almost endlessly long. All were brought up in homes and school systems where fear, violence, intimidation, fear, fear of and hatred of any difference was taught from birth, any human weakness or frailty was brutally punished, rigid punitive shame based rules, brutal shaming indoctrination, and religious and emotional neuroses predominated. Sounds exactly like the GOP and their mouthpieces today huh?

'The Rosa Parkes Story' for one. Anyone remember her? Black woman growing up in a vile racist southern states of America and her life story during the times of Freedom Marches, desegregation of schools, M L King Jnr etc. What a terrible 'woke' book that is huh ???!!!!!! Imagine?! Anyone wanting to read about the history (actual chronological) of one of the most pernicious evils in all of all mankind's history - racism and slavery in the US of A and its origins from across the seas. How leftist and anti-American of anyone wanting to read such a book to kids in school so they can understand and be aware of the reality of all history so as to make the world a better place and to actually progress and become more enlightened more compassionate, less bigoted and less hateful. One rule fundamental to all of humanities neurotic, dysfunctional, and repressed systems is - thou shalt not be aware) Ignorance is not bliss mate, it is the perpetuation of said ignorance and the decline of humanity.

Great idea. Geese are very protective and make a good racket if anyone enters a property. The eggs are delicious too . They have interesting personalities and are funny as all-get-out as they waddle about with their long necks quacking. A few shirt haired Fox terriers might be an idea, say 3 or 4. They are very alert and as a pack will give an intruder what for should they come inside the gates. I f you take care of them and train them, and give them some attention, just a little, they are great dogs. But, if neglected they can be a bit yappy/barkers. Ya don't wanna be one of the neighbours who has barking dogs all day long goodness knows theres enough of those to tend with.

How long is a piece of string compadre? What is your financial status (I'm not asking you to disclose that). If you have plenty of money and can afford it easily then I'd suggest an Elite visa (that's what I've got and its wonderful in my opinion). The Elite provides almost no reporting hoops, no quarterly fees and paperwork, once a year minimum leave the country to reactivate the clock on your 5, 10, or 20 year Elite and lots of other nice perks and assistance especially ease of dealing with I.O. with Elite support whenever you might need it or you have a query or grey area to clear etc etc. If you have limited funds and pension as a supplement to that small savings then either apply after arrival O Visa as advised by others or you could apply in the UK for your retirement V. These types as mentioned by others require you to hold funds in a bank account as a condition of visa compliance the Elite does not have this requirement.