LaosLover

Would you go to Chernobyl? I def. would.

I had $140 rent in in NYC in 1974 and split it 3 ways. I'd be adding an extra zero now and living in a windowless room in The Bronx. That article made me think of all the glorious unencumbered old guys who sweat not a bit about sailing camp for their kids ($7K per), or paying a grand a month minimum for private school. Even the dug-in family men here, prob don't spend $500 per kid per month all in. Then there's all the hands-out stuff from schools, charities, family, friends, weddings etc. Just gone here. It's so good to be off the lifestyle treadmill and live in cheap-land. We eat out every meal and go to a 5* at least once a week. I am going to put our total foodbill at about $12-1500 a month (including daily very wasteful Starbucks delivery, $10 a day). At $5K a month in New York (presumably for 2 people), that's $165 a day. Hard to get out for less than $80 in a nice cafe for lunch.

In that article, they say that basic vet check ups for a single cat costs $1,500 a year.

https://www.curbed.com/article/cost-of-living-nyc-calculator.html People are spending $1,500 a month on yoga and five thousand a month on restaurants. What's the craziest, most useless spend in your home country?

Free enterprise is all well and good until it affects a critical mass of renters. Then those renters vote for rent regulation, as in Hawaii, Asheville, New York. I'm back spending a lot of money to get my house ready for Air BnB rental. An agent will manage the place and take 25%. We prefer short term renters to a long term lease since we'd like to come back to the mountains for a few months each year during the Chiang Mai smoke season. We have a very desirable house, but in a less desirable middle of nowhere location. We will likely only net out about 20% better than if we signed a longterm lease. But we like the flexibility to be able to come back. Also, the middle of nowhere-factor means that there are not that many potential long-term tenants to pay our minimum rent-ask. It's a beautiful place to visit, but a hard place to live. It's like any small biz; you put in some money and hope that (the right kind and number of) customers show up. We might do better than we think, we might do a bit worse. It'll take me two years to break even after all the house upgrades. I just spent $2K on TV's for every room. Holiday renters in God's greatest nature paradise need a TV on every available blank spot of wall.

I'm in Asheville NC, the Chiang Mai of the South. Plenty of regulations on Air BnB here to keep the downtown feeling local, but of late, these has been loosening: https://www.citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2023/04/13/latest-deregulation-bill-would-throw-asheville-wide-open-to-airbnbs/70108180007/ Do you favor rent regulations, either at home or in Thailand? Is AirBnB a factor where you live? How does it affect you? Do you use Air BnB when you travel? Can you share any good ones?

-Like I said, go to a local temple. Much less visited, much desire to talk with you. Very different from Thai-style, more Indian-realistist mural style, more Chinese ornamentation. Lot's of Day-Glo cartoony stuff too. I may find the super Day-Glo guy and bring him to Chiang Mai to do my some big landscapes for my apartment. It would be like hiring Buddhist Keith Haring. Prob $500, transit money, and noodles. Have him do it on a couple of sheets so I can take it all with me. Cambodia is prob about half the price of Chiang Mai if you want to some massive wood-carved things. Thai art is more varied. They're all about the apsara.

Out of a dozen books I've read, this out of print French reporter's account is the most vivid. He was in the country for the full Khmer Rouge run: https://www.amazon.com/Cambodia-year-zero-François-Ponchaud/dp/B0006YVAFE/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Cambodia+year+zero&qid=1684673861&sr=8-1 I'm posting the link for the informative reviews. You'll more likely see it as a white-colored bootleg reprint paperback in a used bookstore for around 150 baht. I've read it 4 times. Used to be tons of reprint books on offer about Cambodia -not to mention the venerable bootleg Lonely Planet Guide- for about $2 apiece. Looked a bit for them in October. Didn't see much. They've gone the way of the DVD (which is still happening medium-big in Phenom Penh).

Good long read on the filming of Lord Jim at Angkor Wat: https://www.phnompenhpost.com/7days/cambodia-versus-hollywood

"No, no, I don't want to visit The Louvre. Don't they have old paintings in churches for free? Isn't it the same?"

Container ship cruises cost the same as regular cruises. I did one over to England from NYC with all of my then-stuff.

My favorite money saving tip that I actually read is that you should put a paper towel into a near-empty jar of mayonnaise, swirl it around, and then pull it out and rub It all over your face. For a "free facial". When I lived in a small village in England, a guy came in the hardware store with a broken level and was trying to buy just the glass bubble part to repair one he had.

60's film fans should check out Lord Jim, which has a battle scene inside of Angor Wat. They had to build a hotel for the actors. Peter O'Toole says it was the worst experience of his life. It's a bit slow moving, as was typical for such prestige projects, so maybe just Youtube up the Angor Wat parts. https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=angkor+wat+lord+jim&tbm=vid&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjT9NuB0IP_AhUyRTABHY9AB6kQ0pQJegQIBxAB&biw=1440&bih=820&dpr=2#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:c192fd17,vid:5TPxyVmt2Rw

I did a Pai mega-post elsewhere. Search for my semi-current Pai Recco's. I'm a fan. Insider tip: the old ladies by the wat are dishing out quality all you can eat for 40 baht. They're gone by 11 AM. At the latest..

My next nowheresville trip will be to Nan, via a northbound boat from Luang Prubang (mostly empty going north). The area between the boat drop off at Pak Beng to the border with Nan has a lot teak and cartoony-mural temples. Call it a leisurely day to the border, then a waiting sonthew into sizzling downtown Nan. I've done this boat ride at least 6 times, the first day of it from Luang Prubang is more jungle-ish than the second, which then drops you off a couple of hours from Chiang Rai. Or near The Gibbon Experience -where you suspect it's a Lao person moving that branch off in the distance, not a gibbon. In the super-rainy season, you can go all the way to the top of the country on the river, but that involves staying over night in villages (bring Pringles in case you don't like dinner). Akha villages, first time I'd seen an Akha person not scraping a wooden frog at the Chiang Mai night market. Lovely people, love their chicken soup. They have the real opium brown goo. Tip 'em a fiver, bring a couple of Bic lighters as a gift. They love Bic. They're more into the moonshine. Rainy days, sleeping on a hard mat under a mosquito net, bad food -those kinds of touring days are gone for good, and certainly veto'd by my wife. Call it 2 dining-days in Vientiane, 4 days in Luang Prubang, 4 days for the boat, border tour, and Nan-chill. And then the day-long, very Mountain-scenic bus ride back to Chiang Mai. 5 travel in motion days out of 11 is def pushing my wife's comfort zone a bit.

It's like going to Disneyland and just touring the fence around it. Compared to a Euro-admission to something like The Tower of London, the $50 is a deal. And it's good for non-consecutive days, so you can chill. After a long day of ruin-viewing, I didn't want a second one immediately. If you're a temple marathon viewer, you could knock it all out in one long day -for about $15. A lot of the ruins are a bit of walk from the road and not that impressive nor jungle-ish.

It was $50 a day for a private driver and worth it. You will get gently soft-sold in the cab from the airport. If you want to avoid tourists following the well-worn schedule, the drive will help you. Also, a million websites. You might get more swamped with crowd avoidance strategy-types than if you went at the regular time. The driver will take you to any site and if you give him a list, in the most efficient manner. There's an outdoor upscale Combo restaurant out near one of the sites that he took us too. A few cuts above the usual mushy fish amok, and very Travel and Leisure Magazine for about $20 a head. SR is also a good place to try crocodile, at half the Khao San Road price. We also went to the little dance performance (booked by the driver), prob the best such classical I've seen in SEA (warning: at 90 minutes, the show feels long). It was great to have someone on 24 hour a day stand-by to cater to us and take us down to PP. In PP for 3 days, he slept in his car outside the hotel. We bought him a pillow and a cheap blanket. If I had the fitness and could stand the heat, I agree that biking would be the ideal way to tour the sites. I saw a few locals on bikes, but no tourists.

Wen't last October. I sat dead in the middle of the biggest part for half an hour and didn't see another soul. A poster I enjoy said it's over-rated. I think it's more of a very specialized interest, which is the polite way of saying that after a while, if you've seen one Apsara-festooned door lintel you've seen them all. But you like ruins and this is The Beatles of Ruins; much more interesting than Pagan or Machu Pichu, or all the stuff I've seen in Turkey. 3 days does it unless you're Indiana Jones. The boat trip to see houses on stilts will be familiar if you've been to the south. Siem Reap's little restaurant row is decent, try the Greek place. Can't recco Phenom Penh at all; the traffic kills it. Was nice to have a driver down to PP and stopped at few temples. The Cambo's favor a lot of dayglo paint in their murals.

It's down to how long you're here, how young you are, and how bad your case of Thai-itis is. When I look at that map, I see that you have done Thailand to death. Nine months in living here, and after 20+ visits, my map looks the same; what's left is mainly in the south. At 70, I want at least 3 days in the same place. A week or 10 days (2 weeks max) and I'm usually ready to go back home. A small Thailand Towns-itinerary means a string of 2 day stops in some very samey muangs. Day one, you get there, pop into a few amulet shops, and eat somewhere Youtube-ish. Day 2, you go out to see a few crumbly Khmer pillars in a field for 100 baht and go to the night market. Rinse, repeat. So, call me Songkhla, yes; Chumpheon, no. Ko Lipe is my last southern hold out. Mildly daunting transit connections make it and Songkla two separate trips. 10 years ago, I'd have tossed in Hat Yi and that lake with houseboats too. As per my name, I ran out of Laos to love too. Since it's a country with only 2 real towns, it happened fast.

They have nice noodles in an old teak house mere steps from where I live. Nimman is Instagram-central with innocuous but perky murals and funny Mao statues tossed up for the Chinese onslought. Nope, just not feeling the identikit hipster places (and I have at least a foot in hipsterism myself). 'Can't think of any reason to leave my own. We have 2 Roaster8 mediocre, but very scientific coffee branches within 5 minutes of each other. I feel bad for the YouTubers who have to wildly over-react to a bog standard latte to fill up their 18 minutes. Def recco Phrae for an untouched wander through old teak. But bring a book and expect to turn in early. How many days did you kill in Phattalung?

A problem with quaintness is that it is so replicable. This thread made me look at some Songkhla video's. 'Had me gagging for a roti, but it looks like a clone of Penang or Old Town Phuket. Does anyone need to visit all 3? Is there a subset of tourists who can't get enough of too-tame street art and 3D-type murals? People who plan their vacation around visiting esoteric coffee bars with 50's decor? Has anyone here travelled more than 4 hours for generic-style quaintness? I don't see myself getting on a plane to Songkhla when I'd pass half a dozen such places in between.

It's like a time traveler bearing a 1999 Lonely Planet Guide. Pai is now a very mature resort destination, with plenty of 3,000 baht rooms and upscale restaurants. They even have a jazz bar. It's very mixed in age, purpose, and income. It's not Khao San Road. To describe Pai as an out-take from The Beach is decades out of date, if it was ever true. What were the hippies "yelling and screaming about"? Free love? If only. Hippie-looking? You mean they were fake hippies? That's a lot of work to get a girl. Respect.

Chiang Khan is good for an overnight, Ditto Nan and Chantaburi. Lampang pretty much never sees a tourist. Phrae supposedly has the biggest collection of old teak houses. I've been her a year and have been to Pai 3 times. These places are good en route to a real place, but 3 days in any of them would have you reading a book a lot on day 3.

And my offer stands: Come here and laugh at Trump's base. My congress woman is a faith healer. I mean, my former congress woman. True: Red neck republicans were told to either gay up the downtown of Baton Rouge or give it up. They refused. Today, it looks like the set of dawn of the dead. If you like Trump, you like this stuff. And I sort of have to laugh at you. Particularly if you get the benefit of living far away from its logical manifestation, free of its proven disastrous consequences. We agree; I want to live far away from it too. Like you do.

I'm in the fabled Blue Ridge Mountains of Country Roads (Take Me Home) fame right now. You are welcome to come here as my guest and see for yourself. So to answer your huffy and inchoate question: Yes. As far as the eye can see, I see dopes, goons, and hillbillies. Who wouldn't deign to spit on an effete type like yourself. I don't blame you for franticly running away from them. I'm on the same page. So much is written about people escaping the hell of liberal New York for no-services Florida. I'm going the other way. I'm taking my $1500 a month tax payment and my other economic contributions and leaving these bible-thumping loser-Trumpers to fend for themselves Most of the red states are net beggars from the blue states. How are they going to have a civil war when they have plead with the blue state for the bullets?