Dilligaph98

Pardon? Did you mean per year? For 5 years I have had TOT/NT prepaid B300/mth (+VAT). Unlimited, 300MB (usually see around 180-200). ##edit: actually I was answering "1176 Baht per month with True". Not sure what happened there.

FWIW, here's some info on Padang Besar (PB) as it stands in August. For reasons I won't bother to explain, I have just had to do an urgent, cheap, out-in of almost any description from near BKK against the background of the big holiday weekend, no Cambodia and frightening reports of savage, snarling IOs demanding baksheesh for immediate return. Lao was an option but looked like 2x20 hours in a minivan for B4K -plus, not to mention the visa. Malaysia is attractive because no visa required but no planes to Penang and KL was B3K each way when I looked plus an overnight to avoid paying the stormtroopers. PB doesn't quite select itself, but nearly. The two trains south were full, of course, so I booked a bus….. (I am surprised at how good the online booking systems are – specially by comparison with SRT!). There are many website mentions of the general chaos surrounding train passage through PB and its immigration. Trains are never on time, especially the two “shuttles” per day from Hat Yai which are said to be overcrowded. They stop way short of the border, unlike the two international services where at least there is some organisation to move passengers through the border. To Hat Yai, then. 16 bleddy hours. From HY it gets easier, contrary to many websites' info. The main HY bus station is on the east side of town (very close to Central Festival). Bus from airport also comes in here. Ignore any touts or services offering “border for B300”; minibus to the border is B70 (from ticket counter 24), runs roughly hourly – in practice, as soon as one fills; I waited literally one minute – and takes 40-60 minutes. Minibus will drop you right at Thai Immigration building. No need to stay on until the small van station in PB's Thai town. No queue at all in IO (at 2pm on a holiday). Two minutes' amiable chat with officer before stamping out. She asked if I was returning immediately but I said no, “you don't like that, do you?” She just nodded. Now walk across truck park (ignore a few nitwits suggesting you need a motorcycle taxi) to Malaysia, around 6 minutes. Option to visit the laughably expensive duty-free en route. Malaysian IO (don't forget, they too now have the silly pre-trip form to fill) also no queue. One-minute chat; stamp; out. I chose to stay overnight to avoid reported demands for B2000 for an immediate return. I would like to like PB, but it's a nothing place, though there are some cheap and passable cabins to stay. Kangar, 35km away on a frequent local bus from near the border office, is a better bet and from there one could go to Butterworth if contemplating a more expansive round trip. But best is the idea of Malaysian trains (clean, modern, cheap) from PB to somewhere like Alor Setar or Ipoh for a couple of days. NB: PB is essentially dry; I did a very thorough search for you all and found one sole location with a fridge of Tiger/Carlsberg (RM19/large bottle) at: https://maps.app.goo.gl/3ABWaR8N85d6SunX9 . Next day, repeat. 1015 MAL border, no queue, immediate stamp. Walk to TH; again no queue. IO on desk said: “British? Go to that room to the side. VIP room.” This worried me as I have not heard the like since the end of the Soviet Union. Officers (two of them) told me to sit down (and, oddly, made it clear it was an order). But then merely asked where I had been in Malaysia. And stamped me for 60 days exempt. No questions at all about my previous visas etc. Out. From this building go immediately across the dual-carriageway and there is a shack selling B70 tickets back to HY. “Ten minutes”, said the lad, but it was 6. Back to HY bus station 3.5 hours early, which was hardly their fault. There are tables and chairs within Central to sit and relax. Summary: Nothing's perfect, and a bus to HY is not a picnic, but HY-PB-HY is so simple I may investigate a BKK-HY flight next time as the actual border bit is as easy as any I have ever experienced.

Never trust anyone you could not share a bacon sandwich with. That's the nearest I get to religion

I used to use a private bank in HKG. Last ten years or so I have used Transferwise for all foreign currencies, and have not had a single problem. Some people comlain about "slow payments" to TH in particular, but I have never been inconvenienced. With BBL, it has proved impossible even at Silom HQ to enter my date of birth into the mobile app. That's how good Bangkok Bank is................

I have been a victim of BBL for more than two decades here and I most emphatically DISagree with your sentiment! I have banked (yeah, ha ha) on every continent and even by banking standards BBL is appalling on every score.

Well it certainly wasn't settled after WW2. There is an awful ring of truth to the actual words "ethnic cleansing". It may be unpalatable, but certain tribes (call them races, ethnicities, religions, whatever) are simply unacceptable to others, in particular the neighbour tribes they have to "live" with. Examples without ranking them and with no specific animosity: Rohingya, travellers (roma, gipsies, etc), Uyghurs, Kurds - and Palestinians. Objectively, there is little raison d'etre for these tribes. No-one wants them as neighbours or as immgrants, and they will always cause trouble by their very struggle for existence. Of course genocide is unthinkable. But for those neighbours at least, their locale would be "cleaner" without these tribes. There are further awful examples in central Africa. There are obvious parallels in Iraq, Iran, Syria. Create "peace" by use of external force and/or expensive peacekeeping, remove someone nasty at the top, then leave them to sort it. What do you know, within weeks they themselves are doing what the neighbours are not permitted to do - ethnic cleansing. Recent history shows us a partial solution which, unfortunately, is not fashionable thinking up the posh end of the UN. Leave one pliable dictator in place to run the show and look the other way: Pahlavi (Shah of Persia); Gaddafi; Assad, etc. You can even point to some instances where the dictator was good for the neighbours and to some extent the tribes themselves - eg Tito in Yugoslavia who kept it all together. After him, it fell apart - into the very genocide everyone had been hoping to avoid. And point to innumerable dictators (rightly!) deemed unacceptable, eventually, to the more upstanding members of the UN: such as Franco or Pinochet. No, I think you are being very optimistic in suggesting a mere third world war might solve this problem (legally).

Western third-party countries, as well as England, getting lathered up in a display of fake outrage over pix of babies. In this day and age, are they kosher or faked? But where is the outrage regarding the remaining hostages – we don't even know how many are still 'alive', if that's what they could be called after nearly 2 years. The sight of thousands marching on Sydney Harbour bridge yesterday in support of the filthy bunch of terrorist thugs Hamas was nauseating. Many of them, no doubt, were duped by PR and rabid anti-Semitic (in this case pro-Arab, but it amounts to the same thing) social-media coverage. And NSW “government” lets it happen. Disgrace. No, I'm not jewish or anything near it. But I care more about those hostages than about Gazans, who have been a (literally, mods) bloody nuisance to the world since forever. Balfour was on a hiding to nothing, as more recent events show.

Tod mentions KR2 and 3, though, hence my question. If only UJ's word was still law across the land! If there's anything re KRs, I'll report back - now SP's IO is back by the river, the amphoe is only across the car park anyway if they are acting difficult. Thanks again.

I wondered if it referred to the TM47 notification. Thanks. One other thing: for this 60-day extension, do they need the same-day update of KorRor maariage cert from the amphoe as they do for a one-year extension?

Really useful, thanks. One question though: Your list includes "Print out of the PDF file that is the visa" I don't think I have ever had such a thing; I was on one-year non-imm (marriage) for several years and last year switched to retirement (not sure if this constitutes a new visa or just a different extension), but I can't find any PDF ever sent to me. Is this to be downloaded from Immigration? (Samut Prakan in case that matters)

Total nonsense. As a long-term (non-imm) resident, I ditched health ins. several years ago as it simply does not add up financially. I'm not even hitting on my previous insurer, but the premise of your title is completely wrong.

Last time I heard this one, David Beckham was still playing soccer and visiting Harrods......

Very true and good comment on Thailand's malaise, but highly unlikely to stay up here without risking fairly serious prosecution.

Neither the OP nor the link clarifies the "class war". Who's fighting it? But while the concept has merit, a quoted output of "between 300 and 2,500 kilowatt-hours (kWh) annually" is pitiful in comparison with typical solar-panel domestic installations. Taking Sydney as a sunny example, "a 5kW solar system [on a typical house] should produce, on average per day over a year, 19.5kWh per day" [based on Clean Energy Council Guidelines]. That's nearly 3 times the quoted maximum for the new-fangled jobbie that can hardly be quieter than a solar panel.