Robroy

Cambodia (where I live now) has caught the official Thai habit: lots of hot air.

Every second day the government announces a 'crackdown' on something or other. A minister blows smoke for an afternoon, & fulminates about touts/corruption/tuk tuk drivers/illegal vehicles/illegal logging/human rights abuses etc...and how it must end NOW!

It's all forgotten by the next morning's editions.

It reminds me of the governor of Chiang Mai reacting to the fires blanketing hundreds of thousands of acres in northern Thailand with smoke in 2007...by banning Korean barbeque restaurants. I think he also ordered the firetrucks into the streets - to spray them with water, moisten the air, & thus encourage rain.

Using Bangkok's Airports since 1983 - first good ol' Don Muang now Suvarnabhumi

I confirm the scams and other "assorted malpractice" hasn't changed in all these years.

Every year an "official" announcement, a good PR- same same but different...

With all respect I have for Abhisit I doubt things will change soon....

What about transferreing the local police chief to Nakorn Nowhere and arresting the Sri Lankan dirt bag, who claimed to be called Tony, who acted as the police go betweenin the King Power scams? He is bound to be guilty of work permit and visa offences as well as failing to pay income tax on his share of the extortion proceeds.

Agree.

Words from leaders are meaningless in SE Asia - no-one believes them. Only actions will demonstrate that this is anything more than piss & wind.

When the Sri Lankan dirtbag is in jail, & King Power has been shut down & its management tried, convicted & jailed, I will believe that the PM is serious about cleaning up the airport.

Until then international travellers would be wise to continue to route themselves around SVP.

Hate to sound like a wet blanket, but are you sure smoking & drinking make you happy?

I do both from time to time, but drinking has never given me anything other than the passing illusion of happiness. I.e. I'm acutely conscious that it is short & not that real.

Smoking doesn't give me even the illusion: it's an awful compulsion that it not enjoyable at any stage.

Is that only me?

Exercise is my problem , I dont do any and I know with all the smoking and drinking and eating , Im going to die but at least I will be happy doing i t.

I've had my life saved by alternative medicine, so am loathe to dish out blanket criticism.

Some non-medial 'alternative' therapies do work & have good science behind them - and indeed high acidity can cause disease sometimes.

However there is a fantastic rate of fraudulent claims, which tends to devalue the discipline as a whole. This would certainly appear to be one of them.

If doctors learned to think within a holistic model, & alternative practitioners learned that we are now in an evidence-based era, we may make better progress.

The Bangkok Post told us with a straight face 3 years ago that the blanket of smoke over northern Thailand, Laos & eastern Burma (300,000 people treated for pulmonary problems) was caused by Chiang Mai's Korean barbeque restaurants.

So we mustn't expect much.

Re Thailand, I have to agree with the som num naa comment: this is the result of an abject failure to respond to problems which have been accumulating very visibly for many years.

I'm a writer, & dozens of adjectives flew through my head during my 3 years in Thailand, to best describe the place. In the end "passive" is the one that stuck.

If anything is, the new airport in Bangkok is at the very heart of Thai tourism. This week's report of an extortion scam

run there - within King Power Duty Free - with the assistance of bent police, says it all. Out of sheer passivity, the authorities will not act to prevent one crook & a few bent cops from stealing thousands from tourists. The story goes all over the world. Thai tourism (& thus their incomes, ultimately) decline even further...

...but there seems to be a strange inability to connect cause with effect - A with B.

I love Thailand & owe it a lot. It contains competent, well-meaning people. But, as Einstein said of the US: "The idiots will always rule".

The best-documented successful treatment for depression is 'Learned Optimism' - a type of Cognitive Psychology pioneered by Prof Martin Seligman.

40 years of well-controlled studies have established it as the pick of the treatments. More effective than psycotherapy, Prozac, or old-fashioned wilpower.

I had depression from my teens till my 50s, whereupon I discovered the above, applied the exercises assiduously, &...bingo - I have depression no more.

That was 4 years ago - in Thailand.

However the 'Learned Optimism' book is not in Thai (I checked). Nor is there much understanding among Thais (including Thai doctors etc) about depression. They're basically where we were in the 50s.

So the good news is that depression can be retired permanently. The slightly more challenging news is that if you wanted to go down this path, you would probably have to order the book from Amazon, & explain the principles & teach the exercises to your bf.

Do the exercises daily & the depression will go away. But like anything good this takes some commitment.

I've been on two buses in that part of the world in recent times in which the driver literally fell asleep at the wheel.

In one (a minibus from a hotel to the airport at Phuket) we took turns digging him in the ribs every time he slumped forward.

The other was a big bus...

My first impression of Chiang Mai was how ugly it was.

After promises of some Asian wonderland, this was a surprise.

I still think it's ugly, and that Thailand's built environment (temples aside) is extremely ugly: there's no aesthetic sense anywhere.

However I realised that there was more to a place than what it looked like, and that the real

pluses of the place were behind closed doors.

You could open an account with ACLEDA Bank here in PP pretty quick, & get some of the funds wired over.

Mr Lim there will help you out: 015 700 646.

ACLEDA is one of the better banks, tho you have to go a kilometer or 3 to find an ATM: they're not as plentiful as we're used to.

(BTW my Australian bank won't send card even to Thailand - let alone Cambodia, which basically has no rule of law & a high crime rate.)

I had the same problem 2 weeks ago trying to book return flights Phnom Penh-Bangkok-Penang: Air Asia's site was running so slow that day I gave up in the end, & paid more to fly via another airline.

I realise my country (Australia) makes it harder for Thais to enter than Thailand does for me to enter it.

However I did find the endless visa runs a bore after 4 years in Thailand, & decided to jump ship to Cambodia, where you just pay someone off & get a year's multiple re-entry work visa without having to fill out a form. No need to ever leave the country either: renewals are all done here.

It's much easier, & much less stress: you're never thinking, 'Now when do I have to book that plane/bus out of the country, and where will I go this time?'

Everyone is different. There's no right answer.

But personally I was contributing a lot to Thailand, & for me the ceaseless visa runs weren't worth it in the end.

Hi, I'm going to get a new TV in Phnom Penh, and some people here told me to take a lot of cash with me because there are no ATM's?

If so do I have to take $ with me, means I have to change them here from Baht, or can I change there into Riel?

I'm planning to stay over for abouth 4 nights, not only for the visa, but also to have a look around to see if it would be better for me to live there instead of Chiang Mai. Are there any nice beaches in Cambodja, and would $400 a month be enough to rent a nice house, 2-3 bedrooms and furnished?

Any suggestions where i can stay in PP at a guesthouse? Any one heard of DV8?

Also, do you know if there are agents who can do the visa stuff for me, for a fee of course.

Hope someone can give me some advice,

Thanks

Thanks for this excellent information - which is still current. (I'm in Penang now.)

Rapid Penang still works pretty well – and is still 2 ringit. I waited 5 minutes after getting out of the airport for a bus. Bus departures were upstairs, just outside the glass doors (ask directions).

I’m not on a visa run – am on holiday. I got of at the central KOMTAR stop, & changed for Batu Feringhhi, the northern beach area. (Again a 5 minute wait, & another 2 ringit.)

The whole journey took the best part of 2 hours. But for $USD1 who’s complaining?

To change the subject slightly: for those interested in a cheap holiday:

I then booked into the luxury Hydro Majestic Hotel via the Internet special of $39 p night for 3 nights. (I tried showing up at the desk: no dice. You have to book via the net. I used Agoda booking service – they were excellent: polite & fast.)

Once there (& ensuring it was a comfortable, well-run place – which it is) I got onto wifi & booked another 3 night package.

The only thing I didn’t do well was the airfare – paying $472 Phnom Penh-KL-Penang return with Malaysian Airlines. That was because Air Asia’s site was (as usual) too slow to use, & (when I tried another computer) too buggy to use.

However had I been able to buy tickets from them, Air Asia would have saved me a hundred bucks or so I think.

At the Hydro Majestic I threw all the brochures on tours to the monkey farm & butterfly park etc in a drawer (why are these places so generic?) & just enjoyed reading & the nearby beach. For a change of pace after a few months of hard work it’s hard to beat. Because of the time of year & the dawning of Great Depression II it’s 3/4 empty too.

Whilst Cambodia is a more difficult country to live in than Thailand, one of the things that keep me here is the freedom from the time-consuming & expensive Thai visa regulations.

One annual fee (for a year's visa), & no leaving the country. Not even a form to fill in. After 18 months here I am still grateful - & keenly remember those needless border runs etc when I lived In Thailand, & all the days wasted in doing them.

I found that when the airport first opened there was free wifi, but now every scan I do produces several providers - all wanting cash.

This seems to be the case in the locations mentioned above, & everywhere else.

Having been driven out of Chiang Mai by the smoke pollution, 2-3 years ago I did a tour of about a dozen islands and beaches in the gulf. Every one of them was covered in plastic and rubbish. On some beaches there was more platic visible than sand. Phuket was the worst - even the less-used northern beaches - but even small islands I'd never heard of had lots of rubbish.

The cleanest beach was Ao Nang near Krabi, but it was hardly clean.

I asked lots of questions, but no-one seemed to know exactly where the rubbish came from. One person said an island off Ao Nang had a rubbish dump on iy next to the ocean; another said tourist boats; another said stuff just left on beaches. There's probably truth in all.

My gf of the time said she had once been on a ship going across the gulf, which contained tons of garbage collected from the streets of Bangkok. Halfway across the ship dumped its garbage into the gulf.

Partly because of Thailand's multiple environmental catastrophes I now live in Cambodia, however the beaches here are also filthy.

(The main advantage here is the absurd & ever-changing Thai visa regulatioins do not exist. Pay off a police official & you get your 13-month visa no questions asked, no leaving the country, etc etc.)

The Thai visa situation is a reason cited by many here in Cambodia for the move from Thailand.

I actually left Thailand because of the smoke pollution in Chiang Mai, but the visa siatuation - with its requirement to leave the country frequently, and the endless rule-changes - also contributed.

Here in Phnom Penh I paid the guy at the airport $300 cash and had a 13-month working visa delivered to my door next day. No work permit is needed (or even exists). No need to leave the country to renew: you can stay here forever if you want.

Not always worrying about visa runs, and the many complications and changes of the Thai system, is a load off.

2-3 years ago I had an English friend who always went to the Penang consulate.

He'd wait till it was closed, deposit some money & minimal paperwork with a security guard (who told him which counter to go to - some were 'good', some were 'bad' - then come back next day for his visa.

He was very happy with this arrngement - tho I don't know if it still operates.

What's the visa situation in Bali (Indo)?

I left Thailand a year ago partly because of all the hoops I had to jump thru for visas, & have been living in Cambodia since. No visa hassles here at all. Pay the nice colonel at the airport around $300 & he gives you a visa for 1 + 12 months = 13.

You don't have to leave to renew - just pay again.

However Cambodia is noisy, with very bad traffic, crime-ridden & surreally corrupt.

I like Bali; your post got me thinking a bit...

Whatever Buddha - or anyone else until recent centuries - said about rebirth is going to have to be metaphorical, because it was said in the pre-science era.

In all of history - including in the scientific age in which we have a battery of instruments & proofs to establish such things - there has not been a single study, or piece of video, audio, spectrographic evidence - to suggest that there is such a thing as rebirth. Not a single pulse of data in human history. That does not prove that rebirth is not real - but it stacks the odds against it by thousands to one, to put it optimistically.

However the metaphor is a rather lovely one, & personally I'm all for it. We can change beyond recognition, by our own efforts - as if we had been born a second time.

Firstly, congratulations on being the first person since 1980 to not know what herpes is. I can remember the day when it was in the top ten most-used words in English, up there with 'the' & 'and'.

(It's a virus which lives in your nerve ganglia which periodically erupts onto your skin or mucosal tissue and causes blisters & pain for about ten days. Most people get it around the mouth (which tends to be Herpes Simplex Virus Type 1) or genitals (which tends to be the more virulent HSV2).)

Anyway, the infection can cause 'referred pain' to various parts - legs, feet, for example. So it could be that. You can get a blod test to see if you have it; and swabs to see if you have it 'down there'.

If not - or even if so - I find that a healthy lifestyle abolishes most ailments - including herpes, which I had for a while.

We're a paleolithic species, basically, & we are therefore designed for regularly daily exercise, good quantities of vegetables, fruit & lean meat, and to live in mutually dependent communities.

There's a fair bit more to it than the above, but that's the essence. The degree to which you depart from the evolutionary norm is the degree to which you will invite new friends like herpes, cancer, heart disease, & a thousand miscellaneous aches and pains into your life.

I can vouch for Phnom Penh in terms of friendliness and a kind of unspolied quality. The sexual culture is more conservative than Thailand's. (Bargirls & virgins: not a lot in between. Men all on the make, married or not.) But the people are very sweet, and going to a village is like visiting the 14th century.

But I have decided against settling here forever simply because the place is so damned dangerous. The driving in Phnom Penh is easily the worst I have seen - and Thailand takes some beating.

Recently there was a gunfight just outside the restaurant I am writing this in. (A rich guy shot a moto driver; the police arived & found nothing amiss.)

I have never seen so many moto & car accidents as here: the most recent - a few hours ago - entailed a moto driver going right through the rear windshield of an SUV, head-first minus helmet. There have been several near-misses from motorcycles hurtling out of nowhere. (More than once I was compelled to hire a taxi to cross the road.) I swear Phnom Penh's drivers think they are in a video game. There have been incidents of food poisoning too numerous to mention. There is the steady daily diet of air pollution, often from a pile of plastic being burned under my window (garbage disposal in some suburbs consists of throwing everything into a pile in the street, and periodically setting fire to it); and the high pesticide loads in the foods, many of them imported from barely-regulated China. There are the guns: aimed at people near me in the street; falling from people’s holsters on passing motorbikes and clattering along the road; and (see above) being fired at real or imaginary enemies near where I dined.

There was the petrol bomb I ducked recently (thrown by a street gang); and the slipped disc from the potholes en route to the school I teach at; and...did I mention the dog attack? The dengue-laden mosquitoes? The 1-in-4 HIV rate among the bargirls?

I love Phnom Penh, actually - it's like the Wild West. But my inner statistician tells me my probability of living a long life here are very low.

I don't like the way Thailand is going (I was hoping democracy would develop - apparently not), so am not sure what to do when I check out of here. That's the next project.

Hate to be a spoilsport, but riding motos in PP is very dangerous.

The drivers/riders are the worst in SE Asia in my opinion - way worse than the Thais - and there are no rules. My co-worker was trashed by a drunk riding a trailbike 3 weeks ago - multiple injuries & breaks - and this morning in my tuk tuk on the way to work a moto came around us at high speed & straight into an oncoming one - nasty.

A couple of months ago there was fresh blood all over Sisowath Quay because another drunk on a moto had gone into the side of a tuk tuk at high speed - instantly killed. My tuk tuk driver (on his moto) was run into by a guy from behind, and was consequently in a coma for a week.

I could go on - carnage is a daily event here on the roads. If I could afford to upgrade from tuk tuks to SUVs I would, purely for protective reasons. I gave up motos soon after arrival, on hearing the stories then seeing them for myself. Safe/slow riding is no protection because they come at you out of nowhere at enormous speeds, often drunk.

There's also the theft problem, which is large. Another co-worker had her moto stolen last week, and went to the police station to report it. She discovered it in the chief policeman's office: he'd knocked it off on the way home from work the previous night. ('$30 please.')

Yes, hundreds of different gum tree species, from desert to lush tropical.

You need to search ones suitable for your soil & climate.

If not enough info on the web, the classic book on native Australian trees is by Vincent Serventy - he gives a page or two to each.

Gums seem to be prolific in Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Burma. However remember eucaplypts are a pest tree in some places (e.g. much of India, from memory) because their roots go down too far and dry up the water table - thus killing other plants.

It could be a reaction to certain foods - e.g. rice. Anything eaten for a long time has the potential to build up an ellergic or other reaction.

The way to find out is to remove one food from the diet at a time, and note symtom changes.

We are not a grain-eating species, so for preference remove grains & replace with foods that are non-grains & non-dairy.

(See my post on today's celiac thread: http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=185922 )