chuckygobyebye

Great, does this mean bars and clubs have to stop serving alcohol at 12.  Fantastic!  So  after i've finished my dinner I won't be able to have a few drinks by the bar.

Another step forward for the tourist industy!

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Dude, bars and clubs have been closing at 12 for ages.

A few notes about the taxis in Bangkok. Firstly, they run on LPG which has been going up in price in lockstep with oil prices. However, the daily rental charge that drivers pay to the taxi owners has been going down, since taxi fares can only be raised by the government. Secondly, there's no limit on the number of taxi plates so the supply of taxis is not dictated by demand, the risk of going broke is borne by the driver.

They have taxi ranks and a ban on flagging down cabs in Kuala Lumpur and that seems to work OK.

It's my opinion that the traffic problems in Bangkok have a more sinister root cause -- traffic cops. Traffic cops are the only ones who have an intrest in congestion, the worse the traffic the more secure they are in their jobs. So I lay the blame at the feet of the ping-pong heads standing in the middle of intersections every morning. After all, it wasn't that long ago that they forced the government to abandon the computerised traffic light system they'd spent so much money on.

Sack 75% of the cops, put the lights on automatic and see how that goes.

What's going on here is the guy's septic tank is full and he's letting it outflow on the beach.

I was in Samui a couple of weeks ago and noticed that there were several foul smelling green puddles about, seepage from underground tanks.

Sadly, this is a problem that isn't going to go away until they install a central treatment plant and sewers, a very expensive exercise.

One point is that they're probably not pumping it out every day.

Why isn't anyone mentioning:

Singha tastes like crap.

It probably gives you a hangover because it's got lots of methanol in it.

Why isn't Tiger in this discussion? It's a great beer. Or better still, when you can get it, Asahi beats them all hands down.

Yes, Phuket air and Victoria Casino are owned by the same guy.

I know someone who has worked at a few Thai airlines and she says...

Don't fly Phuket or Orient Thai as they find it cheaper to bribe the safety inspectors than to maintain their planes.

Phuket air is on the ropes. The owner charged one of his mates/trusted luitenants to go to the middle east and buy a new plane. Turns out the guy took the suitcase of money or whatever and ran off with it.

I left my bag in a taxi once, had my passport inside, the guy dropped it into the office two days later.

On New Year's eve I left my phone in a taxi. Rang it and the guy had his wife drop it around to me.

On both occasions I gave them Bt500 for their troubles, which is a small price for stupidity.

It strikes me that Bt25,000 is a lot to pay for a wallet. Also, if he lost his wallet, what's he doing walking around with Bt25,000 in his pocket?

A naval vessel will also be stationed on the island to assist with operations.

Ha. Typical Thai incompitance. What good is a boat on the land?

I got a new one last time I came in, didn't notice anything on the back and just handed it in. The immigration office also didn't notice anything missing on the back and handed me back my passport.

I'd suggest that the question on income is for STATISTICAL purposes since it asks the RANGE of income and not your EXACT income.

Tourism is Thailand's second-biggest currency earner and they take it very seriously. If you look at the TAT website you'll find they keep huge amount of data on tourist numbers and activates.

I applaud the govoner's decision, we all need a good laugh.

Firstly, the cops already tell you not to smoke in the park. Secondly, why is smoking in the park such a bad thing?

This all sounds strangely familiar. I had the same experience in China when my girfriend was denied a tourist visa and recieved a very similar letter.

I thought she'd be a shoe-in since I'm an Austrlian citizen, she was sponsored by my parents. But there are plenty of unwritten rules and we'd broken one, the Aussie embassy won't issue a visa for more than three months (the maximum is six) and we applied for four.

If you're serious about getting an Australian visa I'd recommend employing a visa agent.

We're with Jasmine Internet (JI) ADSL and the first thing I notice is that proxy lists are blocked. It's not hard to get a proxy address but using a proxy server doesn't seem to be opening up blocked sites anymore.

I'm not going to pay for an anonymiser account so any views on a solution to this?

I have an overseas hosting provider, anyone have an ASP script for repeating pages?

You're lining yourself up for a lot of no fun.

Firstly, did you know a spouse visa can take up to 12 months to issue?

Secondly, the non-refundable application is Bt36,000.

Thirdly, I don't know about the Aussie embassy here but if they're like every other embassy I've ever delt with they're a sack of a-holes and there are lots of 'unwritten rules' about which applications are accepted.

I would recommend that you get your wife a tourist visa here and then apply for residency when you both get there (she gets a bridging-visa while her applicaiton is under consideration) and talk to an immigration agent. If you do apply for a spouse visa here, you _must_ do all you can to show that your relationship is a genuine one. Letters, photos, evidence of travel together are all good.

The raid in Q Bar isn't news, it was more than a month ago. It is an interesting case becasue the operators of Qbar have always cooperated with police and the governement, even going as far as being a test-bed for new nightlife policy and laws.

I've been there many times and it is not a place where people go to take drugs, it's just not the right kind of atmosphere at all. The police carrying out the raid had been instructed to make arrests and when they found nobody testing positive, they started busting people for not carrying their passports. (As an aside, how many forum members carry their passports every minute of the day? Mine would be wrecked in a week!)

All this makes me suspect that the raid was carried out for political capital than law enforcement.

And by the way, if you want to see Farangs taking drugs, pop down to Patpong any night of the week, it's the one place that never gets piss-tested.

This story is about a month old, but...

For my last visa run I went to Phnom Penh. I went to the Thai Consulate, filled in an application for a Tourist Visa and handed it over with photo and cash, and watched with growing dread as the woman behind the glass' frown deepened.

"You have a lot of tourist visas here Mr C," she said, "almost a year's worth."

"Yes," I replied.

"And you have many overstay fines,"

"Well, you'll notice that one of the visas expires of Christmas day and another on my birthday,"

"And every visa is extended. Are you working in Thailand Mr C?"

And so a 'who me?' conversation ensued.

Eventually she said she'd have to have the Consul look at my passport, so I squirmed in a chair until closing time when he came out with much the same questions, to which I gave much the same answers. Eventually he said:

"We'll give it to you this time Mr. C, but I don't want to see you here again."

Now I've never, ever had any problems at any of the checkpoints or at Immigration here in Bangkok. Anyone else had this kind of problem at Phnom Penh or another Consulate?

Curiously enough, a friend of mine is going out with an immigration officer from Dong Muang and I asked her to have a look at my passport and she said everything is in order.

Before we panic believe this probably applies to entry without visa rather than a tourist visa.

No, this is regarding extension of the 60 days tourist visa. Here is the info from Thai Immigration:

http://www.thaiimmigration.com/inv/index.php?showtopic=126

Come on George, it's been pointed out before that the thaiimmigration.com site isn't an official site. Plus it only applies to one of the upcountry immigration divisions and it's wrong more often than right.

If Thaivisa.com is going to send these posts as news can you please get confirmation from a second source first?

Is anybody going to the Farang Magazine party in Khao San tomorrow night? I hear it's 400 Bt for all you can drink.

Can someone tell my why all the focus on kids in this article? They're not worried about adults doing it?

Once again it's two pages of posts smug oldies, sitting at their keyboards and thinking "Unlike my good self," while missing any insight.

Why do people overstay? Because they're doing visa runs and it's pretty easy to miss a day because they're working, sick, whatever.

Usually this isn't a problem as long as you're going straight to the border, you just pays your Bt200 per day -- I've done it plenty of times myself.

As for the crackdown, notice it's only in Samui? Samui is a mafia-run island full of crooked cops. Anyone ever suspect that this may be a shakedown exercise?

Hang on, has anyone confirmed any of this because one or two things don't ring true.

Why do they need a cental system to check if you have three back-to-back tourist visas? The stamps are in your passport and they've been checking passports very thouroughly recently.

What the ###### is thaiimigration.com?

Is this news reporting or scaremongering? Can anyone check any of the details of this claim?

Also, how do they define back-to-back? If I arrive in Thailand, fly down to KL for a few days, take in Ankor Wat and then go through Laos, do I get refused when I come back?

Far be it from me to suggest that the publishers of Thaivisa.com are alarmist, but, you're alarmist.

Even when they were doing the exit stamps at the immigration office in town (in Mai Sai) if you were doing that crossing twice in a row you needed photocopies. It sounds like with the move to doing the exit stamps at the border post they've added a few more requirements.

But has anyone heard of people getting turned back here? Sure, the law on the books is that people can only stay here for 6 months of the year on tourist visas but there has been no word from government that they're going to enforce it, only on this forum.

I know that visa-runners are on thin ice but it seems to me that lots of people here are all too keen to cry wolf.

My understanding is that half the 400-500 were given away and a lot were bought as favours.

If the holders of the super-elite cards are to be treated as guests-of-state, surely super-rich people would be treated as guests-of-state anyway.

The guy was a welder. There was a story in the paper about him yesterday saying that he wouldn't get compensation because, although he suffered an injury while working, a phone is not part of a welder's apparatus.

I would suspect that he was probably using an electrical welder, quite possibly on the power pole, while there was a live, high-voltage, wire attached.

The story goes that the phone rang and he was electrocuted, maybe the phone induced a current in the structure that was already charged and that was enough to trigger an arc, maybe it was just a coincidence.

I'd suggest that the phone exploded as a result of his electocution.

Maybe the women on this forum don't like being called "nice farang ladies". Just a hunch.

Hmm, looks like only the newbies got this joke and all the loudmouthed pricks got sucked in.

Bt1,000 a pill! I think the corrospondant should change his dealer.

Is getting killed a fair penalty for smuggling E? As far as doing the time for the crime, why not ask someone qualified: http://www.farangonline.com/disp_articles.asp?art=256