Johpa

Isnt that CM hotel owned by an influential local family? Alot of hotels in Thailand are owned by rich locals.

Many, if not most of the smaller hotels and resorts, are owned by "influential" people who have need to launder money. Hotels and resorts are the ideal vehicles for doing exactly that as most guests pay for their stays with cash. Just three rooms a day listed at 1,000 baat per day gets you one million baat laundered per annum pretty quickly. And then you can pick your multiple for your needs.

Thai culture start 40Km out of CM

I could easily take someone a mere 10km outside the city to find relatively traditional Lanna life. I know this may surprise many on these boards, but there is life outside the Farang ghetto housing estates.

What is wrong with my countrymen? I'm so proud to be Swedish..... Not

Uff Da! A bad week for the Svenske is always a good week and cause for celebration for the Norske, a group who have had their own troubles recently.

The behavior of these "Locals" is ridiculous.

It is rarely locals, it is almost always Bangkok folks. Although sometimes it is locals who relocated to Bangkok decades ago who return. But go to any national park region or just about anywhere that is going through a resort oriented development transition (e.g. Mae Chaem and Pai up north) and all the land, legal or otherwise, gets bought up my Bangkok money.

And lest we forget, many of these resorts should hang the traditional "sak, op rit" sign outside as their primary function is to do laundry, money laundering that is.

My apologies to any Thai people reading this forum.

How about an apology to those of us who do not consider Thais "beasts" and who may have such "beasts as family members? And while I am atop my pedestal, shame on the mods for allowing the riff raff to control this thread. George, time to redefine your little cash cow.

There was (maybe still is) a large compound with a very high wall in the warren of sois just SW of Thaphae Gate that my intelligence sources -- OK, the girls from Stuart's Oasis, which was just around the corner --

I would suspect that Stewart's wife, AKA The Dragon Lady, would have been a reliable source. Poor Stewart.

Getting back to the original story, I only found a single reference online to the death of a Joyce Powers, wife of a DEA agent, murdered in Chiang Mai in 1980. This would help explain why the US would not engage with Khun Sa in the 1980s and take up Khun Sa's offer to sell the entire crop under his control to the US, thus keeping the drugs off the street. It also helps explain why the US State Department evacuated all non-essential personnel from the US consulate back in late 1987 when they perceived a possible threat.

Don Meung ... Hub of Empty Un-needed Airports ?

It may be empty and it may now not really be needed, but it was a relatively new facility that was quite capable of handling the same traffic as Swampy if they would have simply relocated the adjoining RTAF base. And as the price of oil continues its inexorable trend upwards, expect to see fewer international arrivals.

The killing of the DEA agent's wife is noted by several sources found on the internet (as well as Mekong Bob here who I suspect knows what he's talking about).

I suspect he knows what he's talking about as well.

It may be as I found references to an event in 1980, a year before I first arrived in Chiang Mai.

By the way, I am acquainted with a Bob in Bangkok who spent considerable time on the other side of the Mae Khong in even earlier decades, but I would be gobsmacked if he were actually posting here.

There was a daytime shooting in a Thai market area in Chiang Mai in the 1980s, resulting in death of the wife of a DEA Special Agent. Motive unknown.

I was living in and around Chiang Mai throughout most of the 1980s and don't recall any such an event. I use to share drinks with the US Naval Attache in Chiang Mai and we talked candidly about lots of current events and don't recall any such incident. But I do know that my sister-in-law's Thai husband, well actually she was a mia noi, worked undercover for a joint DEA-BPP unit and was shot and murdered along with a partner back in the early 1990s up in the Chiang Dao. And there was the somewhat disheveled and a bit crazy American who disappeared after he kept getting into too arguments with a local bar owner, a Thai man who was friends to many of the old timers here, including myself. But methinks all this talk about DEA agents is nonsense as those guys usually keep a very low profile indeed.

My experience with USPS to Thailand is anywhere from 10 days to 21 days regardless of class of postage service, the difference in time being totally random. That being said, I have never lost any package. With any international package, I never get worried until after 30 days, 60 days for Canada.

Hi All.

I seem to remember I think about 1 year ago another man I think an MP was forced out of his home in the same location by bands of screaming Redshirts, The hordes of Red were ultimately successful and the family were forced to leave their home and it was demolished, So I think it would be fitting to have more of the same please.

phupaman

And I seem to remember back in the late 1980s when another sister of the red shirt leader encroached upon some forest lands out in Sankampeng, east of Chiang Mai, a very hard core red shirt district. At that time the lead protestor against the encroachment was the head of a local elementary school. His reward for his efforts was a bullet in the head. And the beat goes on......Chaiyo!

Democrats need presents in the North-east.

What they need to do is somehow eradicate the underlying racism against the Isaan/Lao folks that is a predominate social value amongst the Sino-Thais and their assimilated Central Thai and Southern Thai partners.

Overstay is due if the person entered on a foreign passport and overstayed. Immigration at airport handled the situation correctly.

Whether the assessing a Thai citizen a substantial fine for "overstaying" in their own country as being "correct" is a matter of interpretation. But I am certain that there are fine legal minds that can come to that conclusion on the basis that my son initially entered the country not as Thai citizen. Its just that in many countries the accepted logic does not follow that rather peculiar path.

But it is what it is and young lad should indeed have gone to immigration weeks ago, when first informed, to clarify the situation and pay the overstay at that time.

Updating this situation, young lad (22 years old) failed to take his old man's sage advice of seeking an opinion from Chiang Mai immigration officials first and decided to let the immigration officials at the airport, where he was easy prey with no options, make the decisions. Most interestingly, when he tried to depart on his new Thai passport the computers immediately showed that he had entered on his US passport. Indeed, he was not only obligated to depart on that same US passport, but despite the fact that he is now a full Thai citizen, was slapped with the full overstay fine for not extending his US visa in a timely manner.

The next chapter is when my daughter, in the exact same situation but on a student visa, asks Chiang Mai immigration whether she can exit the country on her US passport up in Mae Sai and then re-enter on her new Thai passport.

There are lots of very good Thai dentists around these days. The Thai dental schools graduate good doctors. Decades ago the only place to get top rate dental care was at the Seventh Day Adventist clinics in Bangkok, Chiang Mai, and Phuket. Those clinics also served as teaching centers, and the foreign dentists, who usually spoke fluent Thai, also taught at the local universities. They would bring in visiting dentists from Loma Linda, and, as I recollect, the remarkable Dutch woman who use to run the clinic in Phuket had an affiliation with USC. Anyways, the Thais no longer need to depend upon foreign dentists to train newer generations. That is not to say that you can't run into a bad Thai dentist, but it should not be hard to find a good dentist in any large city.

By the way, in the US I never use native born golf playing dentists as I found the foreign born dentists to be just as good and far more affordable. But any major dental work gets done in Chiang Mai on my annual visit.

There was an identical poll taken by an academic some 20 years ago that generated the exact same results. That being said, I see only a difference in quality of corruption, and not in quantity of corruption, between Thailand and my home country the US, where corporations are given, under a very dubious legal reasoning, the same legal status as individuals. In the US the quality of corruption is much higher as the corruption is hidden under the smoke and mirrors of lawyers, accountants, and politicians. Ordinary people are not allowed to participate in the game. I will take the Thai mode of corruption over the US mode any day, and that is one reason why I look forward to retirement in Thailand and not in the rapidly declining USA.

No religion is perfect but I feel that Thai Muslims are really some of the most friendly and warm people I have ever met.

We shouldn't judge Thai Muslims by what we read in the western press either.

The problem is not Muslims. The vast majority of Muslims I know, both those in Thailand, in North America, as well as in the Middle East where I spent time decades ago, are indeed warm gregarious people. The problem resides in Islam and the intractable structure of Islam where the world is divided between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, and then is combined with the concept of Jihad which is the logical consequence of that bifurcated division of the world. The only effective method to battle Islam is to deny faith in the invisible man in the sky. The Thais, being Buddhist, thus have a slight advantage over the western nation-states whose citizens still cling to numerous variations in the existence of Zeus.

How about tearing down other resorts seemingly built on public land such as the Phuket Yacht Club on Nai Harn or the Four Seasons resort up north of Chiang Mai.

but like "ding' mentioned stay away from the "hilltribe" villages. They are tourist traps and just sad.

Tourist traps? Absolutely!! But not sad as the constructed "villages" are filled with gainfully employed people. You might be misconstruing ennui with sadness as the people working in these places on a daily basis can become bored catering to tourists. And you can easily find a real village, but there is little going on mid-day as most people are at work or tending their fields and thus one would be totally bored.

What is a jungle market?

The "jungle market" is kat wiang, arguably the best known attraction for Thais in Lampang. It is well known for its large selection of forest products ranging from native vegetables, herbs, and edible leaves, to a large variety of the local insect cuisine. But the town itself, like the vast majority of provincial capitals, has little to offer the typical ex-pat who is not integrated into the local scene. The surrounding areas are quite nice, such as heading up due north of town.

where were they born?

They were both born in the US. They are now Thai citizens and have Thai ID cards and Thai passports. What would prevent them from departing on a Thai passport? Why would they even need to show their US passport at immigration upon departure?

Since they now have Thai citizenship and Thai passports, they have not renewed or extended their visas. The officials who issued them the passport told them to use the Thai passport upon departure. So there is some conflicting info between Immigration officials and the Ministry of the Interior officials at the passport office. Another question is whether the immigration folks at the airport would still charge them overstay fees if they showed the US passport with the entry stamp? I think I will have my son stop by immigration in Chiang Mai and ask those folks as I have found that office to be very helpful over the decades. But as far as I can see, leaving on the Thai passport will leave a digital trace of an entry without a corresponding exit, but as they will never enter Thailand using their US passport again, I fail to see how this would be much of an issue.

Just curious as my kids, both legal adults, just obtained their Thai passports. My son entered on his US passport and then finally received his Thai passport last month. Any issues with his leaving the country on his Thai passport next week?

CP is close to whoever they need to be. They were in with the Dems they were with TRT, they do monstrous amounts of business in China. They are the most influential Thai-Chinese company in the country, and one of the most important for anyone wanting access to the Chinese market, and what they say, goes particularly when it comes to keeping foreign companies of their turf.

CP became a Chinese company years ago. Yes, the family still lives in Bangkok and the company still makes some modest investments in Thailand. But for all intents and purposes they are a Chinese company and it is China where they re-invest their profits extracted from their Thai operations.