Thailand Second Best-value Destination: Lonely Planet

[nakachalet]

slipperx

perhaps we all have to wait for the next generation of younger thais with westernized education and ideas....

to replace their older fathers, brothers, sisters, aunties and aunts....

tuktuk drivers and the likes.... mostly can not comprehend the ideas of helping farangs to have fun first....

so they and others will come back for more.... lol

currently, this is an incomprehensible idea for most thais to understand.... much less expecting them to carry it out in their life.... a very sad truth....

[moe666]

Remember Lonely Planet is written for people who are trying to go around the world on a dollar a day.

[hanno]

I have a question for the esteemed members of Thai Visa:

Reading some of the posts on this, and many other, threads, I get the distinct feeling that many (though certainly not all) posters hate Thailand with a vengeance (and at least one poster pretty much hates every country ) If this is truly the case, then this prompts my question which is:

Are there airports in Thailand?

I know for a fact there are and I would like to make the same suggestion I made to all the moaners I met in 14 years in Vietnam (a country with much less amenities than Thailand, incidentally): get on a plane and head back home!

Sure, living in a 3rd-world country is tough. I live in Cambodia now, which is not always a walk in the park either. But I wouldn't want to change for anything. Some posters tend to forget all the advantages they have: good weather, good food, nice beaches, people that will actually give you the time of the day, high standard of living for little money.

Go back to Manchester or Marseilles or Düsseldorf or wherever (preferably in winter), live there for 6 months, and then post again.

Rant over

P.S.: I fully support the notion that Thailand is great value and am desperately looking forward to my next trip there!!!

[cutter007]

What utter crap!!! I agree London has now most certainly become better value. Things are much cheaper in comparison to Thailand. Thailand is fast becoming a major rip off! People are still living in the past and still believe the old crap. So what is better value in Thailand?

Cheaper in Thailand:

-Accommodation - Is kinda true now, but I expect it to return to overpriced levels within 2 years.

-Public transport - Other than taxies, public transportation is completely overpriced here, take the BTS or

MRT, for the places they go to and the inconvenence of transfers, I could name 50 other cities with better

value mass transit systems.

-Eating out - True

-Most groceries (apart from imported western items) - Not true, on average, most groceries are more than in the US,

(I don't know about Europe), milk for example is a staple and more expensive

-Health care (apart from NHS) - True

-Fuel - Not True, same as other countries such as the US

-Insurance - True

-All kind of taxes - None sense take singapore for example, tax is cheaper, and the quality of life is far better

Thailand use to be a great deal, I would say now it's inexpensive, but definitely not cheap

One thing that kills Thailand is the land and housing prices, these are completely overpriced, I took a

look at some dumpy villa a friend bought in Kamala a couple weeks ago.

I had to bite my tongue to avoid laughing, he spent 48 million on something that probably cost the builder 8 million to build.

[jobsworth]

Bali (Indonesia), Goa (India), Koh Kong (Cambodia), Southern Africa and southwest Western Australia featured among the top 10 regions.

?!?!?!

I once got stuck in Koh Kong for a night on the way to Sihanoukville. There was almost nothing there, except for hotels and beer bars (this was in 2002 I think). My impression was that the whole town's business model was based on tourists getting trapped for the night because they missed the one boat to Sihanoukville. At the time, the Thai-Cambodia Bridge hadn't been completed yet and the only way to Sihanoukville was by boat. The border crossing from Thailand opened at 8am, and you had about 30 minutes to get through and try to catch the boat, which required a taxi or moto ride to a pier some distance away. Maybe the first few people caught it; the rest of us stayed the night in Koh Kong. I have a hard time believing that this narrow window was a coincidence.

It was cheap though.

Apparently it has been been built up a bit since then (and perhaps there was more to it than I knew at the time). Admittedly, since I had no intention of staying there, I didn't do any reading on the place in advance. The staff at the hotel were helpful, but my Khmer was minimal, and their English not much better. I ended up taking a somewhat sketchy motorcycle tour to a "water fall" for the afternoon, and finishing up the evening at a beer bar with my moto driver and his friends (whose food and drinks of course I ended up paying for, although the total bill was quite reasonable).

Has anyone here been to Koh Kong in recent years?

I am in Koh Kong now.

It is a quiet place with no major attractions where nothing much happens.

I love it for that reason. It is good to escape from the activity in Thailand.

Of course it is changing very fast.

Since the bridge to Thailand opened about 5 years ago

and Thailand has finished the 4 new bridges on the road to Phnom Penh,

it has become a bus station for tourists journeying between

Thailand and Cambodia.

And there are many more motor cycles and 4 wheel drive vehicles.

Despite all of this it is still worth a visit.