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ReindeerF posted:Tell the truth, Finch!, you got in the sawngtaew and yelled, "Macca's!" repeatedly. Hey, I'm not that Australian... although I did eat there. I stocked up on breakfast muffins for the sawngtaew to the pier before a day diving. Would recommend. I think the only other time I've had McDonalds in Thailand was when I was in hospital on Samui with dengue, and the hospital food was so bad that they thoughtfully provided a folder full of delivery options and I was sick of eating pizza.
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Jan 3, 2019 08:35
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webmeister posted:Malaysia has a great food scene, the only downside (or not, depending) is that alcohol is either expensive/unavailable because of the whole Muslim-majority thing. +1 for Kuching. It's one of my favourite places in Malaysia, although... it's been about nine years since I was last there.
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Feb 16, 2019 08:24
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grellgraxer posted:Have a college buddy who caught Dengue on PP during the rainy season. Said it was horrendous, hurt even to move his eyes left and right. How long were you hosed up, and how bad was it? I'd had a partial shoulder reconstruction about six months prior to getting dengue, and my shoulder hadn't given me any trouble or pain for about five months. I woke up one day and it was sore, but I'd also spent most of the prior day moving about one hundred scuba tanks between boats so I thought I'd just worked a bit too hard. The next day was the same but on the third day everything was sore - even my eyes. It took a couple of days for the blood tests to tell me what I already knew, and I was sent to Bangkok Hospital Samui for four nights. I was pretty wrecked - sore, tired, not interested in food or water. I was on a drip for most of the time and fed godawful hospital food. I had a gnarly rash, too, which was kind of hilarious when I was escorted onto the catamaran from Tao to Samui with a nurse holding a drip - nobody wanted to be near me. I think the long-term impact probably took about six months or a year to go away entirely. I was mostly just tired, but within a week or two of being discharged from hospital I was functioning as normal - but I slept a lot. 0/10, would not recommend.
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Mar 11, 2019 08:44
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Cheesemaster200 posted:Why are you attempting to eat anything with cheese in southeast asia? I'm not much of a pizza fan but I had the best four cheese pizza I've ever had about 8 years in Khao Lak. So good. Made by an Italian guy, by way of a Burmese proxy doing the actual hands-on stuff while old mate managed. Legitimately, like he was a puppeteer. It was weird. Anyway, having spent a lot of time in Thailand since then, and more time back here, I'd realised that Thais don't get cheese but the Burmese do. And I think that at least one of the cheese on the four cheese pizza was mouldy and I don't care because it made it taste better.
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Apr 9, 2019 11:16
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Much to my disappointment, scuba diving is kind of incompatible with travelling light. You start off with a mask and fins, then maybe a regulator, then a BCD, then a backplate and wing, then a manifold, then you think that back mounted twins sucks and you want to go side mount so you get more regulators, and to properly explore overhead environments you need a bunch of weird reels and lines and lights and battery canisters, wetsuits for all kinds of conditions, and then you think "gently caress! I need to document all the cool poo poo that I'm seeing!" and you end up with a Pelican case or two full of lights and strobes and cameras and housings and all kinds of other poo poo, and it looks like you're single-handedly mounting a military invasion every time you rock up at the airport. And Indonesian customs treats you as such, wanting to inspect every item in your many item diving kit in minute detail because they're horribly afraid that it's all brand-new and you're importing all of this poo poo to sell and you're going to flee the country without paying tax or something. Then because you've spent all your money on gear and training and flights and excess baggage weight, you have to schlep all of your junk - case after case after case - like a sucker using the cheapest land transport you can get. It loving sucks, but it's worth it for the three great photos you get every year. Until you don't dive for 3 years in a row, all of your poo poo falls apart because it's not being used, you need to have everything service lest it flood or you die if you ever decide to use it again, and because you've moved back to the real world you've got a thousand other things you need to spend your money on. I guess the moral of the story is: stay in Asia. Don't buy scuba gear. Don't be afraid of languages or smells or minor hardship. Thailand won't eat you - not unless you fall in love with a bar girl who used to be a bar man, and you find yourself supporting her extended family out in the provinces, you somehow knock her up (even though she used to be a guy) and you think you're doing the right thing by getting married but you wake up dead one day and she's stolen all of the meagre amount of wealth you've managed not to spend on Big Chang (tm) and chips and gravy and the local titty bar while totally not cheating on your Thai Wife (tm). Finch! fucked around with this message at 02:58 on Apr 10, 2019 |
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Apr 10, 2019 01:10
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Fitzy Fitz posted:take up birding For my own sanity I've banned myself from getting involved in any more expensive hobbies 
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Apr 10, 2019 01:18
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C-Euro posted:It's great being married to someone from Thailand because she can translate for me and take me to all of the cool spots...but it's also bad because we can never go there without spending nearly all of our time with her family I'm probably going to marry a girl from a big Italian family here in Australia. We're going to Italy in a few weeks and she's JUST told me that she failed first-year university Italian because her extended family helped out with learning but taught her some weird dialect that's specific to the region they're from and is almost unintelligible to everyone else :/
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Apr 10, 2019 01:41
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Good Parmesan posted:Hi, currently planning out a trip with my buddy to Singapore and Malaysia for 11 nights in September. Right now all we have booked is that we're flying into Singapore, and then to Penang, and flying home from KL. I like Ipoh. It's worth a night, at least. I stayed at the Weil Hotel, atop a modern shopping mall. It was a great hotel. What's your budget for accommodation in Penang and the Cameron Highlands, and what are you looking for? I spent a few days at the Cameron Highlands Resort and loved it, and also the Lakehouse a year or two later and it was cool but kind of quirky. They provided an excellent driver who picked us up from Ipoh and who we hired to take us on a few trips. I can probably hunt down his contact details for you, but I suspect he works exclusively for the Lakehouse.
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May 24, 2019 02:27
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So... I'm looking at spending December, January, and February in Kuala Lumpur for work. I haven't been there in three years but I know the place fairly well - I briefly went to school in Penang when I was a kid, and have a bunch of friends in and around KL. The trouble is, I've only ever visited as a tourist. Hotels in the city or couches in the suburbs. In this case, I'd be spending 9am to 5pm in TTDI, not far from the freshly opened MSBK train line. Would it be a stupid idea to get an apartment in Bukit Bintang to commute every day, or would I be better off staying around TTDI and heading into KLCC when I need to? Any thoughts? I don't think I'll be there for long enough to warrant finding a decent place in a more expat-popular area like Mont Kiara or something.
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Sep 14, 2019 02:29
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lemonadesweetheart posted:I'd stay in TTDI because commuting from BB will suck. Heh, everybody I've asked has a different opinion about this. You're the first to suggest staying in TTDI. Even my friend who lives there has suggested staying somewhere else. He says the new train is pretty good, particularly as I'd be going against the flow of rush-hour commuters. That said, I don't think he's ever been on a commuter train in his life. The main thing that turns me off TTDI is the lack of... stuff... there. I mean, there's a golf club which my club here in Australia gives me full reciprocal rights to, but I probably won't have the time to use it. It's not very walkable at all - it looks like I'd have to take a Grab for what would be a five-minute walk if there were pedestrian access. And I know that's true of many places in Malaysia, but at least Bukit Bintang is kind of more accessible. It looks like I will be in KL over that time - I just need to find a place to live for a while.
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Sep 20, 2019 00:55
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ReindeerF posted:EDIT: I guess it technically *is* SEA Uber since they kicked Uber's rear end and bought them out regionally. Hadn't thought of it that way. Something similar happened when I was in China a few years ago. Uber worked one day and not the next... but not reading Mandarin, I didn't figure out what was going on and managed to get both my Uber account suspended and my credit cards suspended. That was not fun. BizarroAzrael posted:Does anyone have any suggestions about hotels in Singapore? 6 nights for about £100 a night is the target, but I think it's between the Orchard Yotel or the Ramada. All I can say about my recent experience with non-legacy hotels in Singapore is to make sure the bathrooms actually have doors and proper walls and aren't just doorless cubicle extensions to the bedroom and/or have floor to ceiling windows to the rest of the room. Like, my girlfriend is great, but I neither need nor want an audio, visual, and sensory experience of her morning movements and she definitely doesn't need one of mine. Finch! fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Jan 8, 2020 |
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Jan 8, 2020 22:09
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BizarroAzrael posted:I'm traveling alone, are you talking about Yotel specifically? Was actually interested for the view and the small room and glass walled bathroom aren't such an issue to me. No - I haven't looked into either of those options specifically, but it's something I've noticed over the past few years: lots of open or glass bathrooms in Singapore. It's weird. If you're solo it's probably not much of a big deal, although I'm always weirded out when there isn't a door even if I'm solo.
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Jan 8, 2020 23:02
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Cloudflare fail double post!
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Jan 8, 2020 23:09
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cyka blyat posted:Beautiful nature stuff. I was going to suggest an overnight rafting trip from Pai to Mae Hong Son but it's hot season and there's barely any water in the river and the rafting company I was going to recommend go on holiday. But, check out Pai and Mae Hong Son. The latter is a really wonderful provincial capital, with plenty to see and do and the food is fantastic. I've been meaning to go back for over a decade now, but haven't got around to it...
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Jan 17, 2020 07:33
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The Chang water? Years ago I saw some dude out the back of a 711 doing just filling up the empties from a tap.
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Jul 2, 2020 07:56
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Water Resistant posted:https://thepointsguy.com/news/thailand-plans-to-waive-quarantine-requirements-for-vaccinated-travelers/ I would expect the quarantine requirement for everyone, including those with vaccines, will persist until there is concrete evidence that vaccinations stop transmission. The major vaccines (they're the only ones I've been paying attention to) reduce the chance of viral infection turning into the disease, but I think we are yet to discover anything concrete about vaccines reducing transmissibility. They might not - we might need a second or third-generation vaccine for that to happen, or it might never happen. Early evidence suggests there is some reduction in transmissibility but it needs more study. June 2022 is looking more likely than June 2021... Edit: improved testing will probably help reduce the need for mandatory quarantine, too. Finch! fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Mar 10, 2021 |
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Mar 9, 2021 23:10
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Waltzing Along posted:The thai govt really doesn't seem to know what they are doing with attracting tourists. That's been the case for years, though, not just the past 18 months.
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Oct 6, 2021 02:32
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Has anyone here re-located or temporarily re-located to Thailand? If so, how was it overall? I'm kind of at the point of my life where I want a big change and would like to see the rest of the world before I'm too old but would eventually end back up in the United States. I spent increasingly longer periods of time there from 2008 to 2012, with each trip centred around a few weeks or months diving and relaxing on Koh Tao. I went back in 2012 and stayed, with brief trips home, for a couple of years. I was lucky enough to get an ED visa to study scuba diving. There were other options available which I discovered when I was there - investment visas, Thai Elite, work permits, and so on. My visa was a 12 month + 12 month multiple entry visa - I had to leave Thailand every 90 days, but that usually coincided with a week at home anyway. If it didn't, I just went to Penang or KL or Hong Kong or Taiwan or whatever. There were loads of temporary or permanent expats over there. The lifestyle was great - diving, gym, working remotely, exploring Thailand, etc. I imagine that the pandemic has had a negative impact upon all of those things. I know that my favourite people and places are no longer there, which is a shame, but that doesn't mean that there isn't (or won't be) a comparable lifestyle. Koh Tao was the perfect place for me at the right time of my life. I don't know if I would have enjoyed living anywhere else in the world as much as I did. I loved the island life, enjoyed exploring Thailand and other nearby countries, made some friends for life, etc., etc., etc. Of course the disclaimer is that this was 10 years ago and things have changed a lot since then. But what worked for me might not work for you - it's worth spending a bit of time trying to find the right place for you. Go exploring for a few months first, then decide where to settle for a bit longer.
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Jun 27, 2022 01:01
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:I loved Bangkok. The city is so cool, housing affordable and furnished or partially furnished housing is super convenient. I like Bangkok a lot now, too. I didn't at first and it took a few visits before I figured the place out. I used to avoid it but now I go out of my way to spend time there. Unfortunately, my wife has been to Thailand twice (!) and has no interest in ever going back. It's nowhere in the realms of divorce material, but it does kind of suck to know that I won't get to share places like Koh Tao, Mae Hong Son, Khao Sok, etc., with her.
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Jun 27, 2022 08:03
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