donny

Alan, the problem was that your Telewest phone line wasn't a regular phone line; Telewest is a cable provider and everything, TV/Phone/Broadband, comes down one cable. There's no way you can get a DSL service like AOL via that cable but, instead, Telewest provide pretty much the UK's top-rated Broadband service, albeit cable broadband, with speeds of up to 10MB if I remember correctly.

Fans are better but, unfortunately, the rooms that have them tend to be cheaper/dingier. Aircon is a major contributor towards illness including, believe it or not, those painful ear infections that can drain the fun out of any vacation. I've been told that it helps to take out the filter, wash it in the shower and leave it to dry before putting it back in - the hotels rarely if ever bother to do this and a lot of muck builds up.

Wow. I wasn't aware of PBG but it's a pity to hear about any Pattaya forum going to the wall over unpaid hosting bills, it's an awful waste of all the posts that were contributed. Scumbag, if you know the forum owners personally, let them know that I can give them space on one of my servers for free.

Was a better site

???? www.gmail.com What do you mean? I'm sitting in Edinburgh right now and it appears just fine for me. Pretty much everyone I know uses it every day. I know that there is some dispute over the domain gmail.co.uk but who the Hell wants a .co.uk for their email address, all that happens is people remember your address as a .com anyway. Same goes for yahoo.co.uk and hotmail.co.uk, retarded idea.

They're stealing our seed!!

You're a decent bloke, jballstate. Tell them that you like diving and have converted to Buddhism They won't believe it for a second, of course, but it'll make conversations a little less awkward.

Jesus, at 800b guest fee per girl, I don't think I'd be organizing any gang bangs there It would be great if someone could start a list of hotels in Pattaya that charge guest fees OR are girl unfriendly, use the Wiki so that others can contribute to it over time. You could start the wiki page with just the Amari and make a post in the Members Bar asking others to contribute their favorites.

The problem is your "free" email address, they reject them because it's too easy for spammers and trolls to create loads of accounts. If you can still remember it, use the address that your ISP gave you. If you can't remember how to access that, they might accept a Gmail address because spammers tend avoid Gmail's extra layer of checking and stick with Hotmail and Yahoo.

Stayed there the first time I visited Pattaya. Nice rooms and grounds but would never stay there again because not girl friendly; I think they actually charged a hefty guest fee.

I was reading on the ThaiVisa site that a lot of foreign buyers are now abandoning their deposits on condos in the new developments because of jitters about the problems they might encounter when trying to resell company-owned property. This has accentuated the glut in an already stagnant market. Having said that, derycolin's condo does look nice and is priced realistically - the 2.5m he was looking for 6 months ago was definitely too much. The prices the agents promote online and in the press are complete nonsense, designed to suggest that the bubble is still going but don't reflect the prices at which properties are actually changing hands. There was a discussion about this a few weeks back when someone tried to sell a condo here for a ridiculous price.

Cleanse, purge, ebay.

Tom, you're right that wait times for Emirates aren't more that a few hours, it must have been the prices flying out from Glasgow that put me off in that case; at the moment, economy return tickets for a month hence are hitting almost £800. There are, however, some seriously mismatched schedules out there; all I'm saying is that, sometimes, before rushing to buy the cheapest ticket, it pays to think about the convenience of your departure and arrival times and, also, check to make sure you don't have a nightmare stopover in the middle. One stopover stretch I was looking at at one stage actually had me looking to see if DBX had a reasonably-priced hotel like the one in Singapore Airport (they don't).

Big Chief, from what you're saying, there's a fair amount of work available among farang but how hard is it to get into the right circle. When I was a fresh-off-the-boat teenager looking for illegal work in Boston, I simply went to an Irish pub and was set up within less than half an hour. The place was a crazy mix between a pub, an employment agency and a commodities exchange floor, with deals being done an a frantic pace, I'd never experienced anything like it. It there a similarly dynamic but informal market for competent farang workers in Thailand right now? And, if so, what sort of things are poeple looking for: fluent Thai, solid previous experience back home? etc

Funnily enough, a girl who's interested will notice you while you're all standing around waiting to board - remember, she probably makes this journey quite often isn't going to waste the opportunity to meet you. Certainly, a bit of eye contact or a friendly smile from you at that stage will almost guarantee that she ends up sitting nearby. Even better, ask "Does it take long to get to Pattaya?" or some other easy, bullshit question and, if she speaks English, bingo, you're in business. Even if you aren't as proactive as that, you'll have probably end up with one person next to you and another just across the very narrow aisle. If you aren't drunk and are friendly, you'll almost certainly end up talking to one of them. And, yeah, perhaps it won't be a BG, perhaps you'll end up talking to an expat, getting good advice and hearing funny anecdotes. Either way, you don't lose and it beats the Hell out of sitting bored in the back of a taxi.

One thing I've noticed flying out from Edinburgh to various destinations over the last 5 years is that most of the delays you hear over the tannoys are flights to the London airports. I guess that Edinburgh Airport itself is less congested and, therefore, generates less of the delays itself, but still has to rely upon the other airports. My impression is that flights to other well-run airports such as Schiphol tend to go like clockwork. Not that the London airports are not well-run but, frankly, they don't have enough capacity. By taking London out of the equation, you can risk running your times closer together. Yeah, I quite often come across posts online by guys who are horrified to discover that their changeable ticket needs a fee to actually get changed; it's all there in the small-print when they book but a lot of people seem to trip up on that. I should have mentioned that the BMI and EVA one-way came to £362, not exactly cheap but really not that bad compared to return tickets that were flexible enough to suit my needs. I spent quite a while researching the different options and, by the time you rule out tickets that simply cannot be changed, tot up the fees for those that can and factor in the possibility that the airline you've tied yourself to may not even have seats available in your class for the dates you want to change to, I realized that the ultimate flexibility would be to simply get over there one-way and, when some problem pops up in the UK that I have to return for, buy the cheapest return ticket I can find at that time. I guess the real advantage of buying the tickets in BKK, at least for those of us who want to spend more time in LOS than the UK, is that they can be the cheapo 1-month returns. Yes, good point, I'm applying for a Multiple Entry visa on Monday, will hopefully get it back before the end of the week. Thanks for the advice Alan.

Alan, I usually fly KLM Edinburgh - Amsterdam - Bangkok because they tend to standardize their fares from all UK cities, so, we in Scotland don't have to pay a surcharge. When you choose your flights, you can leave either a very short gap in Schiphol (because you've already checked in at Edinburgh) or you give yourself a few hours to head into the city. You can also book it as a multi-city trip, paying a little more to stop off in Amsterdam for a few days. I have the impression that Schiphol Airport is a lot better run and less of a hassle for me than the London airports. For my next trip, however, I wanted the convenience of a one-way ticket and KLM's prices for that were mad, so, I'll be flying BMI EDI-LHR 18:25-19:55 EVA LHR-BKK 21:35-14:35 ... which I think are pretty ideal times. As someone who lives there, do you tend to buy your return tickets in LOS? Part of my reason for getting a one-way this time is so that I can flip over to buying all my tickets in LOS, do you reckon that's a good idea?

Tom, why the aggression? We are talking about airline deals, for God's sake! When I talk about spending hours in deserted airports, I'm obviously not talking about Amsterdam and Frankfurt, there are regular connections to those hubs. I'm talking about the main flight between Europe and Asia being indirect. Do you seriously think that someone living in Scotland hasn't thoroughly checked out the options from Glasgow? IIRC, Emirates Glasgow - BKK service is particularly bad on the return and was exactly what I was talking about when I described a huge wait at a lousy time. I wouldn't mind being stuck in Abu Dabi or whatever for 12 hours if it was in the daytime and I could get out and visit the city.

Torrenova, I don't agree with your tot. I've already said, earlier in this thread, that people arriving at Don Muang after a 10 hour flight shouldn't bother mickeying about buses, they should just hop into a taxi and get taken straight to their Pattaya hotel. Mind you, myself, if I arrived in the daytime, I might be tempted. For anyone who just wants a bit of change from Pattaya for a day or two, however, the bus is perfect. The Pattaya bus station isn't that far away, how much would a moto taxi really cost? Then, at the Bangkok end, you're right on the BTS line, just a couple stops from whatever Sukhumvit hotel you're staying at and a few more to the Siam Center or MBK. I forget how much the BTS costs, but it's just a few baht. You're wrong about the buses being for hand luggage only, they are exactly the same as the coaches back in the UK or the Greyhounds in the States: they store the luggage in the hold underneath, which isn't unlocked between Pattaya and Bangkok. It isn't about saving $30 dollars (although, of course, that's not chump change in Thailand) but I genuinely don't think that catching a taxi is any better. Okay, I guess it's a little faster but, my God, the taxi journey is boring as Hell, why miss out on the opportunity to have a long chat with a BG without having to buy her a lady drink every ten minutes

Yup, the bus is no hardship whatsoever and the conversations I've had have been as interesting as any I've had in a bar. It's also good to know that, should the urge strike me, I can hop onto a bus at any time and get up to BKK cheaply.

Bus from Ekami to Pattaya is fine if you are travelling from Bangkok (city as opposed to airport), really don't see that a taxi is that much more of a convenience. Do it once just to see how easy it is. Would still, however, catch a taxi if going from the airport to Pattaya, but only because I would be tired after long flight.

Thanks AJ.

"Should I fly indirect?" is the long-haul sister question to that short-haul classic "Should I buy the £5 flight at 6AM or the £25 flight at 1PM?". When the budget airlines first burst onto the scene in Europe, we all made the mistake of greedily grabbing the cheapest tickets possible, usually so that we could brag to our mates that we flew to Germany for £15 or whatever. What we had to learn the hard way is that 6AM flights are no picnic. Now, when we sit up all night trying to find the best way to get to LOS, a natural reaction to the hundreds of pounds involved is to grab any saving we can, especially as the flights last year were so much cheaper. Unfortunately, it's all too easy to forget that an indirect flight usually means hanging around a deserted airport all night, wrestling with plastic bucket seats specially designed to stop people lying down. Neither leg of the journey really gives you enough time to settle into any kind of sleep, so, you arrive in BKK exhausted instead of excited. Indirect flights are almost always a false economy. The exception is when you take a direct flight to another S.E. Asian destination, with the intention of experiencing that city for a night or two before taking a short and ultra-cheap Air Asia flight to BKK. That's a good idea if you are interested in seeing that other city and it certainly opens up your options - earlier this year, I got a £350 (inc. taxes) KLM 'Far East Special' return from Edinburgh to Singapore, well worth it because flying from Scotland usually adds quite a whack to the price of tickets. It wouldn't be worthwhile purely as a money-saving exercise but, the way I see it, I got to stay in Singapore again for free!

The no-brainer solution for anyone taking photos in LOS is to upload them to an online service. I pay $25 per year for a pro account at Flickr but you can get free accounts too. I originally signed up simply to have somewhere to put my pics but was surprised to discover that it made organizing them so easy and fun that I got more into taking photos. There are loads of similar services, all very cheap and more convenient then hiding memory sticks up your arse.

Is there a discount for staying a month?