Thai Life
Thailand guides, travel tips, cultural insights, and essential local information—discover everything you need to know about living, visiting, and experiencing the Land of Smiles. Get the latest from The Thaiger, your trusted source for Thailand guides.
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Environment: Dealing with DDT – Nature’s greatest enemy
PHUKET: Almost all of us can point to what James Joyce called ” epiphanies”, moments or experiences in our lives that ineradicably changed us or our world view for ever. Such events may have been seared in our memories by pain or fear, others may have been moments of insight or ecstasy. One such experience for me came from reading…
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Property: Self-centered Patong lures seven new hotels
PHUKET: Patong remains Phuket’s epicenter of development, as it attracts seven new hotels to its shores. Hoteliers investing in Patong see the non-seasonal beach as establishing a stable market, while some believe that other beaches such as Kata and Nai Thon are perceived by visitors as being more seasonal, explained Bill Barnett, managing director of C9 Hotelworks and Gazette columnist.…
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Balance Matters: Autism isn’t misbehaving
PHUKET: Robert, a 7-year-old boy, had been anxious about his upcoming trip for weeks. His mother’s job involved an overseas relocation and the family had to take both him and his older sister on a plane journey to visit new potential schools and houses, check out locations and all the usual rigmarole involved in moving countries. Robert’s family had prepared…
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Boating: Slinging for Singapore
PHUKET: A host of Phuket’s leading brokerages and charter companies are preparing to hoist anchor to join the Singapore Yacht Show (SYS) at the ONEº 15 Marina Club at Sentosa from April 23-26. Phuket-based companies alone will have hundreds of millions of baht worth of boats on display at the show. The key attraction for joining the event is the…
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Phuket Pads: Take to the hills for stunning views
PHUKET: Aside from the wishful thinkers who request beachfront properties, the majority of inquiries for properties in Phuket are for those with a sea view. Thankfully, as the island boasts 70 per cent hillside coverage, there are many properties on the island that fit this criteria. It all really depends on how close of a view you wish to have.…
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Diving: All aglow down below
PHUKET: Most divers remember taking a crash course in the color spectrum and light waves from their advanced diving course. Notably, that we see short wavelength colors, such as red, yellow and orange, quickly disappear as we descend on a dive. The lesson is usually combined with a color-comparisons activity on our first deep dive to about 30* meters. There…
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Video Report: Phuket Airpark event a flying success
PHUKET: THE successful Phuket Air Show & Fly’n event at the Phuket Airpark on February 28 is just the first in a number of similar activities planned at Phuket’s only private airfield, with another fun event scheduled to take place in mid-May. Pat James, head of the Phuket Aviation Club, told Up In The Air: “The airshow on March 28…
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Excuse Busters: Busting cholesterol myths
PHUKET: In my previous column, I explained how a published dietician missed the mark when it comes to the potential benefits of consuming coconut oil. This week, I want to focus on the following comment made by the same expert: “Speaking from a medical point of view, coconut oil contains over 90 per cent saturated fatty acids, which are likely…
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Across the land: Harvesting monsoon bounty
PHUKET: Those of us who have lived in a tropical country nearly all our lives tend to take rain for granted. We regularly forget that it’s the rain that keeps the plants a lush green, while also providing for our everyday water-usage needs. My grandmother used to collect rainwater in big Chinese urns in the garden. She would use the…
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Excuse Buster: Overtraining and the stress bucket
PHUKET: Believe it or not, training can increase the amount of stress in your life, and stress accumulates over time. I work closely with many Thai boxing gyms in Phuket and I get asked a lot about overtraining. These guys punish their bodies for six to eight hours every day – that is a ton of stress on the body.…
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Books: Scoring big in Africa
PHUKET: Denis Johnson published his first of three books of poetry at the age of 19. His meticulous attention to words is evident in his 11 books of fiction, which tend to be slim and terse, but intensely descriptive. I’ve read his second novel, Fiskadoro, a post-nuclear apocalypse set in Key West, and his eighth, The Tree of Smoke, an…
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Island Fever: Life after nut rage
PHUKET: We live in a complicated day and age. With our lives revolving around “selfies”, our very existence is punctuated by snapshots expressing extreme delight. Sadly, most of these moments seem to occur only in cyberspace. One recent event that is testament to how quickly our world can about-face is the Korean Air “nut rage” incident involving Heather Cho, a…
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Phuket Pads: Kathu – A golfer’s paradise
PHUKET: Kathu, in the center of Phuket, has a number of advantages over other locations on the island when it comes to residential property. Its central location means that it’s as easy to get to Patong on the west coast, as it is to visit Central Festival shopping mall, or Phuket Town on the east side. It’s also within easy…
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Thinking Green: Striking a beach balance
PHUKET: “We need chairs,” are the plaintive cries in the press, demanding a return to the old model of endless rows of deck chairs and umbrellas. Meanwhile, the vendors are crying, “Our businesses have been hit badly.” And at the same time, environmentalists are claiming, “Our natural treasures are being directly influenced by coastal law enforcement, pollution, construction, density of…
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Looking Back: Kedah state’s magical history
PHUKET: The Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa is an ancient book which chronicles the history of the Kedah state. Kedah is a Malaysian state bordering the south of Thailand. As recently as a century ago, the sultanate was in fact a tributary state of Siam. Sometimes referred to as The Kedah Annals, the Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa was translated by Lt Col James…
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Gardening: A shrub with no enemies – allamandas
PHUKET: It’s astonishing what one can learn by watching Mother Nature at work. As readers know, my garden has long been plagued by hawk moth caterpillars, but what is fascinating is that these voracious munchers have a distinct pecking (or should I say munching) order. Their diet, in strict order of preference, is tabernaemontas, then periwinkles, next adeniums and then…
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Property Watch: Battle of the properties
PHUKET: I was a big fan of the ideas behind Planet of the Apes and the subsequent movies, even the remakes. “Don’t touch the filthy humans!” had a good ring to it and penetrated straight through our general human – though often misplaced – feeling of superiority. In Phuket, I have witnessed a battle between warring factions of owners within…
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Property: Working a wider Angle
PHUKET: One picture is worth a thousand words. Make it a panoramic picture or a virtual tour, and it becomes even more valuable, especially in the competitive world of property sales. Geoff Whitlie of Panoramas Thailand has proved this formula successful in Koh Samui – now he is expanding to Phuket. Before the internet, the real estate business involved a…
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Gardening: Dealing with dry spells
PHUKET: While we are used to the onset of the dry season in Phuket every November, this year has been a bit different, as the monsoon was more prolonged and the drought, once it did arrive, has been more extreme. Not a drop of rain since New Year’s Day in my bit of the island means that we are having…
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Books: Enjoying horrific greatness
PHUKET: For many years on Anzac Day, memorial services for the prisoners of war (POWs) killed on the Death Railway in Kanchanaburi would be presided over by Colonel Edward “Weary” Dunlop, a heroic surgeon and camp commander. Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2014, 334pp) is a highly fictionalized account of his…
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Booming business of silicone mermaid tails
PHUKET: She might have been Melanie Long’s role model growing up, but the one thing the Little Mermaid got wrong was that a woman can’t get too far by flipping her fins. Melanie, also known as Mermaid Melanie, recently completed an enormous one-year undertaking – designing and constructing her own silicone mermaid tail. In the mer-world, tails are a big…
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Blazing Saddles: How to stay young for longer
PHUKET: Phuket is one of the globe’s most desirable retirement havens, drawing thousands of retirees to its sandy shores. In addition, the demographics of the local Thai populace indicate that Thailand is a rapidly aging society, with 21 per cent of the population already over the age of 55. While many of us think that the effects of aging are…
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Phuket Pads: Luxury villa shortage in south
PHUKET: The south of the island is facing a shortage of new upmarket villa developments. There are two main reasons for this: higher land and material costs, and more buyer demand for two-bedroom to three-bedroom villas on smaller plot sizes. However, a home is up for grabs in one of the first upmarket luxury villa developments in the south, Rawai…
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Thinking Green: Protecting our coastlines
PHUKET: “We love our coast and we love the water,” proclaim the founders of the charity organization Sustainable Coastlines, established in New Zealand. “We want to support, protect and be challenged by the sea.” In the past, Phuket’s coastline provided communities with a livelihood from fishing, but this has now moved on to tourism. As a result, today’s great challenge…
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