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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Phuket lifestyle: Emptying the Tank
In England there is a children’s TV series called Thomas the Tank Engine about a plucky railway engine called Thomas. In the USA there is another story called The Little Engine That Could. In Phuket we have our own cuddly DJ ‘Tom the Tank’ who is also bravely puffing “I think I can, I think I can, ” as he…
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Phuket Property: How to acquire Thai property
PHUKET: Separating emotional excitement from the need to impartially assess the risks of an important investment when purchasing a dream home is not easy. A real estate agent may have shown the purchaser glamorous photographs and conducted a personalized tour, so the desire to sign on the dotted line might impair the purchaser’s judgment. The real estate industry in Thailand,…
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Holiday Inn opens in Ao Nang
PHUKET: The Holiday Inn brand has arrived on the coastline of Krabi with the company taking over the 55-guestroom Sala Talay Resort and Spa on Ao Nang beach recently. “We are pleased to announce the initial phase of the opening of our first Holiday Inn property in this beautiful region of Krabi.” says Steve Ng, the general manager of the…
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Phuket Property Watch: Location, location, location
PHUKET: Reading the above headline you would have to believe that either I somehow suffered a momentary nervous breakdown, or else those three drinks before dinner were triple shots. Does the truth lay at the bottom of a glass, obscured from sight by the swirling ghost of a melting ice cube? Probably not. There isn’t much poetic license in real…
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Phuket Books: The resident fashionista of Guantanamo
PHUKET: Norman Mailer was never known for his generosity to young writers. The one author he did adopt was the convict Jack Abbott, author of the prison memoir, In the Belly of the Beast. Mailer championed his cause and when Abbott was released from prison, he promptly stabbed a waiter to death. But Alex Gilvarry has been named a Norman…
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Phuket Humor: Death from the Ozone Layer
PHUKET: There’s a new theory about what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. It wasn’t a meteorite that wiped them out. It was their own farting. “The animals, weighing from 80 to 100 tons, would eat…between 130 and 260 kilos of food every day,” according to one report. “They would fart non-stop.” Their farts contained a high proportion of methane…
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Phuket Tech: A 3G auction in a 4G world
PHUKET: In last week’s Live Wire, I talked about the recent “3G auction,” wherein AIS, DTAC and TrueMove each acquired three of their own channels near the 2.1 GHz frequency, for delivering 3G services. The auction, plagued by delays, infighting, legal drama, bureaucratic wheel spinning, political machinations, and an unknown amount of tea changing hands, has finally brought legitimate HSPA/HSPA+…
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Phuket Property: Looking to expand in Asia
PHUKET: After an absence of two and a half years, Regent Hotels & Resorts is setting its sights on finding three properties to manage in Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Hua Hin. The company currently manages a property in Phuket which is expected to open in December. Regent Phuket Cape Panwa offers 105 rooms and expects to keep 50 per cent…
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Phuket Diving: Rise into Cathedral’s darkness
PHUKET: Our dive team surfaces into the blackness of “The Cathedral”, torch beams bounce off the yellow walls and catch stalactites hanging from the ceiling like delicate icicles well above us. With BCDs inflated the team relaxes. Below, the water glows, changing from a sapphire blue to an emerald green within the depths – this is Koh Haa Yai. In…
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Phuket Property: Sansiri to build the Base Uptown
PHUKET: Looking to build on the recent sell-out success of “The Base Downtown” condominium project in central Phuket, Sansiri recently unveiled their new “The Base Uptown” earlier this week. The ‘urban lifestyle’ condominium project will feature a total of 387 units in three buildings, each with seven floors. The project will span a five rai (8,000 square meters) plot adjacent…
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Phuket Gardening: The three o’clock flower
PHUKET: Today we consider two purple bloomers new to these columns. One, the Indian rhododendron (melastoma malabathricum), with flowers a glorious shade of deep magenta, was discovered by your correspondent in a garden center on Chao Fa West, south of Phuket Town, better known for its range of rustic stone. For a moment I wondered whether it was the same…
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Phuket Life: 100 US Navy service projects in Phuket
PHUKET: THE USS Peleliu returned to Phuket recently and conducted the US Navy’s 100th Community Service Project in the greater Phuket area. In June 2006, the Rotary Club of Patong approached the US Navy Attaché’s office in the US Embassy in Bangkok about doing community service projects together with the US Navy ships that visited Phuket for rest & relaxation.…
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Phuket Gardening: More entries in the Annual Report
PHUKET: Last weeks’ list of annuals in the Phuket Gazette were predictable choices. The only surprise was that all of them even the so-called African marigold originated in America. Impatiens balsamina is a bit different, not just because it is Asian, but because it took me a while to discover its identity. But it is not uncommon. In fact the…
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Phuket Lifestyle: The race that stops a nation
PHUKET: Next month marks the 152nd anniversary of the ‘Race That Stops the Nation’ or, as it has more recently become known, ‘The Race That Stops Two Nations’, because Australia and New Zealand go into lock-down on the day of the famous Melbourne Cup. This year, you’ll have a chance to be part of the celebrations, when the Phuket International…
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Phuket Diving: Re-breather revolution
PHUKET: The pool is silent. Three divers, but not a sound. Then, right before our ascent, we flip the switch on our regulators to open-circuit. There is a roar of bubbles that destroys the silence – it’s inappropriate. Yet in reality, up until my recreational re-breather “Try Dive”, a cacophony of bubbles ballooning in my face was all I had…
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Phuket Food: Chalong’s Rimtang
PHUKET: The first thing you notice when walking into Rimtang@Chalong, Phuket, is its smart ambiance. Past the intricately carved wooden door, is a light and airy space, tastefully decorated with Thai objet d’art and minimalist furniture. Tall glass windows invite in the surrounding flower garden and the tantalizing views of Wat Chalong beyond. Talking to the staff, we learn that…
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Phuket Gardening: An annual event
PHUKET: It’s been about a year since we talked about annuals. So that’s my excuse for returning to them today. The reason annuals don’t get much exposure in these columns is because they only exist for one year and will, like Wimbledon, make their statement – a floral one in this case – just once during that time. Shrubs, on…
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Phuket Property: An alternative holiday choice
PHUKET: Kanita Resort & Camping is a family-run agricultural resort on the Karon hillside. The property started out as a resort with bungalows, but over time it has evolved into a unique project with various accommodation options and activities. Resort owner Satchaphol Thongsom and his wife Kanita explain how the project started: “At first we bought 10 rai (16,000 sqm)…
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Phuket Books: A question of savages
PHUKET: I picked up Don Winslow’s Savages (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2010, 358pp) with a good deal of eagerness, having just finished the much-lauded prequel The Kings of Cool, which impressed me with its zany energy, veering between screenplay, poetic stanzas and wise-guy syncopated prose, deeply empathic with the surfer/grass dealer ethos of Laguna Beach, California. Winslow is a…
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Phuket Tech: Please play fair
PHUKET: The competitive business world can easily be compared to elite sports. In both, the stakes for winning or losing are extremely high, with people being stretched to constantly deliver their best results. At sports events, ethical behavior and values such as respect, honor and sportsmanship, get utmost importance. Cheating is not tolerated in world-class sports. And, in exactly the…
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Phuket Gardening: Books on tropical gardening
PHUKET: Much of the knowledge one acquires about plants is learnt in the acid-bath of experience. And certainly there is no substitute for hands-on gardening. How often we find ourselves puzzled by the advice we find in books by so-called “experts”. Nonetheless, we often do need to check things – names, cultural requirements, growing habits and so on. And different…
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Phuket Lifestyle: Property expo offers luxury…. and a helicopter ride
PHUKET: Fancy an opportunity to test drive a super car? Or go for a ride in a private helicopter? Or how about enjoying a cruise on a marquee yacht such as the 80-foot Emily Rose? These possibilities and much more will grace Phuket when the all new SMART Property and Lifestyle Expo takes place at Royal Phuket Marina, December 27-30.…
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Land of smiles: An interview with Higgs Boson
PHUKET: The wonderful world of particle physics is agog at the recent discovery of the ‘Higgs boson’. This is not to be confused with the ‘Higgs bosom’, a stunning anatomical configuration possessed by Miss Fanny Higgs, an exotic dancer in Las Vegas. No. A Higgs boson is a subatomic particle. Through my extensive mafia connections I managed to score an…
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Phuket Lifestyle: The island’s own daredevil
PHUKET: Sometimes Phuket is compared to the Wild West, and, although a bit dramatic, it can be true. You never know what can happen here, or who you might find doing it. The island has a tendency to draw extraordinary individuals. Quiet neighborhoods overlooking the ocean that house the secretly rich and famous. You might meet the person who invented…
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Phuket’s divers speak, the world listens
PHUKET: PADI dive professionals, from dive master to instructor examiner, united and made Phuket’s reefs their number one priority by taking part in Go Eco Phuket’s record breaking reef cleanup. Tasked with bringing up the bigger debris and the 4.5 ton net in Banana Bay those on board Khao Lak Scuba Adventures Manta Queen III were obviously excited about the…
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Phuket Property: The island’s very own superhero
PHUKET: Growing up, I never quite got into comic book superheros. Sure there was superman, Batman and Robin, The Flash and frankly more than I could list in an entire column. I preferred reading books or watching those old black and white classic movies to all that ‘slam bam thank you ma’am’. Hollywood got hold of the trend and even…
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Phuket Property: Thai property investors facing AEC land ownership hurdles, local competition issues
PHUKET: Although the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) will open up opportunities for Thai investors in other countries in the region, the investors will have to be concerned about barriers to entering the property sector in those nations, experts have said.They voiced this view at a seminar titled “AEC: Pros and Cons for the Property Sector”, conducted by the Real Estate…
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Phuket Environment: Jellyfish are back in the spotlight
PHUKET: A piece published recently in a London daily newspaper may have created some unnecessary alarm in Phuket. The story concerned a British tourist who apparently fell overboard while on a boat in Thailand. She was so severely stung by jellyfish that she ended up in hospital with the equivalent of third degree burns, not only excruciatingly painful but which…
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Phuket Gardening: Having it both ways
PHUKET: I am aware that it may sound heinous, but having given the matter some thought, I don’t believe the tropical gardener should be too preoccupied with the hazards of poisonous plants. After all, only a few, such as the lantana, have toxic berries or fruit.Take the allamanda cathartica or ban burii. One of the best of all tropical climbing…
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Phuket Lifestyle: It’s fun to eat at the ACYC
PHUKET: Sunday is a day when many of us generally have a lie-in, followed by a lazy morning pottering around the house, until thoughts turn to lunch. Dreamy thoughts of a traditional Sunday lunch… you know, the ones we used to have ‘back home’, with roasted meat, potatoes, peas, gravy and all the trimmings. But it’s already late Sunday morning,…
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