Thai Life
Discover the latest regional stories and happenings in Thailand with The Thaiger, your source of credible, informative, and reliable updates. Stay informed about important local events, political happenings, social issues, cultural highlights, and entertainment stories, all curated to ensure you never miss out on what’s happening in the Land of Smiles. Our journalists will keep you informed with all the essential Thai life updates and allows you to connect with the community and experience Thailand like a local.
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Sponsored Siam Paragon's 'The Luxury Watch Destination' presents exclusive showcase of luxury timepieces
Siam Paragon reaffirms its positioning as the "Luxury Watch Destination," Thailand’s epicentre of over 43 prestigious watch brands. This underscores the confidence of leading watch houses and Siam Paragon’s commitment to delivering world-class and unparalleled experiences to the customers continuously....
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Phuket Lifestyle: C’mon light my fire
PHUKET: The smell of gasoline lingers on your hands after the flames have been extinguished, and the performance is over. But the smell itself is a little addictive, like a woman’s perfume on the pillow of an empty bed – a reminder of a past flame. A very talented busker (street performer) once took me aside and gave me a…
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Phuket Dining: The other Kiwi juice
PHUKET: Rain squalls, flooding and high winds put a bit of a damper on the recent Steve Bennett MW New Zealand wine dinner held at the Holiday Inn, Patong Beach, but having heard many good reports about this form of Kiwi juice I brave the elements and turn up on time. granita is served to cleanse the palate and I…
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Phuket Dining: Tempting tastes of the Cape
PHUKET: Few things can tell someone about another culture or country like its food. Italian food is full of flavor and body. American food comes in large quantities and fills you up. Thai food is spicy with intricate details and layers. If food is indeed anything to go by to get a sense of culture, then the South African Food…
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Phuket Diving: Camera rolling, regulator in
PHUKET: Toweled dry and eating a pile of pancakes on Andaman Ocean Safaris’ boat, my dive buddy and I head to the upper cabin with lackluster enthusiasm to watch the video from the day’s dive. I had seen these sorts of videos before. They usually came off as gimmicky and, let’s be honest, I had just been on the dive…
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Phuket Lifestyle: From Phuket teacher to London 2012
PHUKET: English judo competitor Sophie Cox has five weeks left until her fight to become Olympic champ – seven years after retiring to Phuket to become a teacher. Sophie,30, broke the news of her Team GB selection as the under 52-kilogram competitor on Twitter recently, with her official team selection announced by the British Olympic Association on June 16. She…
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Phuket Gardening: Our sunny reminders
PHUKET: Typhoon force winds, teeming torrents of rain, roads like lakes, uprooted trees and fractured boughs – hardly the conventional image of a “Land of Smiles” burnished by tropical sunshine beaming from azure heavens. Leaden skies, accompanied by profound gloom suggest that something much more ominously potent than Venus has blotted out the sun. Despite the meteorological office’s pronouncement that…
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Phuket Gardening: Scarlet symbols
PHUKET: Red flowers are often symbolic, or associated with particular events or activities. Take the red rose, England’s national symbol. In the dynastic War of the Roses, the baronial armies of the House of Lancaster wore the red rose in battle against the white rose of York. Bizarrely, that red or “damask” rose may well have been the first cultivated…
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Phuket Lifestyle: Low season diving
PHUKET: As I watched my first rainy season blow in over the Andaman Sea in frightful gusts, I assumed it was time to pack up my dive gear and head over to Kata Beach with a longboard. However, I wasn’t ready to throw the flippers overboard completely, because unlike Khao Lak, Phuket dive companies do run low season trips daily,…
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Phuket gardening: What’s in a name?
PHUKET: Plants can have bizarre common names, but these names remain in use precisely because they are memorable and refer to a plant’s visible features. Clitoria ternatea (even the botanical name is – well – suggestive) is called the butterfly pea. Quesonia has a tall, triangular crown of flowers which gives it the somewhat cryptic label of pagoda plant. Other…
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Phuket books: Boring obsession with rock genius
PHUKET: In my recent review of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, I lamented the dearth of novels about rock musicians. Now along comes the even more recent Stone Arabia (Scribner, New York, 230pp, 2011) by Dana Spiotta. But this is in a every way an inferior book: both shorter and more conventional. Egan tackled plot – time…
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Thai Gallery – Alongkorn Poochamchote
PHUKET: In 2007 when Alongkorn ‘Kob’ Poochamchote was invited to be part of the prestigious art fair, the Florence Biannale , it was the proudest moment of his career. He was the first Thai artist ever to receive such an accolade. After all, this is where fine works of art are shown, admired and purchased. 50-year-old Alongkorn, who was born…
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Phuket Life: In praise of the bag lady
PHUKET: Cast your mind back to any freezing night in New York or London. One of the memories that will likely haunt your conscience is the image of a pathetic human bundle of rags, covered by a frayed blanket or a flattened cardboard box, in a desperate attempt to keep out the biting cold. Her face, if you can see…
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Phuket lifestyle: In a league of their own
PHUKET: There’s a restaurant experience in Kathu that is uncannily like dining in someone’s front room; largely because it is in someone’s front room. The restaurant in question is Royale Nam Tok (RNT) hosted by Corry Ringoet and Marc De Schriyver, (a Belgian partnership) who, after having enjoyed 20 years of success operating their Antwerp restaurant, De Tafeljoncker moved lock,…
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Phuket lifestyle: Branching out with colorful nudibranchs
PHUKET: Perhaps it’s embarrassing, but I first got involved in diving because of the lure of the unknown treasures, which I “knew” were lying at my feet, just below the surface. I wanted to discover statues, gold, porcelain, all those precious and valuable objects that were lost to humanity. However, a couple archaeological ethics classes and museum practicum courses managed…
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Phuket lifestyle: Saving Thailand’s mangroves
PHUKET: “Conserving the mangroves may not be as sexy as saving the rainforest, but it’s arguably even more important for the environment,” says Udo Gattenlöhner, Executive Director of the Global Nature Fund (GNF). The non-profit, independent foundation is facilitating an international project designed to rehabilitate lost mangrove forests in Thailand, India, Sri Lanka and Cambodia. Funded by the German government,…
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Andaman manta rays take flight
PHUKET: Dive companies like Sea Bees can guarantee a lot of aspects of their trips. They can guarantee a high-quality breakfast, good equipment and knowledgeable staff, but what they cannot guarantee are those precious and glorious sightings of roaming mega-fauna, like manta rays.Every diver last week may have spotted the sweeping black wings of a manta ray in the distance…
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Phuket Health: The doctor will see you now
PHUKET: With the Phuket Health and Fitness Festival set to kick off this weekend, keynote speaker Dr John Hinwood stopped by the Phuket Gazette’s TV studios for an interview with organizer Michael Massey, a driving force behind the Rawai – Nai Harn Group who are hosting the event. Dr Hinwood says that he will focus on the mindset necessary to…
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Blooming jellyfish stay for safety-stop
PHUKET: Directly in front of my mask, as we hang on the mooring line for our safety-stop, is a small jellyfish (jellies or sea jellies depending on your concern about the misnomer), not a box jellyfish or an infamous jelly-like Portuguese man-o-war washed up from Australia, just a little ambiguous jellyfish. Then through the bubbling of our regulators comes the…
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Phuket lifestyle: Heavy-duty gardening
PHUKET: If you think that the ‘Phuket Gazette’ is a parochial newspaper, then have a re-think. I recently received an email from Honolulu, no less, about a piece on palms. While the writer commended my observations about growing ferns and other epiphytes on palm trunks, he took me to task for writing about, “a very tired and overplanted group,” suitable…
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Phuket Lifestyle: It’s all go for Hugo
PHUKET: It’s Saturday night at the Hard Rock Cafe in Patong and a young man steps out onto the stage armed with his trademark stetson hat, a Gibson guitar, a new band and some sultry killer tracks from his first solo album. On March 24 Hugo was back home in Thailand and performing for the first time here since 2005.…
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Phuket Lifestyle: Top chefs to share a kitchen
PHUKET: The old adage of “too many cooks spoil the broth” receives a sound thrashing later this month and in fact will be given “Six of the Best” with an annual gastronomic fundraiser to help underprivileged children on Phuket. “Six of the Best” features half a dozen chefs from Phuket’s premier luxury resorts and restaurants, who will join culinary forces…
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Phuket Lifestyle: Traffic jams to peanut butter
PHUKET: Good news that big projects on Phuket are finally getting government attention. These include a light rail track from the airport and a mountain tunnel through to Patong with plans for overpasses and underpasses to move traffic along the Bypass Road. However, plans for solving traffic congestion at Chalong Circle where thousands of Thais and expats from Rawai and…
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Phuket Lifestyle: Into the Live and Present Moment
PHUKET: The latest addition to the coffee shop scene in Kamala Beach, north of Phuket, is Live Present Moment. It stands out from the crowd with its original and charming decor and menu offering healthy Thai food, snacks, and all-day breakfast. The proprietor Noppamas ‘Ae’ Mungwiriya explains that ‘Live’, which opened its doors a year ago, was created to serve…
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Phuket Lifestyle: Those other bikers heading to Phuket
PHUKET: With Big Bike Week just around the corner it is good to remember that Phuket also attracts the pedal- powered variety of biker thanks to Siam Bike Tours run by avid cyclist Martin Brot. Martin is a sprightly 54 year old with a healthy tan, deep smile lines at the corners of his eyes and well developed calf muscles.…
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Phuket Property: Community recycling center re-opens
PHUKET: We’ve all been there. The two small batteries in your television remote control have died and need replacing. On the way home you buy two new batteries and then replace the old. Now what? Having learned that you should never throw them in the bin as they will leak toxic elements into the environment, you’ll probably stick them in…
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Phuket Property: Checking into the big sleep; Phuket property briefs
PHUKET: I am a big fan of film noir and even more so those Raymond Chandler novels that became Hollywood classics, such as The Big Sleep. There are a million stories in the naked city, and these day’s Phuket is certainly taking on a noisy urban feel. When you scan the crowd of expatriated persons at any restaurant, bar or…
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Phuket Gardening: Blooming plumerias
PHUKET: In an email both quirky and perceptive, a fellow contributor to the Phuket Gazette recently confessed to dealing with Phuket’s 35 degree heat by gardening at night, and thereby, and unsurprisingly, incurring the curiosity of his neighbors. Personally I haven’t tried it. But, I entirely concur with his subsequent reasoning that because the island’s soil is so difficult to…
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Phuket Lifestyle: Seven’s heaven for our Lady Pie
PHUKET: After last year’s successful involvement with the rugby world’s premier 7s tournament, Phuket’s Lady Pie can claim world renown and will once again fill more appreciative bellies with their themed and delicious fare at the 2012 event that starts tomorrow. Now in their sixth year of operation in Cherng Talay, Lady Pie owners Susan and Harry Usher are thrilled…
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Phuket History: The slow road to Bangkok
PHUKET: Towards the end of the 18th century, trade and logistics was tough business. Phuket, or Junk Ceylon, during that time was rich in tin, a semi-precious metal that was highly sought after by European and Indian traders. Tin mining was therefore an important source of revenue for the island. Because tin mines in Junk Ceylon were considered government property,…
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Phuket Lifestyle: Shark Point diving
PHUKET: There was a sinking feeling in my stomach as Raya’s dive boat approached Hin Musang, better known as Shark Point. Casually floating not more than a kilometer away from our splash-in point were two ragged-looking commercial fishing boats. Rumors and grumbles that Shark Point’s namesake sighting, leopard sharks, were becoming a rarity began to take on some merit. Because…
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