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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Land of Smiles: The mallification of Phuket
PHUKET: Get ready, Phuket people. It’s coming. It has already saturated Bangkok, and is moving rapidly southward, like an alien slime. I’m talking about mallification: the process by which a nation becomes overrun with enormous shopping malls. Now the mallification of Bangkok has progressed to the point where they are considering appointing a Minister of Malls to oversee the process.…
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Phuket Property: Baan Bua brings Nai Harn Luxury
PHUKET: Nai Harn has long been a popular area of Phuket among expats and holiday makers. The sense of being on Phuket, but in an area that feels a bit isolated from the rest of the island is one of the draws, along with the beautiful beach and lush landscape. Nai Harn Baan Bua was launched in 1999 and now…
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Phuket Property: Zcape condos
PHUKET: Local property investors are confident that Tri Property’s affordable new Zcape Condominium, currently under construction near Laguna, is just what Phuket’s residential property market needs. More than 70 per cent of Zcape’s smartly-designed compact units were reserved within days of the sales office opening at the site of the new, low-density development on Baandon Cherng-Talay Rd. Conceived by Bangkok-based…
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Phuket Property: Natural Selection
PHUKET: Kamala is an area full of designer condos and luxurious sprawling villas. To really find any privacy and escape the construction in a part of Phuket that’s being built every hour of every day is no easy task. Kamala Waterside will be a tropical oasis situated on one rai of land in one of the most sought after addresses…
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Phuket Gazette: Book and film review
PHUKET: Oliver Stone’s new movie is Savages, a thriller about the drug trade in Laguna Beach, California. Starring a roll call of Hollywood A-listers – Blake Lively, Salma Hayek, Benicio Del Toro, John Travolta – the film is based on a crime novel by Don Winslow. A former Private Investigator in real life, Winslow has written 15 novels and is…
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Phuket Lifestyle: Mermaids do exist
PHUKET: We all know the power of a beautiful woman. It isn’t the power of brute strength – they have a much subtler influence. Sirens can confuse even the cleverest among men. In Homer’s The Odyssey, sirens sang an enchanted song to Odysseus and his crew. The song caused them to steer off course towards jagged cliffs – nearly colliding…
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Phuket Gardening: Top operators hedge bets
PHUKET: Driving around Phuket today, I was interested to see what plants were being utilized in new developments: as ornamental additions to reception areas, flanking boundary walls, or as borders and hedges. It makes doleful reading, but it is sadly the case that almost all budget-priced condominiums and shop-houses – and there is a rash of new ones – simply…
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Phuket Lifestyle: Paying it forward with a gift that keeps on giving
PHUKET: A student from Phuket who was forced to turn to charity to fulfill his dream of becoming a doctor has graduated as one of this year’s top honors graduates from Prince of Songkhla University in Nakhon Pathom. Thirawat Jewpakanon won first class honors, was named as a top-ten student in a class of 190, led his 30-member intern rankings…
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Phuket Lifestyle: The big zipper
PHUKET: Keeping with the idea that people and modern primates were once related by a distant cousin, I’d like to make a comparison. Humans are social like primates, we use tools like they do and we have the same urge to swing recklessly through the tops of trees for sheer amusement. Such amusement is available in our back yard (a…
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Discovering Phuket’s “must have’ fashions
PHUKET: Trends in fashion can be bewildering from one generation to another, but they help us to recognize significant periods and events in time. This is true for Europe and other Western cultures, but it doesn’t seem to work like that for people living here in Asia. Spotting what will become a trend is something designers can do with ease.…
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Phuket Gardening: Raising the roof
PHUKET: Have you ever felt surplus to requirements? I certainly did on a recent visit to a penthouse roof garden in Royal Phuket Marina. So imaginative in conception and so meticulously tended, there seemed little I could suggest to enhance its lavish charms. Of course, there are roof gardens and then there are roof gardens.Some are actually constituted of a…
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Phuket Diving: PADI centers clean up Phuket
PHUKET: After coming face to face with shattered coral reef systems all over the world and confronting messes of plastic bags and tangled fishing nets, which are not-so-slowly strangling one of the world’s most important ecosystems, divers understand the importance of reef cleanups. There is of course that feeling of only delaying the inevitable, but isn’t that why we try…
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Phuket Culture: Getting ready for the rains retreat
PHUKET: This weekend’s full moon heralds the official start of the rainy season in Thailand, marked by back-to-back Buddhist Holidays, Asaha Bucha and Khao Pansa. For non-Buddhists, the long “dry” weekend to welcome the “wet” season is a good opportunity to relax, if nothing else. For most devout Buddhists, however, there is much deeper meaning and purpose to the holy…
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Phuket Diving: Gear and skills part the waters
PHUKET: When was the last time something truly fresh hit the dive market? Yes, every year we get niftier regulators, more swanky dive watches and new fin designs that we can’t resist at least window-shopping for. But, when was the last time something was put on the market for recreational divers that really parted the waters – changed the way…
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Phuket People: Raise a toast to a coffee roast
PHUKET: Each cup of coffee served at Hock Hoe Lee has more than 50 years of history steeped inside. It’s a taste to be savored. Three generations of one Phuket family have worked tirelessly to create the coffee served up today at Hock Hoe Lee, which has shops in town and in Rawai. Back in 1958, when Chinese migrant Cheng…
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Phuket Books: Present at the creation
PHUKET: Carole King is a 70-year-old grandmother with four adult children from two of her four husbands. At age 48, she took up with a 27-year-old actor and kept him for six years before swapping him for another younger man for another seven. She did this because she could. She is Carole King. For the 25 million people who bought…
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Phuket People: From Yala to “la la la’
PHUKET: Warunee ‘Gig’ Suwannurak is no ordinary singer. The Phuket-based diva, and recent ‘Thailand’s Got Talent’ sensation tells her story to the Phuket Gazette. Her powerful delivery of Pink’s (rendition of) What’s Up in the first round of Thailand’s Got Talent competition received a rapturous applause from the spellbound audience. One of the three judges proclaimed: “This woman will go…
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Phuket Health: Doctor’s orders – eat dark chocolate
PHUKET: Scientists have known for a long time about the protective effects of this “magic food” on atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries). I call it “magic food” because the full official name of the main component in dark chocolate is Theobroma Cocoa or “Food of God” – from the Greek words theo (God) and broma (drink). Supposedly, cocoa has been…
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Phuket Gardening: Taking the pisonia
PHUKET: THE Phuket Gazette is certainly living up to its status as an international newspaper. Bernard King from Auckland, New Zealand, no less, wonders if I can send him some pisonia seeds. He writes: “I am a disciple of growing tropical plants in a cool country. I have managed to grow a small mango tree that is bearing fruits. I…
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Phuket Lifestyle: APEC launches photo contest
PHUKET: THE Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Secretariat has extended an invitation to the region’s photographers to submit pictures that best capture the organization’s priorities. The photos should be inspired by four themes: trade and investment liberalization regional economic integration strengthening food security establishing reliable supply chains intensive cooperation to foster innovative growth These themes reflect the policy priorities that APEC…
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Phuket Fashion – From dawn till dusk
PHUKET: Everyone has days that are scheduled to the max – overbooked and jam-packed with meetings, lunches, get-togethers and parties. For many women, the challenge is how to make one outfit work for everything that a busy schedule demands. Maintaining great style throughout the day doesn’t come easy, but with a little planning, flexibility and resourcefulness, you’ll find a way…
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Phuket Diving: Knowledge trumps beauty of ignorance: sea snakes edition
PHUKET: Not every dive in Phuket’s waters, but often enough, a diver comes across a critter that they become inexplicably and completely fascinated with. The vast majority of dive instructors and masters seem to have their own sea-animal fetishes – from blue dragons to mantis shrimps. They’re usually obscure choices that lean away from charismatic mega-fauna like sharks and mantas…
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Phuket Gardening: Another golden boy
PHUKET: “HELIOTROPISM” – now there’s a word to conjure with, but what does it mean? Don’t use big words if you don’t explain them. Well, for the uninitiated, heliotropism is a plant’s diurnal motion, its capacity to slowly and imperceptibly turn towards the sun. (Helios is the Greek sun god, trope means turn in Greek). By doing this, a plant…
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Phuket Lifestyle: A head start ahead of the rest
PHUKET: Saturday is usually a fun day for everyone. It’s the beginning of the weekend and most people are looking forward to spending time doing what they want to do, and being with the ones they love. Saturday, June 30 was an especially happy day for students of the HeadStart International School (HSIS). It wasn’t just a regular Saturday but…
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Phuket Diving: Rhythm of the night
PHUKET: Watching the sun set behind Koh Doc Mai from the top deck of Sea Bees Excalibur II, an adventurous thrill creeps through me – I’m going on a night dive, and it’s been ages. When was the last time you went night diving? For most of us it was probably part of our advance diver training, and maybe we…
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Thai Gallery – Patima Khunpromkessara
PHUKET: Troubles in the southern provinces of Thailand are real and constant. Political unrest results in a spate of bombings, taking the lives of many and the problems look set to continue. Born and raised in Yala, Patima Khunpromkessara remembers just the opposite. “It was a neat little town. Do you know that we have a town plan similar to…
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Phuket Property: Crime and punishment in paradise
PHUKET: The tragic murder of an Australian travel agent in Kata recently has created a hailstorm of calls for action from both public and private sectors. There is little doubt that over the past few years a steady increase in crime and a straining infrastructure has thrust the island headlong into a self-induced, perfect storm. It’s easy to jump on…
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Phuket Entertainment: Impaling history
PHUKET: Film-makers love revising history to suit a story. Some, such as Oliver Stone, weave their fabrications so subtly into the weft and warp of historical accuracy that they can become instant conspirators. Others, such as Quentin Tarantino, strip history down to its underpants and strap a silly hat on its head, before shooting it, blowing it up and, just…
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Phuket Lifestyle: The mighty Mekong – ‘Mother of Water’
PHUKET: Tourists visiting Thailand for the first time might be forgiven for thinking that “Mekong” is nothing more than a cheap local whiskey. But mention the word to almost any Thai national and you’ll proudly be informed that it is a mighty river. He or she might go on to say that its name means “Mother of Water”. In a…
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Phuket Gardening: Mellow yellow
PHUKET: Few other yellow flowers can compete with the golden opulence of a sunflower, chalice vine or allamanda in full bloom. But that does not lessen the value of less spectacular garden inhabitants. Take the galphimia or “shower of gold”, which is sometimes referred to as thryallis in books on gardening. To give it a human epithet, this small, compact…
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