Off to Thailand in December!

My boy and I are going to Thailand, we have already booked the tickets. We plan to stay there for two weeks from 15th til 28th December.
I'd like to hear forumers' experiences in Thailand and any good tips or advice that could could pass on to us.

Happy travels!

 

Welcome to the land of smiles and prostitution. Get ready for some dirty looks from Thai girls. Some of the Thai girls were being really nasty to a girl I was travelling with when we visited some bars.

Visit Chiang Mai, it is a wonderful and interesting city.
Go to Patpong in Bangkok and watch girls shoot pingpong balls out of their pussies.
Sukhothai is a travellers favorite too.
If you want to beachbum I can recommend Ko Chang or Ko Samui. For some diving visit Ko Tao. For the worldfamous full-moon party go to Ko Phangan.

Or just go, get a cheap copy of Lonely Planet at Khao San Road in Bangkok and let fate and the moment guide you.

Two weeks is way too short though. Enjoy your travels.

 

and now the secert is out why bird travels around...

 

I came back from Pattaya,Thailand in March. Absolutely brilliant holiday and I was pissed off about being back. It was quite depressing. There are a hell of alot of girly bars and prostitution and sex clubs, women sexually performing acts on each other. At the same time I know a married couple that went to Thailand and they thoroughly enjoyed it. Just keep out of the girly bars. You'll LOVE it.

I'm going again next March but Ill be going for longer than 2 weeks.

 

thanks people! I will def check out on those places...
I wish we could go for more than three weeks, but it's hard with work and uni. Still, a nice opportunity to get away somewhere different.

 

Stay away from the buckets of Samsoung & Red Bull, they only lead to madness and memory loss. Other than that have a ball.

 

stay away from drugs, its not worth rotting in hell for 20 years for smoking some ganja...

Good advice about that nasty samsoung stuff. Heard some horror stories about it!

Have fun!

 

what are the buckets of samsoung and red bull???

 

It's basically Thai whiskey and redbull, you can get a bucket of it for 200baht which is about €4. I drank it loads of time but it gets you seriously drunk. The redbull over there is much stronger than over here and the whiskey is terrible. I'd love to bring over a bottle of Irish whiskey and try it with thai redbull. It'd taste better but the hangover would still be fuckin terrible!! Still a chang beer for breakfast and it takes the sting out of the hangover.

 

Oh yeah, for a good insight into the scariness of a thai prison, read 4000 days - My Life & Survival in a Bangkok Prison by Warren Fellows. Short enough book, but fucking crazy.

 

Have a Singh on me! No matter how much larger I drank I just couldn't get pissed!

 

well, this is the reason I latly prefer india, (even though i still love bkk, the beaches ect..) it's too mainstreem for me, beer, hores, buckets, maybe some yabayaba, ....
what i love is the thais, they are crzy and childish in a nice way, but also, they are selling out in such quick rate, thailand is changing SO fast, 20 yrs ago, there wernt that many tourists. and you know what?!! its people like you and me who go there to enjoy ourselves that are killing this country.

 

well said!

I wish the druggy/banana pancake crew would just stay in thailand, at least then it would be contained...But the surrounding countries are being invaded....Look at Vang Vieng in Laos. It's horrific. The area is incredibly beautiful, but they have music blasting out all from 12pm-5am every day and night, and its impossible to escape...I think maybe 15 years ago it was still a peaceful typical south-east asian village. But now the next time I go back (actually I wont bother but if I did) they'll probably have fucking nightclubs, multi-screen cinemas...fucking hell. It's bollicks. Coming from india/Nepal to SE asia I noticed a huge change in the type of travellers I was meeting. You get hordes of SE asian travellers who think they are totally hardcore (when SE asian travel is mostly a piece of piss compared to places like India)...I couldn't be bothered with most the other travellers in SE asia so I just went alone through Cambodia towards the end (I just simply couldn't be bothered). Occasionally I met some gems but mostly I couldn't click with my fellow travellers.
I know tourism is inevitable, but I think it's the type of people that go to these places that ruin it...I mean places like Mcloed Ganj and Pokhara are tourist towns, but I wouldn't say they have 'sold out'. Not like Thailand. I think maybe it's because India and Nepal attracts a broad range of people. They still retain much of there original culture and 'magic'.

I'll stop there before I go all 'Daffy' on you lol

 

Pokhara is very touristy, it's full of restaurants and guesthouses everywhere, same as Dharamsala. Unlike SEA, Dharamsala is full of westerners getting all spiritual & stoned instead of drunk.


Anyway all these places are changing, it's inevitable. If you find somewhere 'new' and then you tell some other people who go and eventually it becomes overrun with backpackers and then normal tourists. C'est la vie.

There's no point getting bitter about change especially at a young age otherwise you'll end up being one of those really annoying old people who are always talking shite about 'the good old days'.

Even if I look closer to home, Ireland has changed lots since I was young, and people have much more money, are much more self-centered & don't appear to be any happier. There's new houses, roads & not as much natural beauty as when I was younger. It's all economy based, tourism in thailand, industry & IT in Ireland.

Also there's always new places to go, that's one great thing about India, it's so vast that there'll always be new places. I agree aswell the type of backpacker in India is alot different to Thailand.

 

i think we all can make choice, how do we behave whem we go to thailand?! we get drunk, fuck some ladyboy ("by misstake", of course!!), have memory loss, cant sleep because of the redbull and other chemicals, and then we all talk about this great experience and have a big laugh. what can i say? many people goigto thailand today do it because it is cheap! (to drink, eat, have sex), and many are amazingly young, and unfortunately, IMMATURE.

 

in india there is more choice; i know some really cool people in india, doing there own thing and being so much more openminded than the crowd in thailand: like in goa, it's not that you need to do coke or MD all the time, even though it is scary how it spreads (EVEN HEROIN). And there will always be the pathetic spiritual tourist going to india and thinking they'll get enlightened or find a guru, by paying expensive courses. but india has so much more diversity, it's less fun than thailand, (thailand is like a quick fix) but i love the old timers, those who hve survived!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

In Thailand after a month you would be bored, but in India you could spend years there. The old-timers are great aswell in India I agree. I met some people who'd be going there since the 70s and they were generally really interesting, they all had great stories about the overland trip back then. Plus for me these people were the same age as my parents and seemed happier and had led far more interesting lives, I found this wierd. You tend to assume when living in a western country that everyone gets married and has kids and lives in the same town and has the same job for ever more.

 

You obviously missed my daffy (The Beach) reference then

 

This is definitely changing.

We are incredibly lucky to be able to have the money/resources to go to other much poorer countries and if we chose could fairly easily find work teaching english and live there for as long as we wanted or until the money runs out in which case we simply return home and save again. We are very lucky to be in a position to realise this is actually possible (technically even without TEFL's)...More than a few people I know are doing this now or plan to do it in the future. I think there definitely seems to be a boom in 'expat' culture as well as travelling as flights get cheaper and cheaper and the poor get even poorer!

Going back to the point on how countries change, I think Africa could well be the next backpacking 'hot spot' when SE asia gets too overun (and if african countries stop with the warring)...But this is speculation of course.

 

Ah I never saw that movie, anywho it was a general statement, not directed @ you in particullar. I was just on a rant.