ceejay

I did this journey (in the opposite direction) as a visa run in January, spending a couple of days in Luang Prabang for chill out time. The boats leave from and return to Chiang Khong in Chiangrai province, which is a 2+ hour bus journey from Chiang Rai city, so you would need to stay in Chiang Khong, Chiang Rai or Chiang Mai overnight before flying to Bangkok. As to the river trip, it depends on what you like. Basically, you spend 8 hours a day for 2 days on a tour cruiser, broken by an overnight stay at Pak Bang, and a couple of visits to rather lacklustre tourist trap villages on the way. You also get to see the Tam Ting (aka Pak Ou) caves, which are well worth a visit. Personally, though, I would hire a car in Luang Prabang to take me to Pak Ou - they don't half rush you on these organised tours! That all said, it's not about the stops, it's about the travelling. In my opinion, it was well worth making the journey for that. If you just want to sit back in peace for a couple of days and watch some wonderful scenery roll past, then it's for you. If that would bore you rigid, then it's not. You might want to bear in mind that July is in the middle of the Lao rainy season. That could detract from the pleasure of travelling on a semi open boat. I booked a trip with Nagi of Mekong. They're a good company. The tours are delivered as promised on the website: http://www.nagiofmekong.com/home Luang Prabang is also a relaxed, laid back place (although a lot more sophisticated now than when I first visited 4 years ago). There are numerous hotels for all budgets. I stayed in the Saynamkhan River View guesthouse, chosen because it was cheap, adequate and well located. Good value for money, but you might like something a little more luxurious. http://www.saynamkhan-guesthouse.com/ I'll leave nightlife to others.

Interesting, isn't it, how different people have different experiences in the same places? On thinking about it, maybe the reason that I had such problems with touts in Hue and Hoi An was that I was there out of season - late May last year. There were probably fewer than usual tourists to go around! It wasn't all bad by any means. As I mentioned above, I was mostly there to tour down through the Central Highlands. I stayed at Lak Lake, Kontum, Buen Ma Thot and Dalat and had none of these problems in any of these places. Kontum was interesting - a busy Vietnamese town which has no tourist infrastructure at all to speak of (a shopkeeper there gave me, unasked, a discount on the marked price of a can of talcum powder because I was her first foreign customer) and Dalat was a truly lovely town. Any expats who are considering a trip to get away from the hot season for a week or two would do well to consider Dalat.

Well done, Fountainhall. We all know that this website is probably misleading people who don't know Thailand. You've actually tried to do something about it.

You can get Gilbey's if you really want it. You can even buy it on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gilbeys-Gin-37-5-70cl/dp/B004EAFCBO

I've now had a look over the Thailand section of gaytravel.com and it seems to me to be a cack handed cobbling together of information picked up from surfing the net, along with a good deal of pure invention. It I never knew that Jomtien had go-go bars and I don't know how I missed Silom Soi 4 being "filled" with them: (After all the debate on the boards over the years on the meaning of "farang" I'm glad that, at least, has been sorted out). And, as for Samui, who would have guessed: The whole point of it all seems to be selling "gay" tours and cruises. We can laugh, but it wouldn't be very funny for anyone who relied on this garbled guff to choose a holiday. I certainly wouldn't part with any money to a company that cared so little about getting repeat customers, but if I didn't know............ To be charitable to Echelon Magazine they may have accepted this in good faith as submitted to them, and be guilty of no more than not checking their sources. That's still a pretty big sin of omission in my view.

I place a higher trust in reviews on Agoda, because reviews can only be made by people who have actually stayed at the hotels. I do use Trip Advisor, but as Z909 says, you have to do a good deal of filtering. Being a cheap charlie and often staying in places in the 300 baht to 1000 baht range, I tend to look for something along the lines of "not the Peninsula, but good value for money". That's what you can expect in that price range. Nirish's post is hardly a parody. I think I have mentioned on here before some mad old biddy who complained about a budget priced hotel in rural Isaan that "the staff spoke very little English" or some such. There's nothing you can do with people like that except ignore them. Often, my advice for Thailand is "don't book". That won't always work (at festival times upcountry, Christmas and New Year in the more popular tourist areas, Songkran anywhere) and you need your own transport in the rural areas, but it gives you the opportunity to carry out the most relaible review of all - checking the room out before you take it.

I think that the article is a briliant piece of modernist writing. A travel piece, written by somebody who patently has never visited the place described and yet, by producing a shoddy fake that falls apart under the most cursory inspection and selling it for good money, the writer has involved us all, editor and reader alike, whether or not we ever actually visited Thailand, in an essential part of the Thaland experience.

I owe you all a trip report on Vietnam. After my problems logging in when in Thailand, I got home to a busted desktop computer and the hard disc with my photos is in a bag at the moment. I started in Hue and went, via Hoi An down through the Central Highlands to Ho Chi Min. I agree with Z909 that you've probably got enough on the itinerary for 7 days, unless you skip Halong Bay and start off in Hue. Mine was just a flying visit and there are places I would like to revisit - with one caveat. That is that, although I thought I was reasonably hardened to it, I found the constant pestering from taxi touts, street vendors and so on the worst I had ever encountered in Hue - that was until I got to Hoi An, where it was almost unbearable. There's plenty to see in Hue - more than I actually saw, I am sure. I stayed in the Orchid Hotel: http://www.orchidhotel.com.vn/intro.html It's clean, central and reasonably priced. The staff are good and the rooms are, I would say, to the standard shown on the website. The basic room is small, but the space is well used. Hoi An can be visited in a day, and that is what I would do if I were you, because of the swarms of touts. The historical area is quite small, consisting basically of 2 streets on 1 side of the river. I didn't stay in DaNang, just passed by it, but if you are going to do so then, as well as the Marble Mountain, mentioned by Khor Those, you can make a trip out to My Son which is an ancient temple city of the Kings of Champa. It's about 60-70 km away from Da Nang, with buildings dating from the 4th to the 14th century. Sadly, many were destroyed in the Vietnam war, and the whole area was defoliated, but what's left is worth the journey (the area has been reforested with quick growing trees too). Sorry, for the reasons above, I have no pictures of my own: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%E1%BB%B9_S%C6%A1n

January for me too. It's going to be an expensive day for somebody

Paradoxically, that sometimes happens when a company publishes good news. The process could have been something like this. First, the initial Dreamliner problems cause a fall in the price. Second, buyers who recognised the underlying strength of Boeing identified this as a buying opportunity and their purchases cause a rise in the stock. Finally, the good news of Dreamliner flights resuming pushes the stock up beyond a trigger point where selling orders are placed to crystallise profits and these selling orders cause the fall. The price will probably stabilise over the next few weeks.

Well, the Dreamliner is back in the air. It'll be interesting to see what passenger confidence is like as the 50 or so that have already been delivered go "online". http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22315317

I have only limited experience of booking for long stays, and I guess at places lower down the star rating scale than Michael typically uses, but while I was looking for a place for 5 months in Chiang Mai, starting at the beginning of last November, I found a good deal of variability. Some places (like the Dome, where I ended up) are in that business and discount really deeply (60% reduction) if you rent on what are basically serviced apartment terms, with water and electricity billed separately, cleaning and linen change done once or twice a week, no food etc. One place (the Chiang Mai Lodge) offers rooms at an 80% discount to its hotel rates if you provide your own linen and do your own cleaning. I guess though that spending an hour or two a week with his hair wrapped in a headscarf and a mop and bucket in his hand is not what Michael has in mind. Some mid range to budget hotels and guest houses offer similar deep discounts for letting rooms on a semi serviced basis, even though they don't advertise themselves as being in that business. Places that only provide a fuller service are more reluctant to discount, 20% or so for a month or longer being the maximum. It depends on the season too. The receptionist at Chiang Mai Lodge was reluctant to let a room at the lowest rate for a let starting on the 1st November, because that was the start of high season, but offered me one if I paid the deposit and first months rent before the end of October. That makes sense. If you make nearly all your money on 4 months of the year, then it doesn't make much sense to be deep discounting in those months.

You can hardly blame the Thais for not wanting to foot other people's healthcare bills can you? It's not an easy problem to solve, either. They could insist on tourists showing evidence of travel insurance as a condition of getting the 30 day visa stamp. So far as arrivals by air goes, they could put the cost of repatriating those refused entry onto the airlines - same as any other refusal of entry. Then, the airlines would do the work - because having insurance would be a requirement to check in in the first place. As far as the 800,000 baht for expats goes I guess that anybody who can deposit that amount of cash would be counted amongst those least likely to be unable to pay a hospital bill whilst for those who use the combined income/cash at bank route that's far less certain - because it implies that they won't have all that much cash readily available, so I don't see increasing the 800,000 as having that much impact. At age 58 BUPA would charge me £3100 per year for worldwide health insurance, so I guess it would be somewhat less for a single country. That seems to be a pretty "Rolls Royce" policy though - maybe there's a market for some enterprising insurance company to come up with a more basic policy - something like the backpacker policies you can get?

I never met LMTU and only "knew" him through his many posts on the various message boards. Personally, I could never understand the strength of the feelings, positive and negative, that he seemed to arouse in others. One thing is for sure: the boards will be different places without him. A suggestion: perhaps we could all get clicking on the "refresh" button and give this thread a few thousand views. That, at least, would have given him a laugh.

Don't you mean "before she completely lost her mind" Actually, I can think of one good reason for the Scots to pay a proportion of her funeral costs. She did more in her lifetime to secure a Yes vote in next years referendum than Alex Salmond ever will.

. My point of view too. Industry awards generally are a scam intended to sell advertising and seats at incredibly over priced awards dinners. Shop around and everyone gets a prize. That's achieved by juggling the criteria and the weighting given to each of them. I note that Heathrow managed a top 10 place. Heathrow???? That seems to be based on Terminal 5 (which I never use) being voted "Best Terminal". Someone who used T3 (like me) might have a different point of view. The other section in which Heathrow came top was shopping. Shopping???? To judge an airport by its shopping facilities is as illogical to me as judging a shopping mall by the quality of its air traffic control.

"don't speak ill of the dead". Usually, I would subscribe to that, but there is a problem with it in this case, because it amounts to an attempt to distort history. If Thatcher's supporters (and I concede that there are many) restricted themselves to "RIP Margaret Thatcher, mother and grandmother" then I would go along with it. But, the BBC has has no problem publishing eulogies of her as the Saviour of Britain etc. etc. and to deny, on grounds of "taste" the many whose lives and communities were ruined by her policies a voice is, to say the least, unbalanced. I think it's important for the historical record to show that there was not a universal outpouring of grief when this woman died and that, 20-30 years after the events many individuals and communities were still scarred by the effects of her policies.

Your head's just in the way. The shower head needs to be positioned like that to fill the bathroom with 2 inches of water.

That's what struck me when I read your original post. Could it be that he was not a money boy at all? That when he turned down the offer of a taxi fare and you continued to offer him money he was deeply offended and felt you were treating him like a money boy? And that what this was all about was him deciding that, if he was going to be treated like a hooker, he damned well wasn't going to be treated like a cheap hooker?

SG- in order to "get the clap I so richly deserve" I will say Linlithgow

Beam me up Scottie!

Indeed SG, and Forest Whitaker played him in the film "The Last King of Scotland". Now, if I may hijack Kokopelli's thread, here is another man in military uniform. Didn't die in San Francisco, but his ashes are buried there. I've sometimes wondered why Hollywood has never made (so far as I know) a biopic of this man - perhaps because you couldn't make his life story up.

In a way, after a dashion, I think he has some similarity to Idi Amin - at least as played by Forest Whitaker,

So far as I understand it, only a little. Accident and Emergency is always free. General treatment is not. So, if a non-resident has a heart attack on the street, he will be treated. If he arrives in the country for the purpose of getting a bypass he will not. I'vs no idea where this "actually receiving money" comes from. For a start, I have never seen a "cashier's office" in an NHS hospital. I know of no mechanism whereby money might be paid to a patient.

I log in to the home page and then go to the Forums. I've tried logging in from the Forums page and it makes no difference.