ceejay

Maybe you should have allowed us to select more than one? Most of my recent trips have started with 2-3 days in Bangkok, followed by a week or so in the Isaan (or Chiang Mai) then a few days in Pattaya. Total time usually 2-3 weeks. The Isaan part of the trip is timed to coincide with some particular festival. So, my answer to your question is that if I were staying for a longer period I wouldn't base myself in any one of the places you list. I'd move around.

If you use the official taxi rank at the lowest level of the airport, then it will be about 300 baht. An airport fee of 50 baht will be added to that (that's an official charge, not a scam) so the taxi driver will charge you about baht 350 in all. You will also need 70 baht in cash on you, to pay the toll fees on the Expressway, which are an extra. Since you haven't used the taxis there before, you may find this helpful: After you have passed through immigration, baggage reclaim and customs, to emerge on the arrivals concourse, turn left. More or less at the end of the building is a down escalator, with a sign for the taxis. Take this down to the lowest level - you will emerge into an area where you will see a couple of desks and a load of taxis lined up. Go to one of the desks and tell them where you want to go. They'll write this on a ticket for a taxi driver, and give you a copy of the ticket. It has the driver's number on it - it's for your use if you need to complain. Make sure the taxi has the meter on when it starts off. In the airport, you will probably be approached by people (especially at the top of the escalator) offering taxi or limo services. Ignore all these touts - they are all much more expensive than the public taxis.

It's above it. Departures are on level 4, arrivals on level 2. There are maps here: http://www.bangkokairportonline.com/node/87

It's seven years ago, and things may have changed, but my experience in the Ambiance was identical to Geezer's. They used some sort of electronic box that had to be interfaced up to the safe and called Bangkok for some sort of code. No key was used. I know, because I stood over them and watched them do it.

Exactly so. I have never had a problem either. On the other hand, I am always careful not to leave valuables or money lying around. It's not only foolish to leave 5000 or 10000 baht lying around, it's unfair to put that sort of temptation in the way of someone with an uncertain income in a country where many have to live on less than 300 baht a day. As far as passports go, I have never been asked for mine either. The one place I have been warned you should always have your passport is on the long distance trains. Thai Railways have their own police force, and apparently they occasionally go through the trains doing ID checks and will not accept copies.

When there is a room safe and I am intending to take guests back, I put everything in the safe before I go out. I only take enough money with me for the evening, plus a tip for the boy. That way, the need to put something in the safe while the guest is there doesn't even arise. I have had a couple of instances of needing the safe opened, once at the Ambiance some years ago and once at Baan Dok Mai last year. Both times I had to wait for the manager or owner to come to the building from wherever they were, because the means of opening the safe were themselves kept in a safe that only the manager had access to. I find that in the Isaan, very few hotels have room safes. I leave larger stuff, like my netbook, locked in my suitcase and have a slimline fabric money belt that tucks inconspicuously inside the waistband of my trousers for credit cards, passport, most of my cash etc. I've never had a problem. If there were a problem with thefts from safes at any particular place, we'd soon hear about it on the message boards, and the answer would be not to stay there. I wouldn't worry about leaving valuables, passport etc. in the room safes if I were you.

If it's just one particulat website, it could be a DNS cache error, although that should usually resolve itself after 24 hours or so. You could try following the instructions to do a DNS flush given here: http://www.whatsmydns.net/flush-dns.html Also, it might help to clear cache and cookies on your browser.

You could also try renaming them. .avi.001 is, I think, an invalid extension. Either delete the .001 from the file extension, or just rename the file completely without putting in an extension - the operating system should recognise the file type and add the correct extension automatically.

You will probably be better off contacting the Thai Consulate in - of all places - Hull. The Thai Embassy can be difficult to contact, while the Consulate has a reputation for approachability. http://www.thaiconsul-uk.com/

I went there about 6 months ago without any trouble. Walk in the front entrance of the hotel, and straight through the lobby area to the back, where there is a glass wall. Walk down a few steps and through a door in the glas wall, into which leads you into the restaurant. Walk through the restaurant, and out into the swimming pool area. Follow the path around the pool to the right until you come to a small door through to a parking/utility area. Keep on going through this until you come to the shrine. I walked past several staff - a greeter outside the restaurant and the guy on the desk just inside it who allocates tables - I just ignored them and they didn't bother me. I guess they thought I was a guest, going to the pool area. Here are a few pics I took:

Thanks Buckaroo. Yes, it is for the Phi Ta Khon Festival. I'm checking this out now because I know you have to book very early. Phu Na Come looks great - maybe I'll spoil myself with a few days there (exchange rates allowing)

Does anyone have any recommendations, please? I may be heading there in June. I can do all the Google and Tripadvisor checks, etc., but any personal recommendations would be gratefully received.

I agree with that, but I guess that Z909 and myself are both imfluenced by havimg to transit Heathrow Terminal 3 at the other end of the journey. That is as close as you will get to the seventh circle of Hell in this life.

I know the standard of English (and, I am told other foreign languages) is much higher in Cambodia than Thailand. When you travel outside Phnom Penh or Siem Reap, every largeish town you come to seems to have a language based school. That's rich in Cambodia. It's somewhere around 10x minimum wage.

US dollars are pretty well the main currency. Take plenty of small notes - ones and fives. You'll get small change in Cambodian Rial - get rid of this before you leave because it is not convertible. There are ATM's but they usually pay out in twenties and fifties, so you need to take a couple of hundred in small money with you. The one I used in Siem Reap (because it is off the street, so you can't be seen taking a load of money out) is in the You Care Pharmacy, which is near the middle of street that connects on to Old Market Bridgeand runs diagonally across this map: http://www.canbypublications.com/maps/somrmapmain.htm That Canby publications website has, by the way, some of the best online maps for Cambodia.

Only visiting once or twice a year, I just get a new SIM each time. Including the SIM 200 or 300 baht in total will keep me going for a couple of weeks. Along with the minuses, there are some advantages to having a new number for each visit.

A few years ago, just about anywhere in Thailand I guess. In shophouses, the shop was an extension of the living space, so it would be regarded as no different to taking your shoes off in someone's house. Not taking your shoes off indoors is a distinctly farang habit that Thais have adopted in places like shops, sometimes grudgingly. I have only once seen a shop, a pharmacy in Nong Khai where there was a polite sign in English, asking customers to remove their shoes. I have seen shops around where there is no sign up, but there is a row of shoes that Thais have left outside the door, even in Pattaya (the souvenir shop at Pattaya Elephant Sanctuary). Places where I see that, I'll take my shoes off for good manners' sake.

You can change the ISO setting in the menu of any digital camera. This changes the sensitivity of the chip, but as a trade off, you get more noise in the image. Digital compacts are limited here - the smaller the chip is for a given number of pixels, the worse the noise will be at any given ISO setting. Try ISO 400, and see if the results are acceptable to you. If you want to put a camera on a faster ISO setting like ISO 800 then a digital SLR with a large area chip is needed. There is another advantage to digital SLR's - the lenses are bigger too, and pull in more light. The other thing to look at indoors is colour temperature. Most of the time the Automatic White Balance will work fine. If you are indoors, in artificial light, try setting it to somewhere between 2800 (relatively dim tungsten light) and 2900 (bright tungsten light). Switch back to Automatic White Balalnce when you have finished - if you forget and use these settings in direct sunlight the next day, you will get terrible pictures. Auto face recognition may not be the best idea. In low light, low contrast environments, it may never "lock onto" a face properly. It may still be "seeking" while you are taking a picture. Actually, I often don't bother with a lot of this stuff. I'm there primarily to experience things, rather than photograph them. More than once, I have put the camera away because I felt it was coming between me and the moment. Rather a mediocre photo and a good memory, tham a night spent fiddling with the controls on a camera while the world passes me by.

I find time of day makes a lot of difference. For me, the whole trick is to go to bed at a normal local time at destination. That seems to get my body clock in synch almost immediately. It takes me about 18 hours door-to-door from my house to a Bangkok hotel using a direct flight from London Heathrow. There are several flights that leave Heathrow at about 9.30pm local time - that gets me into the hotel about 5 pm. I'll just have a relatively early night (say 10pm) and I'm ready to go next day. Similarly, on the way back, I can book flights that leave Bangkok at about 1.00pm local and get me home at about 9.00 pm - then it's just a cup of tea and to bed. I've been up the next day to go to work, with no ill effects, after this leg of the trip. This doesn't work if you arrive at your destination in the morning and probably wouldn't for a trip of more than 20 hours.

I brought the little buggers back from somewhere a couple of years ago. I can't say where - it could have been any one of half a dozen hotels on that trip. You're most likely to find out you have them when they start biting you. It's always at night - they are sensitive to the Carbon dioxide concentrations that build up around sleeping people. You develop this insanely irritating itch and, on inspection, you will find little dark pink spots - a sort of coral colour - where they have bitten you. I treated the problem with a package of products from a British company called PPC supplies - their website is informative (see the link). They've actually moved on to a new set of products now, but what they sold me did the job. Once bitten, twice shy. I spray the inside of my luggage with a long term residual insecticide before I travel now. By the way, don't imagine this problem is limited to "fleapit" hotels. You can pick them up anywhere. http://www.ppcsupplies.co.uk/bed-bugs-pest-information

There's a story in The Nation that Aldhouse has been arrested at a UK airport. I can't find any confirmation in the UK news media yet. http://www.nationmultimedia.com/home/Phuket-murder-suspect-Lee-Aldhouse-arrested-at-UK--30136768.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Nationmultimediacom-Breakingnews+%28NationMultimedia.com+-+Breakingnews%29

Yes, there is the Chong Mek/Vang Tao crossing which I passed through last year. From memory, it's about 65 km from Ubon and another 30 or so to Pakse. You can get a Lao visa on arrival there. It's a good entry point for Southern Laos, where I visited Wat Phu and the 4000 Islands, or you can travel North to Central Laos, where I visited the Khong Lor Cave (one of the world's natural wonders - a 7km cave that you can travel through by boat). I believe (but do not know, I had a car) that there are regular minibuses from Ubon to Chong Mek.

Hi GT I think the shop are trying to oversell you. A bifocal lens has two sections, one for reading and one for another distance. The traditional version was actually in two sections, and it was very obvious. A progressive bifocal is a single lens with a transition from one prescription to another about halfway down. A fully progressive lens has at least 3 transitions and prescriptions for near, middle and far distance. There are some limitations to these - some image jump as your eyes move from section to section of the lens, and blurred vision in the peripheral field which means you need to move your head, not your eyes, to focus on something at the edge of your field of vision. Individualised progressives (which I've never used) use your prescription and detailed measurements of the shape of your head to calculate a formulation for the lens that is supposed to overcome these issues. 30,000 baht does not sound unreasonable, especially as I doubt they would be made in Thailand. I guess they would need to be imported. If all you need is a bifocal, then fully progressives are a waste of money. They also take a lot of getting used to and require highly trained staff to prescribe and fit. Me, I have three sets of glasses. A pair of bifocal progressives, set to my screen reading and writing distances, for work, where I need to be able to read a computer and make notes. Cost me the equivalent of about 7000 baht A pair of fully progressives used mostly for meetings, where I need to focus on people across the table, a whiteboard across the room, and make notes. Also use them when I am out shopping - so I can read a notice at the other end of the store, or a price tag, without having to take my glasses off. Cost me the equivalent of about 17,500 baht. A pair of reading glasses, with about the right reading distance for a screen (I don't make notes at home), which cost me about baht 200. I'm using them now. So, there's no ideal pair of glasses. You need to decide what you want to do with them.

You could try Fresh Beach Boys. They had a pretty wide selection the last time I was in there (November) including some very cute twinky types.

I'll be passing through Banngkok in a few days time. Usually, I'd pay a visit or two to Soi Twilight but probably not this time. It's not that I can't afford it. I just don't want to pay those prices.