PeterRS

I think maybe you are confused and perhaps it was the other direction. Flights in to Narita never fly close to Fuji. The incoming flight path is just too far away to the east. It would be merely a speck in the distance.

On a slight side-track, I have several dozen photos of Mt. Fuji both from early evening southbound flights out of Narita and from one of the great viewing spots in the city - the restaurant on the top floor of the Garden Wing of the New Otani Hotel in Akasaka. But I got my best pic only a few years ago. I was on a daytime Cathay Pacific flight from Haneda to Hong Kong and then back to Bangkok. I knew it would pass to the east of Mt. Fuji and so had my camera at the ready - just in case we broke through the cloud cover and it came into view. It did. Magnificent views. You can easily make out the trails for walking to the top. Aicraft was an Airbus A330.

Attendance was numbered in the thousands - so absolutely in no way a comparison with Taipei Pride. The two events are very different as those attending the Games, I expect, were largely participants. Plus this year the Games were split between Hong Kong and Mexico thereby splitting attendance. Hong Kong does have its own Pride march. Again, though, the numbers historically have been tiny compared to Taiwan. In fact, I know of no Asian country whose Pride march numbers come within a small fraction of Taipei's - unless one includes Israel.

Thank you for the clarification. But with the greatest respect, I suggest you may well be wrong in suggesting that those making reports of short trips of a week or less might be coming from Asian members. In my view almost all are being made by westerners who live in nearby Asian countries or are on trips around more than one country. It's true there is no way we can be certain unless the owner/moderator can provide specific details. You do not sound patronising to Asians in the slightest, and I hope this comment comes across in the same way. Having lived in Asia for four decades and visited most countries a great many times, I have got used to manners of speech, typically local ways of saying things (as in virtually all Singaporeans saying "I saw 50 over people" whereas westerners say "I saw over 50 people") and so on. Typically also, sentence structure is understandably more limited and generally shorter. It may just be me, but I have not noticed much linguistic difference between reports made by long term and short term visitors. Obviously some Asians will not fit my mould, the more so those educated in the west. I remember meeting two tall, extremely handsome, slim young guys in a sauna in Hong Kong. Both spoke almost fluent English but were Chinese and lived in Shanghai. They were in Hong Kong for a week-end of shopping, partying and sex! When I lived in Hong Kong and Japan, I certainly made short week-end or sometimes one week visits to Bangkok - many of them, often side-trips as part of longer regional business trips. I do sincerely think the shorter trip reports in this forum are almost all western/expat generated. I hope I am wrong and, if so, will be glad to be corrected.

I've been to Kaohsiung 3 times but the last was 6 years ago and I expect my information is out of date. With nearly 3 million residents and more in the surrounding districts, there should be lots of gay guys. In addition to a handful of bars and a couple of saunas (one which did attract a younger crowd but older, less in-shape guys did not attract much attention - it was named hi-Man and had naked nights), the city also has its own Annual Gay Pride Parade. This year it is on Saturday 25 November. Attandance is usually numbered in the many thousands. As I recall, Friday and Saturday are by far the best nights. Thursday may be rather barren. One problem I found is that there are far fewer guys who speak even reasonable English on the apps and so hook-ups were less easy than in Taipei. If I were to go again, I'd try to arrage to meet someone from the apps on my arrival so that he could brief me on bars and other gay venues. Far fewer expats living in the city than in Taipei, and so you may find you are quite popular!

Two very pertinent posts with, as usual from @macaroni21, a lot of interesting points. I agree about Guide Sites. I have no idea how they can possibiy keep up to date unless they have a correspondents like @ChristianPFC in every country. The problem is that clearly there are some gay guys around the world who look at them and regard most of what they recommend as some sort of gospel. And with some of the sites relying on advertising, they will continue as long as the advertising revenue rolls in, no matter how many tourists finally discover that at least some of what they wrote was nonsense. I wrote earlier about one site which did have advertising from several major companies, including a hotel chain and airline. This site had clearly made up a two article trip to Bangkok and Chiang Mai allegedly by one of its staff. It was mostly b/s. I decided to write to the advertisers, first to congratulate them for helping gay travellers, but adding my comments on the made-up articles. I don't recall getting replies but I do know that website died quite soon thereafter. As far as this site is concerned, I did assist in writing I believe three of the city guides and the emphasis was on tourism rather than specifically gay tourism. I certainly agree they should be dated. Having just checked, I note that when you click underneath the city descriptions on the sub-heads Gay Bars, Gay Clubs, Gay Massage etc, in most cities there are no listings at all. I sincerely suggest to the Moderator that these sub-heads just be deleted. Bangkok certainly has some bars listed, but why is Maggie Choo's the first when only Sunday is the Gay Night? And why is Telephone still listed as such and not Circus, the new name adopted about 2 years ago? Incidentally I see it is still listed as Telephone under travelgay.com! Asian Members. I wish I could be as optimistic as I have been suggesting for several years that Asians, and preferably younger Asians, should be a natural target for rejuvenating membership on this site. but I really wonder where @macaroni21 gets his suggestions about numbers. As a regular reader and contributor, I definitely cannot see the same numbers, with the honourable exception of @spoon in Malaysia. I do think the problem with this site for Asians outside Thailand, in my view, is that the information on the gay scene is not sufficiently condensed. A young reader in Singapore, for example, has to wade through a lot of posts before finding information about specific massage spas - and Singaporeans are very into massage! For western readers, it's much easier and much quicker to find the relevant information. As an example, the Singapore-based Blowing Wind site appears specifically for a much younger readership (a great many in their 20s and 30s) and it does have an extensive Travel section with information all posted by readers on Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taipei and a host of other Asian cities. The last post on Bangkok was made less than an hour ago and is a very detailed description about Bantai Spa including their Line and Twitter IDs. Another made in the last 24 hours is a very detailed (again!) description of a hostel near the National Stadium and all the gay activity that goes on there. Finding travel information with a lot of detail on that site is a breeze. Not so on any of the gay Thailand sites IMHO.

Anyone who has read transcripts of the last phone messages made by these young people in the airless container truck can not fail to be moved to tears. They knew they were dying and were apologising to their families. So tragic!

It seems you are becoming paranoid about Russian aircraft. You deliberately choose a five year period which covered not just covid when air traffic internationally all but collapsed, you deliberately choose a 5-year period and an aircraft type when that aircraft was grounded internationally between March 2019 and 2020 and deliveries could not be made. You also did not tell us how many Russian-made aircraft were sold during that five-year period so we can compare! You seem to be of some sort of Russian airline crusade which gets facts wrong and offers very misleading information. You are on what the English could call, using a cricket analogy, a very sticky wicket. In other words, there is little point your continuing on this thread because you can never win your arguments.

Sadly not entirely true. Hong Kong residents have been kidnapped when en route to Taiwan and even here in Thailand. Granted, only a few, but one bookseller in 2015 was sentenced by a Chinese court to 10 years in jail.

Experts predict that the coming months will be the best for more than two decades to witness the Northern Lights. The sun is in the midst of some cycle or other which indicates that the period from January - October 2024 will be peak viewing months. I spent ten nights in Scandinavia in November 2014 including a 4-day ferry journey up the Norwegian coast from Bergen to Tromso hoping to see the Aurora. I did not bank of mostly bad weather with cloud on most days. It was only on my last night in FInaldn's Ivalo north of the Arctic Circle that the sky completely cleared and there was a spectacular light show between 11:00pm and 1:00am. This year treks to Scandinavia and the Far North will almost certainly be unnecessary. The Aurora should easily be seen in Canada, in Scotland and in some parts of the world further south. Just one word of warning. Aurora cruises in Scandinavia are being heavily promoted and look great in the brochures. But if you want even semi-decent photos, you need to use a time exposure and the motion of a ship makes that quite difficult. There are plenty of internet sites with advice on taking aurora photos. https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/northern-lights-forecast-diagram-graphic-2024-rcna99053

Sad indeed, but yet another US pastor discovered not to be leading the type of life such religious men are supposed to preach. And why make such posts on social media in such a tiny town where, as mayor, everyone knows you? Ironically, he rather forecast his own demise in comments made in March and quoted in that New York Post article - "Our community is very, very low crime, very low drug abuse. Our number one problem is suicide. It is sad. I think a lot of it has to do with the military. I think some of it has to do with social media and the reality of that. That’s the number one problem we have.”

You have definitely got me confused with another poster. Unlike some of my friends, I am not a regular club goer in Taipei and certainly would never have mentioned Candy. I don't even know what it is! I have mentioned the small Commander D which I have been to and is quite close to The Red House. G*Star is much bigger and probably the most famous. I hear that Abrazo, Bacio, Werk and Bush at B1 are among others worth considering. @hojacat wrote a post about Hunt being virtually a club but it seems to have a different dress theme each night. You can find the post earler in this forum. Best is to chat with some of the guys who go to the various Red House cafes for drinks or dinner. With the rainy season almost over, it will be packed at week-end nights and pretty busy the rest of the week. I go regularly for drinks to Sol Bar and the waiters there speak good English. They will know the latest 'in' places. Since it seems you don't like Taipei/Taiwan why bother going? Others really like it. Some love it.

Check his posts on this forum. He wrote quite a bit about The Philippines.

Here - Sorry you did not like the Boeing 747. I thought it was a fantastic aircraft and loved the hundreds of flights I made on it over a 35+ year period. Well, the Japanese and Russian sites you posted were not relevant, although you probably assumed no one would bother to try and translate them!

I'm delighted you enjoyed Taiwan. But just for the record, for those who like to drink and party, there is a lot going on.

Given that China's century of humiliation included other countries being permitted to have their own nations' cops in quite a few Chinese cities (as well as their own laws, it should be added), I'm surprised it would even consider starting along the same road. And that's before we get down to the nitty gritty of forced deportations! If cops from mainland China are on the streets of Thailand, I can see the number of tourists from Taiwan and Hong Kong dropping very considerably.

Flipping through today's on-line Guardian, I was attracted by an interview. It focuses on questions sent by a variety of readers, including Elton John and mostly movie directors, actors, musicians and writers. The subject of the interview is an actor named by The New York Times as "one of the greatest actors of the 21st century". Yet she is almost a chameleon-like character on screen and I expect few will recall many of her many movies. My two favourites are very different - as the distraught, questioning mother in We Need To Talk About Kevin and as the elderly Madame D in Wes Anderson's hilarious The Grand Budapest Hotel. Yet she also appeared along with Leonardo di Caprio in The Beach. For her role in Michael Clayton she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress (before Actress was changed by the industry to Actor!). In The Deep End she plays the mother of son she believes may have killed his boyfriend. Tilda Swinton is a fascinating character. She lives with her painter partner and her children in the north of Scotland. She loathes being called British. She is Scottish, she insists. What is perhaps most interesting is the early part of her career. In her mid-20s after a degree at Cambridge and a short spell with the Royal Shakespeare Company, she met the openly gay designer, director and gay activist Derek Jarman. The mid-1980s saw the misery of AIDS spreading around the world, and Jarman was to become infected with HIV in 1986. The two became fast friends with Swinton appearing in nine of his movies including Caravaggio, War Requiem opposite Sir Laurence Olivier, and Edward II for which she won the Best Actress Award at the Venice Film Fetival. After a succession of budget movies made using 8mm and Super8 film - the first of which was Sebastiane based on the story of the martyrdom of the beautiful Christian St. Sebastian and deliberately aimed at gay audience, Caravaggio became and remains one of his best-known films. Since then Swinto has worked with some of the most acclaimed directors of our day including Pedro Almodovar, Luca Guadagnino and Boon Joon-ho. She even made a video in which she and David Bowie changed clothes. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/nov/12/tilda-swinton-you-ask-the-questions-pedro-almodovar-wes-anderson-elton-john

You asked more or less the same question in another thread a few months ago and there were no replies. Send a pm to @Olddaddy. He is an expert on the country.

The more I read about gay life and gay tourism in some parts of South America (and I have become enamoured with some like Colombia), the more I wish I had visited more often. Being based in Asia, it always seemed too far away. It would not have been expensive, though, with the amount of air miles I always had.

Thailand is no different from other countries - apart from a handful like Bhutan and Japan where general violence appears to be much less than the average. What I find different here, and what @Keithambrose mentions in his earlier post, is the extreme violence that seems baked into attendance at two particular vocational colleges in Bangkok. I don't believe this can be put down simply to "some violence problems." When attendance at one college invites a large group of students to murder and knifings in the streets just on the basis of tit-for-tat, something is seriously wrong. Indeed, despite atempts to curb extreme violence, the police seem to have run out of ideas how to stop it. What I find particularly firghtening in the vdo is the open access to their former colleges by alumni - even those now in their 70s. The one interviewed indicated that he was there to give "advice" and "take care" of the younger students, not to cause trouble. Given that he himself had gladly participated in violence during his years in college, I seriously wonder what that "advice" might be. Although barred, he openly pays no attention to it. "Nobody can stop me. This is my house," clearly has sinister overtones. Although this may appear flippant, with most of the students coming from up-country and living on their own in a huge new city, I wonder how many of those young men might 30 years ago have ended up as go-go boys. At the least, for some it might have been a safer option!

This long article may help to explain part of the reason. I'm sorry I do not have time this evening to choose sections of it. Besides, i think the matter is too complicated to parse into a few sentences. For those interested, please read the article. thanks. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/cnainsider/shopping-haven-mbk-bangkok-thailand-deadliest-school-rivalries-879811

If someone posts a link and dos not take the trouble to help readers by translating it, I will not read it. I read the English language flight magazines and they are perfectly clear. Sorry but your posts are not. PS: SInce posting I did check your Japanese site with google translate. On page 1 there is absolutey nothing - nothing at all - about any Ilyushin aircraft, only American-made aircraft! If you want people to read more than page 1, they are protected and so you will have to do it and translate so we can read it! PPS: SInce posting the commentbabout the Japanese site, I did look at your Russian site. And i am not in the slightest bit surprised at what it says, even though you seem to be. It states - Il-496 (working name Il-96-400M) is a promising Russian wide-body passenger aircraft for medium and long-haul airlines. Designed by the Design Bureau named after Ilyushin. As of November 2023, one test flight has been completed So despite your inaccurate comments, absolutely everything I have written and quoted in my posts has been 100% true. But I am curious. How do you hate flying on it? It will be years before the Il-96-400M is in passenger service! 🤣🤣 And please do not post non-English links in future unless you translate them first! Thank you.

I'm sure there are sites in most countries. I know of ones in Taipei, Hong Kong and Singapore. The difference seems to be that the average ages of correspondents seems to be much younger than those in Thailand. No doubt a result of there being more retirees and expats here.

Was it 10 years ago? Longer? There was certainly a time when the internet had a considerable number of gay websites focusing primarily on Thailand. Many were informative, some more political in content, some just bitch boards - some providing both interest and amusement. This Board now has a much wider geographical range, but still with quite a number of separate threads on Thailand and others on Asia. To my knowledge there are only two left concentrating on Thailand - sawatdee network and gaybuttonthai. Sawatdee has gone through several incarnations over the years but now seems also to be slipping out of most readers' daily posting. In the last 14 days, it has had no posts for 8 of them. During October there were 16 days with no posts. Yet it is certainly read for, as I write at 11:00 am on Sunday, there are 35 members online and 218 guests. That's considerably more than this site which has 8 members and 200 guests at the same time! Gaybuttonthai is much more concentrated on Pattaya and has far fewer registered members. Now there are 2 online, yet still 121 guests. 11:00 am on a Sunday morning may not be the idea time for checking websites, but there is clearly a readership for all three sites. The key question, I guess, is how likely is it they will all last? Some years ago on his own website, the poster @ChristianPFC compiled a list of 'dead' sites. Among these were gaylilfeinthailand, gaytingtong, gaysexthailand, cruisinggaythailand, gaytouri, baht-stop and bahtstop. Many were very short-lived. Others did not last after their owners died. Since then, yet others seem to continue as websites but often with very little new content. cruisingforsex-asia has been around for many years but its last post was made in May this year. That was a response to a question about Nature Boys raised on 6 November 2009! After 3 years with no activity during covid, activity has slowly picked up - but slow is the operative word! Only a handful of posts in 2023. I raise this merely to ask for how long this and the other two sites can keep operating, the more so with advertising revenues minimal or even non-existent? I wonder if the same is true to a certain extent of gay internet sites, especially those related to gay travel. In theory they should be mushrooming. Are they? Rather like the maps on the free gay magazines that were common in most gay venues in Thailand 10-20 years ago, I guess the problem is how you keep information up to date. Quite a few years ago I remember virtually trashing one such site which clearly had just made-up its supposed travel information about Thailand. The site died soon after. A couple of years or so ago I wrote to the owner of utopia-asia to ask why he did not include arguably the two most popular saunas in Asia in his listings - Hutong in Hong Kong and Soi13in in Taipei. He wrote back that neither had replied to questions he had sent! They are still excluded! Frankly, that is ridiculous! Every other website lists these saunas. It really makes me question what other gay venues utopia-asia deliberately omits because they pissed off the owner. gaytravel.com has been running for more than 20 years. Yet of its travel destinations, the only one in Asia is Phuket! Click on Phuket and it's just one long advertisement for the Sri Panwa luxury hotel! Total waste of time! At least nomadicboys.com has both Thailand and Taiwan as its Asian destinations. The suggestions for both cities are pretty much up to date with a few notable omissions. Worst in both are its hotel recomendations. The top two in Bangkok are the W Hotel and the Mandarin-Oriental! Soon after come the So-Sofitel, the Banyan Tree, Le Meridien, the Peninsula and the St. Regis. To be fair, it also lists the Tarntawan. But why such a cluster of just expensive hotels? I In Taipei it places the Chinese-styled Grand Hotel at the top of its list. Why, considering it is so far from the gay areas and not close to public transport? Beats me. Advertising cash, I expect! thegaypassport.com seems to have upped its game since I last looked 2 or 3 years ago. It at least has better information on a few saunas, but yet again its hotels are almost all top of the range. Since it offers diferent prices from agoda, expedia and hotels.com, I doubt if they get a commission, but could be wrong. Why such expensive hotels are listed when there are plenty of middle and lower priced hotels as members here have noted, again beats me! I expect servers here in Thailand only get a few of the total number of travel sites. Does anyone actually use them, I sometimes wonder? Are there better ones?

Rivalries between certain Bangkok vocational schools has turned deadly over many years. This site has a 45-minute video that analyses the killing of one near graduate shot four times in the heart in front of his mother. Worse is that this rivalry seems to continue for decades after graduations. Please look at it. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/watch/dying-graduate-1511241?cid=fbins