PeterRS

To each his own. I stayed once at the Avalon. Hated the room. The hotel staff screwed up payment with my credit card. Would never stay again!

I have stayed a few times, the last about 4 years ago, Excellent resort with its own private part of the beach. We prefer the upper rooms as the ground level ones are a bit dark. The restaurant is also good at reasonable prices. They ran an on call shuttle service from the police box. Not sure if that has changed with all the changes on that road. The owner's wide, Deb ("Mrs. Rabbit"), who appears on the website video really looks after her guests, Very gay friendly.

With the General Election in April and every party spouting hateful homophobic rhetoric, I would not go near Jakarta or Indonesia in general at least until the outcome of the election is known. When a countrys Defence Minister labels the emerging LGBT community as "an act of war to subtly undermine the sovereignty of the state" and likens it to a form of "nuclear war", thats the time I make sure I do not return. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-indonesia-lgbt-insight/criminal-code-revamp-plan-sends-chill-through-indonesias-lgbt-community-idUSKBN1FT2IO

Things have obviously changed. 4 years ago I took Qatar to Europe because the price was good and I could get to a secondary destination without changing at a hub airport. It cost 97,00 baht biz class. I had bought about 8 months in advance. Then during the Bangkok Travel Fair I noticed a special promotion of the same route at the same time for 77,000! I assumed I was screwed but decided to call Qatar's Bangkok office just to check. The lady could not have been nicer. I could cancel my first ticket but there would be a penalty - all of 3,000 baht! She also confirmed there were seats at the new price. It was all sorted out in about 5 minutes and I saved 17,000. But prices have gone up a lot since then. A word of warning about purchasing through another OneWorld carrier. My understanding is - and I hope someone will correct me if I have got this wrong - you are still bound by the Qatar fare rules and regulations. That is definitely true if you use another OneWorld carriers miles to get a Qatar flight. Once the ticket is issued, you will get no help at all from BA, AA, CX or whoever you booked it through. This happened to me 2 years ago and they washed their hands of any responsibility when a big problem arose. I got zero help and was told only Qatar could help! They didn't!

The inability to check on availability of upgrades prior to purchasing a ticket is nuts! Qatar is a OneWorld airline. So I assume its miles can be spent on other carriers in the Alliance. n recent years all carriers and most hotel chains have been revamping their mileage/points schemes. Travellers now have to spend more to gain less. And if my experience is anything to go by it is becoming more and more difficult to use them. I decided three years ago to get rid of all miles and this year my hotel points. I don't travel long distance much now and upgrades are not much use to me for short /medium range flights. I search around for cheaper fares. If you book far enough ahead, its surprising what good deals can be had.

HOw strange. I usually find exactly the opposite! I expect it has something to do with times of departure and arrival. Normally I depart mid morning and the Priority Lane seems to have a lot of biz passengers. I mostly arrive in the evening. You have to fight your way through hundreds waiting for visas on arrival but Ive rarely had to queue for more than two minutes. I hope I never find myself behind a tour busload of over 70s!

Just a reminder that anyone 70 and over is entitled to use the Priority Pass Lanes. No need to have a biz or first class ticket.

Anyone arriving during this period had better be prepared for longer Immigration queues at peak times. Those departing should arrive earlier than usual at both BKK and DMK.

Ive got news for Trump! But then of course, he cant read! https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/01/30/this-is-why-global-warming-is-responsible-for-freezing-temperatures-across-the-usa/#14b6241dd8cf

I did indeed read it. And I wondered about the source of the author's comment. Unless I missed something (possible) she gives no information about her source. And I can find none. If you have, do please post it. Could not agree more. The sad thing about governments is that few seem able to think beyond the next election cycle. So what happens in 10 or 20 years is unlikely to matter much for any of them. They will either be in their graves or at least out of power. Try getting any to hand policy making about climate change and air pollution over to an international governing body. The laughing will be worldwide!

You do not quote your source. I have googled the latest lists of the worst polluted cities. Bangkok is not on any other than the one I mentioned. I am not doubting your comment but there are sources and sources. Some are highly rated. Others are often based on pretty obscure data. Perhaps since it has just entered a list it is not yet available on google. But I do not disagree. I only think it should be pointed out that only parts of the city show up as dark and polluted as the pics in the media. Today around 4:30 pm I stood at the top of Sathorn at the junction with Rama 4. This is usually bad for traffic as there are a lot of cars on idle for much of the time. This is how it looked going up Witthayu. Yes it's a bit misty but nowhere near as bad as I have witnessed in places like Delhi or even Los Angeles. LA itself features in one of the Top Ten Most Polluted lists from last August - https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2018/08/23/the-ten-most-polluted-cities-on-earth/#294cae9218cc The distance up to that skyscraper is almost 1 kilometre. Going to Babylon along Sathorn soi 1 it was clear as a bell along its length of about 400 meters. Understandably no camera can pick out particles in the air. But I do think it is important, especially for visitors, to realise that although the pollution is very bad in some parts of the city, it is far less so in others. Will it get worse in future years? Lets face it, it is going to get worse everywhere until cities like Paris actually mandate strict measures to reduce pollution and become carbon neutral. But there is surely is a chicken and egg issue here. Which comes first? A really efficient and energy efficient public transport system or the banning of polluting vehicles? I have not been in LA for about 10 years. Does it have a realistic initiative to reduce the number of cars? If so, I havent seen any info on it. Same with Bangkok. The authorities sit on their fat asses hoping no one will see their crossed fingers. Will the elite give up their cars here? No chance. If there is ban on odd numbered vehicles one day and even numbers the next, guess what they will do? Buy a third or fourth car with a different registration!

As a Bangkok resident, I do not agree with that comment. The NYT story reflects the present situation and that is definitely bad. But I have never known it be this bad. The fact is that had the monsoon winds started in December as has always been the case, there would be no pollution at this time of year. December, January and February are usually amongst the clearest each year. This year is a freak just as the polar vortex presently over the USA is a freak of nature. Does the fact that temperatures in much of the USA are today lower than they have ever been before indicate that the USA is now a cold country? Of course not. Wikipedia has a list of the worlds 500 most polluted cities using data based on the PM2.5 annual mean concentration measurement as documented by the WHO. This was gathered between 2008 and 2017. Bangkok comes #474 just a fraction worse than Jerusalem. Many Chinese and Indian cities are massively worse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-polluted_cities_by_particulate_matter_concentration But it is right that the Thai government has to take a lot of blame for not doing a helluva lot more about the air in the city long before now. Yinglucks lot put more than a million new cars on to the city roads with only yards of new roads. End result? More traffic jams, more pollution. No government, elected or military, has ever done much about getting old polluting vehicles off the roads. Ancient buses and trucks spew fumes daily. Then there are the fools who come up with idiotic ideas like water spraying. These morons are like the Minister who in 2011 seriously suggested a pontoon like group of long tail boats with engines at full speed to push the flood waters back up river before they could inundate the capital. We know how effective that turned out to be! Much of the city under water for about three months. And that fool was a member of an elected government.

I think the system is to avoid scams - or make it easier register a complaint about drivers who have doctored their meters. If you look closely at the ticket, it not only gives you the bay number but also the name of the driver and the cab number. Even so, the system could easily be refined. Its nuts to have someone getting a ticket at the TG end of the airport having to walk the length of the airport to get cab. Re the Emirates A380, I once had to exit through first class and down the stairs. First has individual suites with doors! But EK is changing the layout in some of its A380s. Its dropping First and about 20 biz class seats and adding 130 coach seats in their place. This increases capacity from around 500 passengers to 615!

Definitely Ruen Urai. The food is great, its mid-price and the ambience unbeatable. Best to book in advance and make sure you can be seated downstairs rather than upstairs.

I have just finished an amazing first novel - The Final Retreat by Stephen Hough. It is a short book, less than 200 pages the size of a paperback. But it packs an almighty punch. To try and explain any detail of the story is to give away too much. So I will just say it is a series of entries into a notebook penned by a Catholic priest. No, this is not about pedophiles. But it is about being gay and being a priest. It is also very much a novel of opposites: loneliness and the desire for companionship, yearning and disgust, futility and the need for justification, age and youth, despair and the ache after even brief moments of ecstasy. The writing is quite superb. Hough is one of today's foremost classical concert pianists, a painter and goodness knows what else. The Economist magazine named him as one of 20 living polymaths - whatever that may mean! On the basis of The Final Retreat, he is destined to become an equally acclaimed writer.

Not missed at all! So now he's stuck with the Sawatdee crowd. Somehow I think the rattlesnakes deserve him. I really do wonder why Moses bothers with the Board.

The vdos and photos seem to have been posted over a period of about 6 or more months. From those I saw, definitely not all were twinks, although they were in the majority. What I did find was that as far as the vdos were concerned, all the boys seemed to be having a great deal of fun both with the customers and amongst themselves. The sort of fun that used to be common in the bars in Bangkok a few decades ago and which has all but disappeared now.

Apparently it is not so common to see them in Shenzen. Most people that go there come from Hong Kong and as customers the writer says they can be quite difficult!! But the KTV places can be found in major cities in the hinterland like Chengdu, Chongqing and Hefei.

On the tumblr sites that are now banned, there were some vdos of Chinese KTV karaoke joints where the boys were not just serving. They were totally naked for most of the evenings and got up to some quite naughty things! They were far raunchier that almost any gogo bar in Thailand. I asked some Shanghai friends about these. They told me there are maybe 3 in Shanghai but they are located in the suburbs and westerners would not be encouraged to visit them. Apparently they are also to be found in quite a number of other Chinese cities. If anyone is interested and has loads of time on their hands, an overseas Chinese studying at a University in the Netherlands wrote a long thesis on these bars. This includes interviews with the boys, the mamasans and the owners. The title of the thesis is "Space, Sexuality and Power: Producing a Gay KTV in China" and it was written in the summer of 2016.The website is http://edepot.wur.nl/403488 If only for the interviews, it makes interesting reading. Here is one quote from a foreman (mamasan) which shows that the way they are able to operate is similar to Thailand.

I tried to go during the Christmas/New Year period. The queue for the shuttle boat at Saphan Thaksin stretched back well over 100 yards. I gave up! After New Year friends and I decided to go for dinner by taking a taxi across the bridge. No wrong turns but desperate traffic jams. I guess that is due to the subway construction but when a traffic light takes about 3 minutes to change and immediately thereafter 4 lanes merge into one, it really is a hard slog getting there.

I reckon the problem with the distinction between truth and fiction is not that chat rooms should rely wholly on truth. That would be impossible. As with the bunch of friends mentioned by bucknaway earlier in the thread, there may well be an element of falsehood in a story to ginger it up, to make our friends feel we have more success at sex than they, or we are better at our work coz we got a raise. Thats pretty standard banter. IMO it is different if one of the friends outlines a completely false story. In the telling there is likely to be the odd nudge and wink interspersed with the narrative and eventually it is likely the narrator will burst out laughing before he gets to the end as he sees his friends being taken in. So all ends well. The problem in a chat room where a respected long standing member starts a thread that is totally false - no matter that it is a repetition of old threads or is outrageous in its implications - there are no nudges and winks unless smilies are used. In the OP here, no smilies were used. Without them, what are most members supposed to think? Naturally that it is the truth. Popping white or other lies into an existing thread is perhaps not unusual, but starting a thread that is a total lie is, again in my view, not merely silly. It is dangerous. Dangerous because it opens the floodgates for others to do the same. And then how does anyone distinguish truth from fiction, the more so when it is an established poster? Trip reports depend to a large extent on accuracy from the reporter. If they become fiction, what happens to gaythailand? All chat rooms have their trolls, hydras and others determined to derail these friendly porch side chats. Thankfully Scooby and Michael have done a great job keeping them off this Board and congratulations to them for that. One or two have crept in but with the exception of Beachlover who hoodwinked several Board moderators and owners for a long time, members here are basically genuine. I certainly hope it can be kept that way. Cheers!

Am I the only one to find it extremely difficult reconciling these two quotes? In the first, reader states - not implies - that it is "necessary" to distinguish between fact and fiction. In the second, he states that "fact" may not indeed be fact. So who is supposed to trust whom? The implication is that readers (sic) are not supposed to trust what any poster writes here.

Here is a perfect example of what i was writing just as this post above appeared. I enjoyed the discussion. I thoroughly dislike the deception. Future contributions for both posters now go on a 'suspect' list. That is IF what reader just wrote is true! And for me that is itself suspect, How could concocting a story that has been told and written about several times before take an entire week to dream up? Thats pretty unbelievable!

Sorry reader, but anyone who expects the truth every time they read a gay chat forum is in the wrong place. Truth requires more than a degree of trust and verification. How can 90% or more of what is written in such forums be verified? It cant. All we can do is base what we read on the posting history of the relevant poster and make our own assumptions based on that history. Of course we want to believe that what we read is the truth. But most of us dont even know any of the other posters. Looking at the three main Thailand chat rooms it is obvious that some posters are very far from what they claim. I have written that I live in Bangkok. Do you have any proof of that? If anyone asks if I would like to meet up for a drink and I say Ill be too busy, can that be considered the truth - or an attempt to disguise the truth, that truth being that I actually live in Madison Wisconsin but part of my conscious being wants to be in Bangkok? some time ago a least three Boards put up with a troll named Beachlover for well over a year each. This poster claimed to be a mid-20s successful Sydney-based Asian who suddenly appeared, gingered up discussions for a while with discussions of his luxury trips to Asia every few months, before boring the pants off most readers who eventually realised he was a fake, and then he disappeared into the ether. I dont think Beachlover has every been identified. Whoever he is (or was), I suspect he had a big laugh every day. Other fake personas still exist. That is just part and parcel of Board life. But if a persona is fake, how can his posts be trusted, no matter how genuine they seem? Chat rooms thrive on anonymity. I cant see that will ever change. Thus what is written and by whom it is written will always require more than a generous pinch of salt.

I love the story and all the comments. Like others, IF it is true and both parties were happy, then good on them. But this sentence gave me pause. There is clearly a reason for anyone who has fallen out with a life-long friend. And that could well lead to stories being spread which are embellished at best and false at worst.