PeterRS

I read somewhere that Thailand only grants around 100 non-Thais permanent residency in each year, but I cannot guarantee the accuracy of this.

Many were not even born in Thailand. The border in the north of the two countries is extremely porous. Many people can and do just walk across daily. I understand the coach was born in Thailand to parents from Myanmar but that a mystery illness wiped out the rest of his family when he was about 10. He was sent to a monastery and spent many years there. The papers proving his nationality at birth appear to have vanished. The parents of the boy who speaks English, Adul, are ethnic Wa people from Myanmar. It was reported he was smuggled across the border when he was six and left at the door of a Church. Schools at the border routinely take in all youngsters without asking for paperwork.

Why do you say " as long as one of the parents is Thai"? These kids entered the cave as a team, survived as a team, all the boys are being educated in Thailand. They have been invited as a team to visit several very famous football clubs in Europe. I am certain the other boys will refuse to go unless they can all go. It would be a relatively simple matter for the Thai government to make an exception and grant citizenship to the four who are stateless, regardless of their parentage. That hill tribe area close to the border with Myanmar has hundreds of thousands of stateless children and adults who were probably born in Myanmar but fled to escape the continuing hostilities in that country. These did not start with the Rohingya. They have been going on since independence. Without citizenship they cannot get passports, ID cards, they have few rights and almost no legal protection. Thailand has accepted many of them but will not grant them citizenship.

You seem to have lost far too much weight in too short a time and still feel bad. I hope you have been to a doctor and if he recommended it also to a specialist. Get better soon.

How much extra are you prepared to pay a boy for that pleasure?

I guess I must be old fashioned, I cannot understand why anyone would want to see a vdo of himself having sex with another. But I fully accept we all have our own fetishes. IMHO It should not be a question of litigation. There have been tales on this forum and others about boys who have been paid specifically to permit photos or vdos being taken with them. Years ago I met one young guy who was paid 30,000 baht for a series of photos which he knew would be published and put on the internet. He had signed an agreement and he was quite happy about it. But surely this should not be an issue of law. It is primarily a question of making sure you make it perfectly clear in advance to the the boy you are with what you are doing and why you want to do it. Then of the fee you are prepared to pay him for this extra service. Additionally he has to be told that you cannot guarantee that this vdo will not be seen on the internet. Only if after that he is happy with what you are offering, go ahead. No matter your best intentions mistakes happen. Its perfectly possible that you could upload the vdo when uploading something else. Or you lose one device where the vdo is stored. Or you send to a friend who again could accidentally upload it. The boy you are with has to be protected and it is your responsibility to ensure that 100%. Again, thats just my view.

I cant stand Starbucks in the UK or USA. The stores I have visited seem boring and the service as bad. But in Thailand it is a different matter altogether. I find the atmosphere in most Starbucks outlets very pleasant. The coffee is OK although a bit pricey, but the baristas are always smiling and good looking (especially the guys!) and the relatively young clientele offers great eye candy. If there is a group of cute students at the next table lingering over their drinks whilst working on computers, who am I to complain? I am perfectly happy also to spend a long time over my drink enjoying the view!

You are very kind, Vinapu. That is far more information that I had sought but I am sure it is very helpful to those planning a trip. Thank you. Incidentally I entirely agree with you about tipping. It depends entirely on the experience and the service we receive. It then becomes a matter for each individual.

Thank you from me Vinapu. Although i am not much of a massage guy I do appreciate your reports. I am amazed that two massages a day is quite common for some posters. May I ask a rather personal question and please do not answer if you do not wish others to know or feel its just none of my business. I wonder very roughly how much you spend on a 13-14 day trip including accommodation, meals, all the massages, bar hopping and tips and so on. Just a total amount rom arrival in Thailand to departure, not a detailed day by day list as Christianpfc sometimes does. I think it might help others in generally budgeting for trips.

I do not think it was bad luck. It was the fact that very few Thais are able to read a map even when it is in Thai. Those who can seem incapable of communicating the information on a map to other Thais. It is just a national trait. Assuming you can read a map, getting around is not difficult. But it does require you to do two quite simple things. Get your hotel to write the name of your destination as clearly as possible in Thai. Then all you need do is learn four very short Thai phrase - turn left, turn right, straight ahead and stop here please. You then become the navigator. If that is too much trouble, locate the nearest hotel or large office building and have your hotel write that in Thai. There is a very good chance a motorcycle driver will know that location. You then get very close to your destination and only require a shortish walk from there.

Not sure the new trains will make much difference as their introduction coincides with the opening of a lot more stations on that line. Why the BTS authorities are like ostriches beats me. The obvious way to reduce congestion is to add one more car to each train on that Line. They steadfastly refuse to do this.

Please correct me if I am wrong but I thought that one of the objects of ASEAN or APEC was the introduction of mobility of labour within the region.

Sorry to hear you are not well and best wishes for a speedy recovery. I am curious why Singapore guys are abandoning Thailand in favour of Taiwan. What do you think are the reasons for this?

You are "sure", but you are not certain. Its a free magazine. Like you I have no idea how profitable or otherwise the magazine might actually be. Do you really think those ads from bars and saunas bring in much cash? I mentioned another free magazine ThailandOut. I have no idea about its finances. All I know is that it had some inaccurate listings. It also had ads. It cannot have been profitable because the print magazine ended and it became an online publication. Then that died and the publisher fled Thailand. Whether or not the two events are related I don't know. Its immaterial here. There was also another similar free magazine available in many of the gay venues. It too died. I think z909s suggestion was not that anyone become a scout. That takes time and trouble. Being paid for that would be very reasonable. But it only takes a few minutes at most to contact a publisher to point out what is wrong and/or what is missing. That way you provide a service to the rest of the gay community. Not doing so but complaining about it sounds somewhat hollow IMHO.

I am in two minds about maps and listings. On the one hand I get pissed off when one or other (or even both) is wrong. On the other I accept reality. Given that gay venues now open and close with greater frequency than before it must be a huge problem obtaining information and then, worse, keeping it all updated. Years ago there was a rather good gay magazine ThailandOut in English published by a farang in Chiang Mai. Its maps were pretty good but still not fully accurate or fully comprehensive. It did act on comments from readers and obviously tried to update them, but it could never get up to date. I wonder how many posters realise that this site is not just a chat room. It has a great deal of information on its home pages for gay residents and visitors. Much of it is extremely useful. Even so, some listings are considerably out of date. In the Bangkok massage spa section Albury, Aqua and Fan Club are listed. Not sure of the dates but I think all closed about 3 years ago. Under Pattaya bars, Krazy Dragon, Wild West Boys and Yaya are listed. Again, all closed their doors probably at least 2 years ago. I mention this only because the whole business of obtaining information, checking it and getting precise locations must take a great deal of time. This is even more true now that many gay venues in Bangkok are spread quite far from the city centre. Once the basic information has been obtained, how do you keep it up to date? Do the publications have enough cash to pay someone to do that? Unlikely IMHO. Will the venues themselves tell you when they close down? Why should they bother? I havent seen Thaipuan for at least a year. From a quick look online, the basic listings seem pretty good, although oddly there is no listing for Sauna Mania in Bangkok which has been around for years. There is also no listing for the trio of bars close to the Mango Tree - Super A, Golden Cock and Nature Boys. But surely that illustrates how difficult obtaining the information for listings must be especially now when gay venues sit on constantly shining sands.

That is not what i said. The point I was trying to make was really very simple. If you live on the west coast of the US and want a vacation that includes meeting up with other guys whether they are Asian, Latin American or of whatever nationality, it is now easier and faster to fly to South America or Australia than it is to Thailand. So the gay tourist holiday world has grown a lot larger than it was a few decades ago. sglad is absolutely correct in mentioning the arrival in Thailand of many more Chinese and Asians. When compared to the western tourists of yesteryear the problem for the bar owners though is that it seems they go to bars primarily for one drink and to see a show. More than one mamasan has told me that so far they are far less interested in offs. One reason for drinks prices having shot up. The majority find their sex in the saunas, gay massage spas and I assume the apps. But sglad is spot on in his final sentences. The gogo bar business model is outdated and needs to change to survive.

Fair question! As we age and gain greater experience of life and what it offers its only natural our perceptions change. But I honestly do not believe it necessarily follows that our views on nighttime entertainment change, or at least change much. I reckon it is perfectly clear from comments on the various chat forums that my views are quite common. With rare exceptions, what is on offer in the gogo bars is a shadow of what used to be offered. I also reckon your analogy between the bars and a historical monument like Wat Arun is flawed. My appreciation of Wat Arun actually grows each and every time I am fortunate to see it again. Like a Botticelli painting it never fails to fill me with awe. What is offered in the bars has gone in the opposite direction. I know from the views of many recent visiting friends who never knew what they were like decades ago that they agree. I am delighted you had a great time. But isnt it horses for courses again? If the views of the majority seem to be gloom, gloom, gloom, do you not think there might be more that a grain of truth in their views?

An excellent summary by spoon. If the bars are not providing entertainment and instead giving such a negative impression to a relative newcomer, the business model is shot to pieces. It either changes radically or eventually goes the way of the dinosaur.

I honestly do not agree with the rosy tinted spectacle analogy. Entering a gogo bar 15, 25 or even 35 years ago there was a sort of gob smacked disbelief “Wow! Am I really seeing all this?” The quote in Hanans post really does sum it up pretty well. Those bars were tremendous fun. That fun element has all but disappeared and been replaced with routine boredom and boring routines. He could have added that gogo bars are now exclusively for a dwindling band of tourists. Thais used to flock to them. What happened to them? A business model dependant almost exclusively on short term visitors can never survive unless it is constantly reinventing itself. Remember there are not so many posters in this forum. Since they have been making increasingly negative comments about the experience, is it strange that writ large this will also be felt by the much larger group of gay tourists? I had friends here from the USA a few weeks ago. They too were bored. I doubt if that would have been the reaction a few decades back. These guys are not into massages with happy endings. They prefer overnight. They did check the apps but as it was their first visit to Bangkok and they had a lot of sightseeing during the days, they found it not so easy to hook up with guys they thought they would like because it took too long to set up hook ups. They had set aside their evenings for fun. What they found was more than disappointing. Their highlight was Babylon, which they really enjoyed and was inexpensive. Different strokes for different folks. Vinapu's report about his 90 minute massage at Senso for 1,490+1,500 tip to me is outrageous. But he was happy. American tourists can just as easily go to Sydney or Melbourne where they will instantly find many hundreds of cute Asians on the apps most of whom just want to meet up and have no interest in pay for play. Go to South America and they will find vast numbers of smooth slim sexy guys waiting. Most may want a small tip but the sex is usually amazing! If Thailand bar operators continue to concentrate on a dying outmoded model and continuously increasing prices, they are bound to die out. Just look at Sunee Plaza in Pattaya which was thriving 10 years ago but where yet another bar has just announced it is closing. I put its survival as a couple of years at most. The gay world has become global. For those who enjoy Thailand, great. Keep on coming. Unfortunately many who would normally have Thailand top of their list have already voted with their feet.

Thank for the info. Do you know when it reopened?

Wishful thinking I fear. I am not sure how many owners are expats and how many Thai. But never expect any group of Thais or Thai business owners to agree on just about anything! The Titanic may sink but it will be the fault of the iceberg, not the ship and its crew.

Judging from a number pf earlier articles there was definitely a request at the end of each one for readers to leave comments. I think it meant registering first, but people register for most forums if they want to take part. Checking just now I see very few readers bothered to comment. Added to the lack comments I suspect readership hits must also have been low and this prevented Buckbee from generating ad revenue. It pisses me off that some sites like gaypassport.com are able to continue even though it is often massively out of date in terms of its gay Asia listings and yet continues to promote almost exclusively high end hotels. This particular site lists G.O.D. and the original Jupiter as not only being open but having been last reviewed on 23 January 2018. Total lies! Both had been closed for some time by then. Didnt G.O.D. close its doors at least two years ago? I also think updating any blog on a daily basis is probably an impossibility if Buckbee has a regular job. Even Christianpfc who is not in full time employment and whose blog is read and commented on by many often has several days between posts. But still, a sad day for those of us interested in gay happenings and stories about Asia.

Was in Senso twice about three years ago. Way too expensive, Good massages but only so so afters. Maybe if it reduced its prices the masseurs would get more customers.

Whenever I have been to Japan, the Immigration queues for non Japanese on entry have usually been huge. 45-60 minutes was usual a few years ago even tho the Japanese line officials often had no queues at all. Never once did I see anyone from the foreigner line be moved to keep those on the Japanese lines occupied. I wonder how successful facial will be? Some passports last ten years and the photos in them could be a year or so older than that. Over 11 years, a man could have gone bald, men and women have to start wearing spectacles etc.. Quite a number of facial features could have changed as people age. It seems many airports are adopting different systems London has iris recognition. Last time I entered, I was stopped. It didn't recognise my eyes! Taipei uses fingerprints on entry and exit but exit is now automatic with a quick passport scan and fingerprints. No departure cards. Takes 10 seconds or less. Not sure if there is worldwide airport security body. If there is I cant understand why it does not get international airports to standardise their procedures.

I suggest you have made a wise decision. It will be far less expensive on your savings. You will not be tied down to anyone in particular but can still form a longer term relationship if you like. You can also opt for a considerably cheaper studio or small condo unit where you can do your own thing and not be bothered with live in Thai guys wanting their local TV all the time! Have a great stay.