Places in
And I just love chatting about Thailand
Places I've visited
Bangkok - Pattaya
- Phuket - Petchabun
- Hat Yai - Chiangmai - Pakchong
- Korat - Khon Kaen -
Buriram - Chaiyaphum
- Nongbuadang -
Like to probe the dark side of Thai culture ?
Thailand newsgroup (well worth a look every month or so)
Places to eat (& avoid)
Sallim's - my
favourite restaurant in the entire world.
To the side of the GPO, and next to
the International Phone Shop, there is a grubby cafe with a concrete floor and
metal folded tables you haven't seen since Primary School. Lizards crawl up the
walls, the occasional cockroach scurries across the floor. The toilet is
unspeakable. The customers are ALL men (mostly Pakistani), apart from the
occasional female tourist who wanders in unawares. The staff are less than
polite (astonishing, for a race of people to whom hospitality is a way of life)
and often get the orders wrong. And the food can take up to an hour to arrive.
So (if you are still reading), why does he loves this place, I hear you cry ?
Two reasons.
As soon as you taste their food, all of the above are but minor hassles. Their
curries,
And the food is INCREDIBLY cheap ! Example : my average meal there consisted of
2 curries, 2 naans and a pint glass of iced lemon tea. I once paid a total of
six dollars, only to later find I had overpaid. My bill was generally
around five dollars for the lot.
And very filling their meals are too. I never once had room for dessert after
eating at Sallim's, nor had I any wish to spoil to effect !
And I dined there several times with another Australian, a tall and very fat
guy of 18 stone (115 kg, 250 pounds). He never felt hungry after a meal there,
either !
I used to beg these guys to increase their prices. I wanted them to stay
in business for my future trips.
13 Coins - a great
place for late night snacks.
Despite being a great city for
nightlife, it's not always easy to find late night snack places open much after
midnight. There are a number of branches of 13 Coins in
13Coins Silom is open till 4am every day. It's the perfect place to drop into
for a meal on the way to Patpong, or for a late night snack coming back from
Patpong.
13 Coins is an odd copy of a restaurant on the west coast of the
Places to stay (& avoid)
Riverview
Kabana Inn
Surawong
Palace
Manohra
Best, worst and must-avoid go-go bars
Pussy Alive/Pussy Galore - my all-time favourite
Safari
English Language Pattaya Newspaper
Places to eat (& avoid)
Places to stay (& avoid)
Hotels in Pattaya & other Thai places
Petchabun is a 5 hour bus ride due
north of
Places to stay
The Burapa
An excellent hotel. Possibly the
best hotel I've stayed in, anywhere. The room was immaculate, spotlessly clean
and first class in every respect. The Burapa seemed to do much of it's trade on
conferences of businesspeople from
There are VERY few foreign visitors in Petchabun. I saw only one other
westerner during my two-day stay (and he was a Finn). The receptionists showed
me their guestbook. I counted less than ten farangs (westerners) who had
visited in the past 12 months.
The Burapa restaurant is nothing fantastic, and the prices were not cheap,
though quite bearable by western standards.
I would have stayed much longer, except that Petchabun, despite being a
regional centre with a population of 60,000, has the pace of a sleepy village.
There's little to do but wander around the (reasonably busy) streets in the
daytime and go to one of the two local cinemas at night. The conditions in one
cinema are positively third-world.
All in all, Petchbun is a great place to get away from the madness of
Places to stay
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