THAILAND GIRLFRIEND

In order to qualify for a twelve-months’ visa in Thailand, you have to have a precise amount of money in the bank: 400,000 Baht if you are married to a Thai and 800,000 if you are not married. (I have heard numerous times that two can live as cheaply as one, but never for half the cost). Another condition is that that money has to stay in a Thai bank three months before you require the visa.

This time my bank in Britain was slow sending my money to Thailand so I lost my twelve-months’ visa. There are a few choices open in this case but all require travel. My wife and I took the decision to go to the nearby Laotian capital of Vientiane, which is approximately 500 miles (800 kilometres) from where we live in northern Thailand, because neither of us had been there previously.

The bus goes from Phitsanulok, which is about 75 kilometres in precisely the opposite direction from Laos, that is south-east. Since the bus was leaving at 22:00 there was no suitable bus to take us there and we had to book a taxi.

The journey to Phitsanulok took us four hours, because the taxi driver wanted to stop off and check that his mother was all right. He was not a real taxi driver, just a farmer with a car. There are no real taxis where I live and his mother was not sick, he merely wanted to take advantage of the fact that he was going to be passing nearby her village to check that she was all right.

None of that is out of the ordinary here, you take it in your stride as part of travelling through ‘the country’. The bus was clean and comfortable and on time, which, to be fair, they frequently are. When it came to saying good-bye, why wife’s daughter did not want to be left behind. Luckily, there was a chair left on the bus, so we took her along as well.

The trip to Udon Thani was enjoyable but long; seven hours of meandering through the mountains of north-eastern Thailand, but in the dark so you could not see anything. Udon was cold – the first time I have ever been cold in Thailand in six years.

Although it was probably around ten degrees Celsius, I have become acclimatised to a minimum of 20c and an average of 30c. We had no warm clothes and the daughter did not have a change of clothes at all. Nor a passport. And she had forgotten her ID, which has to be carried at all times.

My wife rang a friend in Udon and she arranged a taxi to Vientiane, which is 22 kilometres across the border from Nong Khai, which is 50 kilometres north of Udon – a distance of 72 kilometres. This time it was a shop-keeper with a car who wanted to go to Laos to buy some duty-free cigarettes.

Once across ‘The Friendship Bridge’, we parted company for a while because I had to use a different route through passport control. My wife and her daughter were waiting at the other end for me, but the taxi had deserted us and gone home. I have no concept how the daughter got through without an ID, but I know money changed hands. Getting a taxi, a real one, from there to Vientiane was simple.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on several subjects, but is now concerned with Vientiane visa run. If you would like to know more, please visit our web site at Package Holidays to Thailand.

Pattaya is a city constructed for fun on the northeastern coast of the Gulf of Thailand. It is located in Chonburi Province around 150 kilometres south of Bangkok. In the Sixties, Pattaya was scarcely known, yet the American soldiers fighting in Vietnam began using it for R&R and it started to grow. Pattaya is most well-known for its entertainment and its nightlife, but in fact it has a great deal more than that to offer.

As far as only sport goes, Pattaya offers horse riding, swimming, diving, wind surfing, golf, tennis and jet skiing among others. However, unlike most sporting towns or cities, it does not start to go to sleep when the sun goes down.

The bars, restaurants, discos and strip bars begin to open in profusion at around four o’clock. The bars are of each persuasion to suit each niche market.

There are Welsh bars, American bars, Irish bars, Lady Boy bars and every other type of bar you can think of. Similarly with the restaurants, there are specialized restaurants for every country. There are bush game restaurants, Chinese, Japanese, American, French, German and fish restaurants. In fact there are thousands of restaurants and bars all attempting to become unique.

I am sure that you could stay in Pattaya for months without going the same bar or eating the same sort of food twice. This is just as well because there are representatives from each country in the world there as well. You will hear English, Russian and every European and Asian language spoken in Pattaya on an everyday basis.

Pattaya receives over one million visitors a year. Most of these visitors are men, and the local government is trying to do more to attract women and families by relocating the girlie bars back away from the beach.

Despite it being fairly big, you can stay in your favourite part of Pattaya yet find nearly everything you want near-by. However, if you do want to travel about, nothing could be easier. Most individuals just hop on a ‘Baht Bus’. These small open-backed pick-ups can be seen going around the city by fairly predictable routes once you understand the design of the city.

The ‘fixed fare’ is ten Baht for as far as you want to go on the route, although some drivers will endeavor to trick more out of you if you go a long distance. Thais pay five Baht. If you do not feel confident enough to predict where the bus is going, you could get on one of the thousands of motorcycle taxis.

They are dearer at about forty to sixty Baht, yet they will go anywhere you like. Get a quote before you set off to avoid disappointment on both sides. If you do not want to rent a car, there are other alternatives. You could rent a motorcycle or motorbike. A motorcycle costs about 100 Baht a day at the cheapest, but be wary of the traffic in Pattaya it can become fairly chaotic.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on several topics, but is now concerned with Songkran – the old Thai New Year. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at Package Holidays to Thailand.

Orchids have the reputation of being hard to grow in the West. Gardeners shy away from trying to grow them because they think that they are a problem to grow and because they are expensive. This is easily understood, but there is more to the story than that. The fact is that most countries have their own native orchid species, so it is not that difficult to grow orchids wherever you live, if you select the right variety.

The other side of the coin is that what most gardeners in the West think of as orchids are orchids from exotic countries and they can be a problem to grow. I say difficult to grow, but that is not the whole story either. If you can create an environment similar to where the orchids come from, it need not be a problem at all.

A lot of the spectacular orchids are parasites, like mistletoe is a parasite plant in the temperate countries of the West. These orchids often grow on trees. In trees and on trees, that is. So, their natural environment is to become attached to the bark of a living tree or to get lodged in the fork of a branch.

The orchid will then draw its nutrients and water from the inside of its host much in the same fashion as does a flea or a bed bug. Another thing to become aware of is that if a plant lives under the canopy of a tree, it seldom, if ever, experiences direct sunlight. Wooded regions are also pretty humid. It is also worth mentioning that exotic plants normally come from warm or hot countries.

Therefore, if you can recreate these conditions of providing warmth, humidity and a host, growing foreign orchids should not become that much of a problem. And in truth, it is not, although in the West it might necessitate a greenhouse.

Thailand is home to many parasitic orchids, most of which grow on trees in the forests, which are warm to hot and humid, but most people do not live under those conditions. Most Thais live in either open villages or cities where conditions are not favorable to growing jungle orchid varieties. However, most Thai gardeners do not need or even have greenhouses.

Instead, if a Thai gardener is interested in nurturing jungle orchid varieties, he or she will purchase (or acquire) the root complex of a dead tree which also has a tree stump of, say, a metre attached. They will then move this tree stump in to a very shady position, say, under a canopy and grow their wild jungle orchids on that.

How is that done?, you may ask. Well, it is actually simplicity itself. First you get hold of a sample of the orchid and then you attach it to the stump with a ’strap’ of something that will both allow the orchid to grow and to breathe. Most Thais use some of the fibres from inside a coconut.

The gardener will strap the baby orchid to the stump using the coconut matting as a band-aid with either staples or small nails. By the time the orchid has sunken its roots into the host, the matting will have rotted away, as will probably the staples.

The only thing left to do is to keep the tree and the infant flower well watered so that it can draw the remaining nutrients out of the dead tree. They will flourish for numerous years under these conditions and the tree stump will be a living flower pot, of sorts.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on several topics, but is now involved with Loy Krathong. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at Package Holidays to Thailand.