After the enormous fun (I had) celebrity spotting in Bangkok, I’ve been scouring Phuket’s parties for other famous socialites to brighten this blog up with. I haven’t found many, but at a glitzy party on Sunday a few of my friends started squealing with delight after seeing one young Thai girl chatting casually with her [...]

There are plenty of view points in Phuket. This photo was taken at Khao Rang not far from Yaowarat Road. The streets stretching off into the distance are part of Phuket Town. There’s a fitness park nearby if you’re keen on exercise, and a number of restaurants are quite popular with tourists. For another great [...]

Sick of stray dogs on the way to work? Fed up with roving mongrels barking at you on your way home? Be thankful for those dogs, because if they weren’t around, they’d be replaced by rats or cats… or pigs… or monkeys.
An interesting report in the Gazette a couple of weeks back suggested that dogs [...]

You know there’s something going on when it starts raining money, but that’s exactly what happened in Japan last Wednesday. Almost one million yen mysteriously floated down from the sky in front of a Tokyo convenience store.
One crafty Japanese citizen phoned police to say that it was his daughter who had dropped the money from [...]

Fancy a trip to your own private island? Who wouldn’t?! Phuket has a reputation for being overdeveloped and too touristy, but the only people who say that are the people who only visit the tourist areas. There are plenty of hidden gems dotted around Thailand’s biggest island.
One such gem is Rang Yai island, a tiny [...]

One of the things that’s interesting about living in Thailand is the unusual assortment of animals you sometimes come across. I remember sitting eating lunch once in Bangkok when an enormous millipede (or centipede – it could have been either really) popped up out of nowhere and scared everybody half to death.
I’m not kidding – [...]

I’m a day late with my birthday wishes here, but yesterday, Thailand’s ousted prime minister turned 58. May I be the first to say that Thaksin looks genuinely good for his age. He must have spent much of his frozen fortune on some rather good moisturizers and days at the spa.
To celebrate Thakin’s birthday, his [...]

My laptop started to bite recently. Every now and then, while I was typing away or surfing the net, I got an electric shock. It wasn’t anything life threatening, but it became increasingly annoying the more I found myself being zapped by my computer.
I searched the Internet for what the problem might have been and [...]

I used to struggle to stay awake during the day when I was working in Bangkok. This made office hours a chore and I often found myself taking mini naps of between five and 10 seconds to get through the day. Every now and then I’d take a mini nap and do that thing where [...]

When I was living in Bangkok I could never turn down an opportunity for a buffet. Although Bangkok buffets are usually expensive, the variety of food and the chance to eat as much of it as you want always got me excited. I had my last buffet at the Grand Hyatt Erawan, and once again [...]

Saphan Hin is an area of parks and public facilities where Phuket Town meets the sea. It’s a charming little area where Thai families go and have picnics. It used to be full of thick woodland where Thai couples would go to sin, and it was associated with gangs, violence and robberies until it was [...]

Sometimes blog posts can come back and bite you with a vengeance. Those harmless ramblings you write can cause all sorts of problems. It happened to me once, when a woman labeled me a sexist and took great pleasure in telling me she was going to blacken my name in the English media because she [...]

It took them long enough, but access to the popular video-sharing website Youtube has been restored in Thailand after three months of “will they, won’t they?” I may be premature with my celebrations as Youtube has been known to come back on in Thailand for short periods before disappearing again, but this is the first [...]

Hardcore porn mag or acceptable entertainment publication? I think Thailand’s got its issues confused. At the risk of becoming an X-rated blog, I’m going to put this post below a “more” tag. There will be some brief nudity so don’t click if you will be offended.