I watched the first three episodes of Bravo’s Big Trouble in Tourist Thailand last night. Everyone’s been talking about this series. It follows around the volunteer tourist police as they deal with foreigners getting into all sorts of bother.

It’s pure entertainment and not much more. Nothing covered in the show is new and you could make the same kind of programme in any of England’s major cities. But still, it’s always amusing watching the situations tourists get themselves into.

It goes like this: people get drunk and then either crash a motorbike or get caught with drugs or get in a fight or piss off a bar girl or rent a jet-ski or get mugged and drugged by ladyboys.

The jet-ski debacle in the first episode has been getting a lot of attention in Phuket. But again, it’s nothing new. Tourists rent jet-skis and sometimes they take them back to shore and are accused of damaging them, at which point the jet-ski operators get very aggressive and demand money. This has been happening for years.

Hopefully now something will be done about the jet-ski owners. They are ruthless scoundrels, but no matter how much advice is available for tourists, people will still rent them.

It’s an interesting show to watch, but if you’re planning on booking flights to Thailand, don't panic and think that these scenarios are the norm. They’re not.

Torrents for the show are here.

I've been following this story for a while now and it still has me scratching my head. From the Phuket Gazette:

PHUKET CITY: After spending more than five months in a Phuket jail, the German teenager arrested along with 43-year-old Briton Dax Young on child sex abuse charges in March is set to fly home next month.

The 18-year-old, who cannot be named, pleaded guilty at the Phuket juvenile court today and was handed a four-year suspended sentence and fined 17,000 baht.

He plans to fly home to Germany on August 18 and start a new life in Cologne.

The judgment brings to an end a saga that first came to public attention in March this year, when the youth was arrested together with Dax Young.

The pair were accused of sexually abusing boys as young as 9 years old.

Those who know the young man, including German diplomats involved in the case, believe he was a victim of Dax Young’s ascendancy, rather than a perpetrator.

The teenager was a minor when arrested, and claims he was forced to have sex with the boys by Mr Young, who threatened to make problems for the teenager’s family.

The cold, hard facts are that this lad was 17 when he was arrested, which is above the age of consent, yes? He was accused and admitted to having sex with boys under the age of consent. He then pleaded guilty to the charges and was sentenced.

So, he has been let off because people, including the media, it appears, "believe" he was manipulated by Dax Young. Previous reports suggested that the German youth pleaded guilty because the Thai legal system would never see him as a victim, rather than a perpetrator. So where's the proof he is a victim?

This is from a previous story:

German Ambassador to Thailand Dr Hanns Schumacher said, "…this youngster was irresponsibly left on the streets of Phuket at a very young age for years without any adult supervision. It is therefore no surprise that he was introduced to criminal company. This is the main reason we hope that at the end of the proceedings, [the youth] will be considered rather a victim and not a perpetrator."

That's vague, at best. Here's some more:

The boy, who confessed to conspiring with Mr Young to sexually abuse Thai boys as young as nine years old, allegedly appears in digitally recorded images seized as evidence.

The boy’s mother and sister insist he be released immediately and allowed to give evidence against Mr Young, 41, who denies the charges against him.

The boy was sexually abused by the older man for four years, the family claim.

The family "claim". That doesn't seem like proof to me. Has this been proved in a court of law or is this their word against Dax Young's? And this is the same family that abandoned the youth on the streets of Phuket for "years". Why should we trust them? What are we not being told here.

This is the part of the story that really confuses me:

Maj Gen Apirak said the German youth was renting a house with his mother in Rawai and has lived in Thailand for one year

There has been nothing offered as proof by the media or the police that the German youth should be let off with a suspended sentence.

Discuss.

The ELT Communication Group is actively seeking backpackers and travellers to fill teaching positions at government high schools and language centres. There is no mention of qualifications or paperwork and neither is there any reference to the fact that it is illegal to work in Thailand without a work permit. Will ELT Communication Group provide work permits to get their teachers legal? There isn't even any mention of teaching credentials or any kind of qualification in the advertisement.

From the ad:

English + or elt communications as they're known are always on the lookout for new teachers to fill their never ending teacher void.

This is just plain sad. I don't know what teachers in Thailand make of all this, but it doesn't inspire much confidence.

The scene in Thailand has changed dramatically since I first arrived. I remember stringing one visa run after another. Those days are long gone. Supposedly there was a clampdown on teaching regulations, but I don't know how far that has gone.

I wanted to wire some money from my Bangkok Bank account to one of my accounts in the UK. I’d been meaning to do this for a while, so I finally got round to looking into it during my last trip to Bangkok. The MBK branch where I opened my account told me to go to the Siam branch, who then told me to go to the Silom Branch, which is where the head office is. First lesson: go to your bank’s biggest branch.

The Bangkok Bank head office is a huge, confusing place. I eventually found where I needed to be (on the second floor) and the whole process took a little less than an hour. Bear in mind that to wire money from one country to another, you the SWIFT code of the bank you are sending money to. The only problem I came across was that because I no longer work in Thailand, I was only able to wire 350,000 baht between accounts.

Had I been in possession of a work permit then I would have been able to wire the lot. Likewise, a letter from my previous place of work would have done the trick. Though it was a slight inconvenience, I opted to withdraw the rest in cash and change it to pound sterling there and then. I guarded that money all the way back to London, where I quickly found a bank to deposit it.

There was no charge on my UK bank’s side and the charge from Bangkok Bank was only 400 baht (Western Union would have charged something like 12,000 baht). The exchange rate I got was about 52 baht to the pound. I am no great economist, but the value of the pound compared with the baht has decreased by about one third in the last four years. I don’t know if it is going to sink much lower, but I have been reading that the pound is likely to recover. Call it blind faith, but I would rather entrust my money with the UK than Thailand.

Any other experiences then please share them here.

It's certainly an odd time for Thai Immigration to infuriate a large number of expats living in the country. You'd think Thailand would be doing all it could to keep people here, or at least to entice tourists to visit. By the new rules, according to Thai Visa, who always get these updates before anyone else, any person entering Thailand through a land border will receive only a 15-day permit to stay.

This means that if you do a visa run over land, you can only extend your trip for 15 days. What is unclear is how, if at all, this affects the 90-out-of-180 rule. According to that regulation, visitors without alternative visas are only permitted to stay in Thailand for 90 days in a period of 180 days. If this rule isn't changing, then it just means that some people will have to do twice as many border runs as before.

Travelers arriving by plane still get 30 days on arrival.