Quote:
Originally Posted by ProfCrash
When is the move? And please tell me it is not to the South of Thailand. The BBC had a story on that region recently and it sounds moderately dangerous.
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We are planning to fly out around the 6th of June. We'll be returning to the NORTH of Thailand to live in the area around
Chiang Mai, just a hop, skip, and a jump from the Burmese and Laotian borders. We lived there for 10 years and love the area, people, and foods. It's sort of what one would imagine Hawaii to be without the expense... Flowers everywhere, old traditional bamboo villages next to modern shopping plazas... elephants walking down the side of the roads (at night elephants are required to have red, blinking lights tied to their tails if being moved on city streets...) people still farming with water buffaloes dragging the plows, and cutting rice by hand... but supermarkets selling import foods from Germany, US, France, Spain, etc... Tessco is there, as is Carrefour. Ultra-modern and ancient, side by side. It's the last stop on the railway line going north from Singapore. Beyond here there be dragons...
But we often vacation in the South. It's true that southern Thailand is a hotbed of Muslim extremism, and bombs have been going off daily down there for years now. In fact, it's so common that most of the media have even stopped reporting about it... However, the odds of our being in the same area as a bomb going off are pretty slim. The south of Thailand is about the size of California. And the southern islands are what was written about in the DeCaprio film/book "The Beach." In fact, that used to be one of our favorite destinations... no electricity, no roads, no cars, no cement building... Just a few bamboo bungalow colonies and a couple of dive shops... We would rent a bamboo hut right on the beach for $3 a night. It was so quiet at night... you could almost hear the stars. But that was then.
Once the backpack travelers heard about how nice it was, they descended like locust. Today there are three villages, a car rental agency, and dozens of fancy hotels. You won't find anything cheaper than $75 a night, and that's in the center of the island!
Stitchawl