Filed under: News, Thai news, Travel | Tags: Bangkok, Bangkok Post, Beer, bitter, Britain, bus travel, buses, developing countries, G8, government, Great Britain, Hua Hin, industrial action, London, Marmite, News, newspaper, nostalgia, privatisation, public transport, rail travel, railways, SRT, State, State Railway of Thailand, strikes, Surat Thani, Thai news, Third World, trains, UK, United Kingdom
Half and half
Ah, a taste of home. And no, I don’t mean a jar of Marmite or a pint of bitter. I mean a newspaper headline that will be all-too familiar to anyone who is from or has lived in Britain. “4,000 stranded in rail chaos” was splashed on the front page of today’s Bangkok Post.
Rail chaos. Words that are so familiar to the Brit, they’re almost like the lyrics from a favourite childhood song. Nostalgic, even.
The story is that strike action forced the cancellation of the majority of services in, to and from the southern province of Surat Thani, with passengers left stranded or to find alternative means of transport.
Filed under: Expat life, Outside Thailand, Travel | Tags: airport, airport closure, Amphawa, anti-government protests, Asia, Ayutthaya, Bang Saen, Bangkok, Chachoengsao, Expat life, Hua Hin, Ko Chang, Ko Si Chang, Krabi, Pattaya, political unrest, politics, Samut Prakan, Samut Songkhram, Singapore, Sri Racha, Suphan Buri, Suvarnabhumi airport, Thailand, Travel, UK, United Kingdom, working overseas
Ko Chang
The first item on the agenda is to fill in the gaps between September 2008 and September 2009, before I will start writing about more timely stuff, as and when it happens. I will be concise, because 12 months is a long time to chronicle, and will perhaps return to certain points in more detail at a later date.
TRAVEL
Everyone who knows me will know how much I love to travel. The prospect of living and working abroad always excited me, and now I am doing it. I expected that living in Thailand would enable me to jet off to nearby Asian countries frequently, not to mention that Thailand itself is chock-full of attractive destinations.
Filed under: International news, Outside Thailand, Travel | Tags: 2004 tsunami, America, American Samoa, Apia, Australasia, Australia, BBC, beaches, bottled water, Boxing Day, Boxing Day tsunami, CNN, coral, coral reefs, countryside, disaster, earthquake, expats, flying foxes, food, holiday, independent Samoa, India, Indian Ocean, Indian Ocean tsunami, Indonesia, international aid, International news, jungle, Krabi, Maldives, native cultures, natural disaster, News, Oceania, Ofu, Phuket, rainforests, resorts, Samoa, Samoan islands, South Pacific, South Pacific tsunami, Sri Lanka, subsistence, Thailand, Tonga, tourism, Travel, trekking, tropical beaches, tsunami, US Samoa, US territories, USA, Western Samoa
Ofu beach, American Samoa
Again, a part of the world that is dear to me has been devastated by a tsunami.
Last time was the 2004 Boxing Day disaster which wreaked havoc on several Indian Ocean countries, most famously Thailand. This time the Samoan islands have borne the brunt of killer waves resonating from a huge earthquake in Indonesia – also the epicentre of the 2004 catastrophe.
Phuket was worst-hit in 2004, while Krabi also suffered extensive damage, and scenes of the damage there were poignant for me at the time, as I had only two months earlier enjoyed my first trip to Thailand, spending half of it in Krabi, a dramatically beautiful province which remains my favourite place in the kingdom.
Last week the Samoan islands – both independent Samoa and the US territory of American Samoa – were hit by a tsunami of a similar ferocity, with reports of waves of anything between three and seven metres high washing up to a mile inland, devastating the southern coastlines and in some cases destroying entire villages. Tonga, too, was hit.
