Thai Food, Seafood, Japanese Food and Western Food prepared to your taste - this service you can expect at Buffet Restaurants in Pattaya at 119 Baht only.

The New Honey Inn Hotel is a cosy boutique style hotel with a large coffee shop and beautiful rooms at very reasonable room rates. 62 fully air conditioned Rooms, with TV, Refrigerator, Bath and Shower with Hot & Cold Water and wall-to-wall tiled Floors. For more information please send a mail to Honey Inn Pattaya

The Royal Thai consulate general in Penang, Malaysia, has indicated that officers there will now limit applications from foreigners applying to visit Thailand as tourists to just three 60 day visas.

Other Thai consulates and embassies in the region are unlikely to offer more generous visa extensions than Penang.

It seems that the current government tries everything to keep long-stay tourist as well as investors out of Thailand.

Ikea has put plans to expand into Thailand firmly on the shelf amid an increasingly uncertain environment for multinational investors.

Last year's military coup and a series of tougher laws on foreign ownership have prompted Ikea to postpone a move into Thailand.

The Business Development Department is in the process of inspecting as many as 40,000 companies to see if they have used nominee structures to hold shares for foreign investors, a practice prohibited by the Foreign Business Act.

These 40,000 companies are foreign-Thai ventures, many of which are companies set up to enable farangs to 'own' property.

Farangs are not allowed to own property in Thailand. The whole country belongs to the Thai people.

Hotel operators around the country are reporting declining average occupancy rates and blaming the country's political problems and currency fluctuations. Hotels in most regions were running at lower occupancy rates than in the same period last year.

However, Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) has reported a 3.3-per-cent increase in tourist arrivals in the first half of the year and says the lower hotel-occupancy rates are due to the fact that there are more hotels and not fewer tourists.

BBC TV said in a report, that many tourists from European countries resist to book holidays in Thailand. Travel agencies in Europe are also blaming the country's political problems as well as the September 19. 2006 military coup.

For most European people, a military coup is by far the badest attemp to solve alleged, persuaded or existing political problems in any country.

History books confirm that a military coup never solved a problem; it always created new ones.

Commercial banks and the police, are battling a new ATM theft technique in which fake keypads record pin numbers and personal information. The thieves then produce clone cards to empty bank accounts.

Thai Bankers' Association secretary-general Twatchai Yongkittikul said the fake keypads feel hard to the touch and that cardholders should immediately cancel their transaction if the keypad feels strange and notify the bank immediately.

In a TV interview broadcasted during September 2007, Twatchai said he believed it was a large-scale operation that involves computer experts and people with experience in plastic and rubber products, as the fake keypads looked very much like the real thing.

According to Twatchai, the technique also involved the use of false decoders, which record personal information of cardholders stored in the magnetic strip on ATM cards. The thieves then used two sets of information - pin numbers and cardholder's information - to produce cloned ATM cards to withdraw money.

There are new clubs almost every month.

Here the latest ones:

Casnovy A-Go-Go on Walking Street.
Baron Tailor had to move out for the new venue.

Insomnia Gentlemen Club on Soi Diamond will have Coyote Dancers and replaces Supermodel A Go-Go.

Casnovy A-Go-Go now open!

And there seems to be a new trend too:

Clubs with names hard to remember. It all started with Gorkle Club (former Memories) and now Insomnia and Casnovy...

Why not simply Bush A-Go-Go or Put-In, Daksin Club or Zonti's Coyote Dancers? Easy to remember.

A One-Two-Go Airlines passenger jet with 130 people aboard crashed at about 3:35pm Sunday afternoon and broke in two while landing at Phuket Airport in foul weather. According to our latest information 89 people were confirmed dead. The other 41 people on board were injured, 5 of them are in serious condition. The MD82 was carrying 123 mostly foreign passengers, 5 crew members and 2 pilots.

There was heavy rain when flight OG269 of parent Orient Thai Airways traveling from Bangkok's Don Muang airport to Phuket attempted to make a landing. Planes in both Orient Thai and One-Two-Go livery use the OG flight identifier.

The visibility was poor as the pilot attempted to land. He decided to make a go-around but the plane lost balance and crashed.

The plane of the budget airline skidded off the runway after landing, crashed into trees and bursted into fire. According to a statement by Phuket deputy governor both the Indonesian pilot and Thai co-pilot died along with most of the passengers in the front part of the 24 years old plane.

A surviving passenger said during a TV-interview 'there was something strange about our landing. We seemed to drop down too fast.'

Weather in Phuket has been bad for several days, with thunderstorms and high wind gusts at times.

One-Two-Go owned seven MD82 twin-engine passenger jet aircrafts. The MD82 is a model of the McDonnell-Douglas DC9. The airline use these aircrafts for frequent flights around Thailand, including six each day from Bangkok to Phuket and return.

The managing director of Orient Thai Airlines, which owns One-Two-Go Airlines, said that this is the first accident in more than a decade that the airline has been operating. He said he was shocked by the news that his company's plane crashed and burned while attempting to land at the Phuket airport on Sunday afternoon.

Services at Phuket International Airport were suspended while airport workers and emergency personnel cleared the runway of wreckage in the aftermath of the crash. The airport resumed operations on Monday at 5pm. The first commercial flight touched down at about 5:45pm.

Please contact the following phone numbers (in addition to 1126) for any information regarding the accident of OG/OX269 at Phuket: 085-155-4622, 085-911-5092, 085-918-3422, 02-535-7662, 02-504-3227 or 02-504-3641.
For international calls please replace the 0 by +66 (or 0066).

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Global civil aviation protocol dictates that airlines must properly insure their aircrafts and passengers onboard.

But news reports in Thailand have said that Orient Thai has said it carried no insurance on the fatal flight, but promised to compensate Thai victims and their families.

On the other hand, Orient Thai Airlines is reported to have leased Flight OG 269 from a foreign company, and has procured full insurance for the plane and its passengers, therefore the airline is capable of reimbursing air crash victims for medical treatment and other expenses. According to Udom Tantiprasongchai, the founder of the airline, the company carries more than US$300 million in insurance cover with UK based underwriter Penloyd. The insurance covers damage to aircraft, passengers and third parties.

As of May 2007, a total of 1051 aircrafts from the MD-80 and its variant, the MD-90, were in airline service. The airliner was introduced in the 1980s by McDonnell Douglas, now part of Boeing.

The aircraft is well-liked for its strong structure, its stability and its powerful engines. The only drawback is its high fuel consumation.

There are three reports of major accidents only:

1991: SAS flight 751 had a crash-landing (engines not properly de-iced before departure). All passengers survived.

2000: Alaska Airlines flight 261 crashed in the Pacific Ocean (inadequate maintanance of the jackscew assembly). No survivers.

2001: SAS flight SK686 (collision with a small Cessna Jet during take-off in Italy. Ground movement radar not being in operation, missunderstanding between the tower and the Cessna pilot). 114 people dead.

Be prepared to find endless rows of people in front of all open immigration booths and to stand in a queue for one hour (or more).

Before opening Suvarnabhumi Airport Officials claimed the new Airport will have adequate facilities...

Thai Customs at the new Airport are stopping a lot of people at customs these days. What they are doing is putting your case through the scanner and if they see something worth investigating they will have it opened. Be careful what you bring in, even excess duty free carries a hefty fine.

Nightwalker's News Flash September 2007
Nightwalker's News Flash July / August 2007
Nightwalker's News Flash June 2007
Nightwalker's News Flash April / May 2007
Nightwalker's News Flash March 2007