concerned

ParadiseLost, on 2012-02-26 08:10:20, said:

pretty obvious invasion of privacy that wouldn't fly in any developed nation, but hey TIT.  doesn't matter if you partake or not, the police doing this is no better than the person taking ya ba.

just for the record, not sure if you saw a thread that i posted here a week or two ago about a 6ft+ 250lb farang whacked out on drugs going crazy and fighting with police, so they tied him to a tree with aquarium tubing and gave him an injection into his foot to calm him down, i even added a pic.

insertmembernamehere, on 2011-10-12 15:09:23, said:

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"The only good farang is a dead one" is pretty much the attitude of many Thais on Samui.  In seven years I have never heard a Thai say,"Hey, there goes a good farang." When I first met my Thai wife several years ago she nervously asked me if I had murdered my wife and children back home.  After laughing for several minutes I asked her who had spread that rumour and she said that many people had warned her about me.  I told her the next time she heard it to just say that the farang was offering a 1MB reward for anybody who could find a wife or children in his past.    The longer you are here the less you are tolerated.  Thais like tourists who come here and unload their wallets.  If you can't kill the farang at least spread bad rumours about them.  Again, this is a generalisation, as I have met many good Thais here, but it only takes a few disgruntled souls to rock the boat.  And before you say it, I am here because I love the island, the food, and its attractions.  As my wife said to me,"Stay clear of these people as they are not really Thai."

I would like to leave here my feedback of staying on Samui for 5 days.

I stay in Pattaya with my TG who is from Surat Thani. She has been moaning for quite some time that she wanted to go see her mom and other family. So I thought what the heck. Let's go to Samui first and then visit your relatives since neither of us had been there before. If only knew that it was such a ripoff.

Firstly I was surprised to find out that Bangkok Airways had monopoly on the flights to Samui with ridiculous 4000 baht for one person one way from Pattaya. But on the arrival I realized that the whole island is one huge corrupted monopoly. The taxi fare to my hotel which was 7 kilometers from the airport was 350 baht (at first they wanted 500 and were showing me the printed paper with prices but my girl spoke the local dialect to him and the guy said that for just 2 of us he could go 350 the lowest because the boss would cut his balls). There was no meter taxi at the airport only so called "private cars" with fixed prices. On the way my girl spoke to him and he told us that each taxi driver needs to pay 15.000 baht a month to some boss who oversees all the airport taxis. No other taxi companies are allowed so it's a monopoly and they can extort any prices they want because there is no other way to get out of there.

I doubt they could do it without the involvement of the local authorities. So I believe the corrupt Samui authorities do not allow any competition and get its share of profits. And you have similar stories all over the island. There is usually one single agent which operates some kind of activity and charges ridiculuous prices.

The prices of accomodation are high compared to the quality. We were paying about 2500 baht a night for hotel which appeared to be quite old and was way overpriced. The breakfast was shit too. For this money I could get a really nice hotel in Pattaya with nice food. The hotel we stayed in would cost maximum 1500 in Pattaya. The food is 1.5-2 times expensive than in Pattaya and is often crap.

The beach was nice though. But you can get the same beach anywhere in Surat Thani.

Don't get me wrong guys I am not some stingy cheap charlie guy. I never have an issue of paying for something if it is really worth it. I've lived in Thailand for almost a year and have been to many places and I know the real prices of things. And I hate it when people try to charge me 5 times the real price. It just pisses me off enormously and makes me angry. It's the same thai food in a same thai foodmart. It's the same beer, the same bar as everywhere else in Thailand. WHy the heck are the prices 2-3 times higher? Is it any better quality or it's cleaner, safer than anywhere else in Thailand? No. The answer is greed of the owners. I speak fairly good Thai and I spoke to the staff at the hotels and restaraunts. Most of them are from Isan and they earn the same 7-10k baht (a bit higher than in Isan but still shit... and 10k is for the receptionists who have university education). So the owners gets all the excess profit. Call it "Samui rent".

Another thing the place is so overdeveloped and dirty. It's even worse than Ko Chang.

I guess I wouldn't write it if it was my first time in Thailand and I came directly from Europe say in winter. But I am already used to the tropical scenery and the climate which are the same everywhere in Thailand. And I know how much everything is worth in Thailand too. So I hate it when I put myself into tourist traps (which is the whole of Samui).

I think I will never go to Samui again and will not advise my friends to go there. It's just another massive ripoff (together with Phuket) where they charge you European prices for shit. I am sure that people who stay in Samui long term know how to avoid paying tourist surcharge (as well as I know how to avoid it in Pattaya) but it seems like it's very difficult here.

There are still nice places in Thailand like islands in Andaman near Burma with very laid back atmosphere without the ripoff mentality. And these are the locations where they Thais go too. And notice how there are almost no Thai tourists in Samui. They know it's shit for farangs first comers.

RichieWhite, on 2011-07-08 10:09:41, said:

I was going to reply to nalak but you have done it for me and you are spot on.