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Live Better For Less Money In Thailand! A Guide To Living, Retiring, Working and Doing Business in Thailand.  This EscapeArtist Special Report is intended for those readers who are seriously considering moving to Thailand for a prolonged period, or perhaps for the rest of their lives. The contents focus less upon the sort of information usually found in the popular tourist guides (hotels, restaurants, entertainment etc) and more upon the practical realities of moving to and successfully living in the Land of Smiles. Thailand is a wonderful place to live, but a move to the country is not without it’s attendant difficulties. This Report aims to help the reader to achieve a smooth transition to a new life in the Kingdom - Get The Details - Click Here -

Thailand is more than a place: it's a mood. It's this mood that makes the country alluring to foreigners, and home to many thousands of expatriates. But why Thailand in particular? Can we not find what we are looking for in other places perhaps Paris, or maybe Tahiti, or any of the thousands of dream spots around the world? We all search for that place in the sun where we can find those things that appeal to us the most, whether it be our mental and emotional requirements or our physical and worldly needs. Thailand offers these. For the expat living in Thailand, it's not the lack of love for one's home country, or the desire to flee from an unhappy home, nor is it for political, economic or social reasons, that brings him here. The reason might be more complex, but their motives are quite simple. It's not so much to escape as it is to find, and they find what they are looking for in Thailand. Look at the image that Thailand presents to the world. It's one of enchantment and excitement: a land of golden temples, with tiny bells tinkling in the breeze; a country with lofty mountains, tropical forests and endless off shore islands; a nation of smiling people and happy children, and monks in saffron robes moving in silent animation; a country interlaced with rivers and canals, called klongs, with rice barges, "rafts" of teak logs, ferryboats and river buses all gliding along in a kaleidoscope of changing colours. It's a Mecca for shoppers looking for the exotic, for superlative silks and gemstones, and intricately decorated objects; a country of tropical resorts with palms and white sand beaches; a country with great food.

Harold Stephens, author of 21 books and countless magazine and newspaper articles on Asia and the Pacific, first came East to China as a Marine after World War II. He later graduated from Georgetown University with a degree in political science but gave up a career in the Foreign Service to become a writer. He went to Tahiti to write the Great American novel but soon editors became more interested in his travel and adventure tales than his fiction. While leading a motor expedition around the world, he became stranded in Bangkok. While waiting for a war to end between India and East Pakistan, Stephens took a three-month assignment with the Bangkok World and Thai Airways International to write a series of travel/adventure articles. He eventually completed the motor expedition and returned to Bangkok. Stephens now writes for the Bangkok Post and is a travel correspondent for THAI. . Additional Resources Living in Thailand  Resources for Living Overseas  More Harold Stephens Articles  Tourism Authority of Thailand  Contact Harold Stephens  . .

A few years back, a large Buddha, being moved to a new location, cracked. Examination revealed that the Buddha was coated with a concrete veneer--placed there, no doubt, to fool invading armies centuries ago--beneath which was a statue of solid gold, weighing some 5 l/2 tons. The government tried to place the Buddha under guard in a locked museum, but the monks and people objected. The Buddha, they said, belonged to them, meant to be seen and worshiped. Today, the Golden Buddha is in Wat Trimitwitthayaram near the railway station, where devotees go to pray and tourists come to stand in awe.
 

At a press conference, writer Robin Dannhorn, an expat who lives in Bangkok, was asked why he chose Bangkok to work and live. We expected an erudite answer that would be deep and psychological. Instead he simply said, "On the tiny soi where I live, a cock crows in the morning and during the day chickens scratch in the dirt." Robin lives off Silom Road, with all its high-rises, Macdonald's and shopping malls at hand. Austin Berry, another expat living in Bangkok, when asked a similar question, gave a two-word answer - "no graffiti". Both these remarks have something to say for Bangkok. To the Thais, the residents of Bangkok, this may not be meaningful, but to the foreigner, who may come from cities littered with graffiti, it is. Bangkok has the standards of an international city, and yet it can be rustic. You find people fishing in the river that runs through the heart of the city, and even in the small klongs. And where else but in Bangkok can you see elephants walking down main thoroughfares. Anything can happen in Bangkok, and does.

Thailand is art that's seen everywhere. One expat told me he doesn't need to buy paintings to decorate his apartment in Bangkok. All he needs do is open a window. "Everywhere is a painting," he said. And how true! Glittering temples, so numerous that no matter where you are, there are always one or two in view. Shrines and stupa tower, protruding above shops or glimpsed between modern high-rise buildings, poking up from forested hilltops, jutting up on rocky shores. Palaces with crenellated walls like those in storybooks. Monuments at every turn.

The irony is that these places stand side by side with magnificent five-star hotels, shopping plazas with brand names, cinemas with the latest movies and theatre houses with Broadway plays, and vast green parks and open areas.

The mood of Bangkok was captured in print by a seaman who sailed up the Chao Phraya River a hundred years ago. "One early morning we steamed up the innumerable bends, passed the shadow of the great gilt pagoda, and reached the outskirts of town. There it was, spread largely on both banks, the oriental capital which had yet suffered no white conqueror.

Here and there in the distance, above the crowded mob of low, brown roof ridges, towered great piles of masonry, king's palaces, temples, gorgeous and dilapidated, crumbling under the vertical sunlight, tremendous, overpowering, almost palpable, which seemed to enter one's breast with the breath of one's nostrils and soak into one's ribs through every pore of one's skin." The seaman later gave up the sea he loved so much and took up the pen. His name was Joseph Conrad.

The mood that Conrad found is still here. You can find it on Bangkok's river, as he had, or at a simple temple procession marching down a dusty lane in Chiang Mai, or upon a lonely sun-drenched path leading to a hill-tribe village. In Thailand you feel very alive, and like Conrad, feel life is to be felt to the very tips of your fingers. There is always something happening, or not happening, depending upon what you want.

This informative article on adventure desitinations draws on excerpts from our friend Harold Stephens' newest book Return to Adventure: Southeast Asia. Stephens, an adventurer and early escape artist, is a well known expatriate in Asia having written thousands of newspaper and magazine articles and 19 books. He is currently writing travel articles for the Bangkok Post, and we can assure you that you will not find better, more interesting writing anywhere. Denis Grey, the Bangkok bureau chief for AP, describes Stephens this way: "The fires of youth may have burned down low. We may have reached mid-life or even beyond. But moments come when we still dream about it: an emerald green cove in the South Seas with our own yacht lilting at anchor; throbbing, libido-unleashed ports-of-call; a life free of niggling bosses and nagging children and nasty bill collectors. Yes, many people dream about it, but Harold Stephens does it. Stephens says, "How few of us ever stop to realize that adventure is not something in the past. It's now. It's happening all around us, all the time. The problem is knowing where to look. We turn to new horizons. Adventure awaits in SE Asia." To order this book directly from Amazon.com - Click Here -

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