Budget Accommodation / Hotels in Pattaya

One thing I love about Pattaya and Thailand in general is the availability of cheap hotels for the budget traveller. They are nothing like the budget hotels in US for example which are pretty crappy to say the least. You can find a very decent and clean room for around 20-25 USD per day in Pattaya.

Something I used to do in my early days of travel to Thailand were to book hotels online (www.asiatravel.com or www.asiarooms.com) before I arrive, the rates are certainly cheaper than the walk in rates and you can get an idea about the hotel by reading the reviews of fellow travellers.

This is all good if your budget is over 30 USD per day as most hotels available for online booking are above that rate. In Pattaya there are tons of hotels that are around 18 - 25 USD (600 - 850 bhats) per day if you know where to look. I found several good hotels in this range between the second road (Sai Song) and the third road (Sai Sam).

I'm currently staying at the Intown Holiday Hotel which is in Soi 11 off second road for 700 bhats (USD 21) per day. The rooms are large and clean with AC, Cable TV etc... and there is a swimming pool on the top floor too.

I'll definitely stay in this hotel or one of the other smaller hotels around here whenever I come to Pattaya. I don't see any point in shelling out additional money for budget hotels in the beach road for example as second road is as convenient a location as the beach road.

In summary just rent a motorbike for the day when you get to Pattaya and spend few hours looking at smaller hotels in Sois (streets) between second road and third road, also you can ask the hotel staff to show you the rooms and they will accommodate you in most places. If you like the room you can take it or else just walk off.

Note: The above prices are based on rates in January - February months in 2008.

Internet access in Pattaya - WiFi and GPRS

I'm on holiday in Thailand which has become an annual thing for me and thought I'll make a few posts while I'm at it to revive this blog. I spend most of my holiday in Pattaya since I know the city well and all the night life is concentrated into the beach road, second road and the Jomtian road.

This time around I brought my laptop in the hope of getting some work done and it was important that I had WiFi access. Arriving in Pattaya I stayed at a hotel off Road 3 (Sai Sam) and had a good Wifi signal to a hotspot called info-pattaya. They had several packages ranging from 3 hours of access to 1 month. The bandwidth was based on the package and it varied from 512 kbps to 2048 kbps download. A weeks access was around 14 USD with a download speed of 1024 kbps which was pretty cheap. I was able to pay with my credit card on the http://www.hotspotsystem.com site. They aslso accept paypal I believe.

Sadly I had to change hotels and I moved to a hotel about 200 meters away near Road 2 (Sai Song). In the new hotel I could not get a good signal to any hotspot even though there were 5 or 6 in range. So I used my backup plan which was GPRS access over a DTAC sim card. They offer unlimited GPRS access for 40 bhat (1.3 USD) a day. Remember you have to call the DTAC center and request the unlimited GPRS package else they will charge you by the kilobyte which can be a bit expensive if you do a lot of browsing.

GPRS speeds are ok for email and web browsing (around 50 - 124 kbps I believe) but not recommended for hardcore work like what I wanted to do (Connecting to remote database servers etc...) . I haven't done anywork in the 8 days I have been here so far and I don't think I will do any in the next week either :).

So if you are in Pattaya you might get lucky with having access to a free or cheap WiFi hotspot from your room as there are so many around or if you move around a lot and just needs access to emails and internet browsing, spend a few hundred bhats on a prepaid SIM card and get the unlimited GPRS package activated from the shop you buy the sim card.

Another tip if you are planning to use WiFi is to request for a room in a higher floor.

Chinese, Thai and Korean Groceries in Colombo

Anybody who love eastern food should make a trip to the grocery stores in Kolpitty super market. I found out about these shops recently and was surprised at the range of products they had. They sell everything from Thai rice to Chinese canned bamboo shoots and mushrooms.

I'm not the cooking type but if you are, there are a lot of stuff you can experiment with like tom yam paste, green and red curry powder from Thailand and all types of noodles, spices and canned products from China and Korea.

My favorite finds were the Korean instant noodles brand (Shin Ramyun) which tastes a lot better than the locally available brands (Maggie) and all those nice sauces from Thailand.

The shops are in the first floor of the Kolpitty market and most of the customers seem to be expat Chinese. On the ground level are vegetable and fruit shops. There too you can find lot of vegetables that you would not normally see in Sri Lankan super markets but the prices tend to be on the high side.

Anonymous Browsing with XeroBank Browser

This is a great piece of free software to use if you want to cover your tracks when browsing the net (Previously it was known as Torpark). It's basically Firefox with connectivity to Tor network built in.

It is also a very effective way to bypass that pesky web filtering software at the office. I'm fine with blocking gaming and pron sites etc... but sadly it also blocks sites that are uncategorized by the company selling the software. So if I come across a site thats blocked but is harmless like a blog, I would fire up xB Browser and browse away like most of my co-worker :).

As for anonymity Google analytics thought I was coming from Germany when I accessed my blog using XeroBank from my home in Colombo. Not bad....

Using a Free Anti-Virus Software for the Home PC

It is a must to have an anti virus product installed and running in your home PC, especially if you connect to the internet. I didn't have one installed since all I did on my PC was watch DVDs :) Once I got my internet connection I had to find a good product to install as the first order of business.

When it comes to anti virus software you cant find a single dominant product even though the number of popular products are small. One year its Nortan that seems to get all the good reviews and in a few months it's McAfee. So it's a good idea to search around the web for latest reviews and I came across few posts mentioning AVG Anti-Virus and most importantly the existence of a free version :)

Been a Sri Lankan with a Sri Lankan salary, free sounds very enticing. They provide three free programs for anti-virus, anti-spyware and anti-rootkit. Basically the difference between AVG Pro (not the premium version which includes a firewall as well) and free versions are.

1. With the paid version you get technical support (I don't think I will ever need it)
2. Consent for commercial use (This is for my personal computer)
3. Faster downloads (update files)

All of the above are not issues and I can say the downloads are fast with the free version and they tend to be few hundreds of kilo bytes (unlike the few mega bytes of downloads of updates you get with Nortan).

I downloaded the free versions of Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware and Anti-Rootkit and installed all 3 of them. All of them seems to be fast and not resource hogs.

So if you are a cheap ass like me AVG is the product for you. It might not be the greatest and in anti-virus business there is no such thing as a great product. No product can protect you against all viruses and with few good practices you can reduce the possibility of been hit by a virus, worm or a trojan.

Another must is a firewall and I'll save that for another post.

Opening an RFC Account in Sri Lanka

Opening a RFC account in SL has become one of those really difficult tasks just like most other things, maybe it was always this difficult. Anyway I headed to HSBC Bambalapitya branch in hopes of opening an account few days ago as I do all my banking at HSBC.

As soon as I went in a customer service agent offered to help me out and I started to inquire about opening the account. She tells me I have to

1. Deposit a minimum of $ 500.
2. Must have proof that I worked overseas where I was paid (salary or allowance) in a foreign currency.
3. Returned to SL within the last 6 months.

To start with I didn't have $ 500 and couldn't get hold of any due to government cracking down on black market dealers. Earlier you could walk into one of those small shops in pettah and buy dollars without a hassle. Now not only they refuse to sell dollars they tell you no in a downright rude manner.

So I was busted and went home but decided to call HSBC customer care hot line and ask about the requirements again as I had the feeling the agent I spoke to didn't have much of a clue about RFC accounts.

To my surprise the sweet voice on the other end of the line tells me I can open an account with a zero balance as long as there is a minimum transfer of $500 coming in to the account from an overseas or another RFC account in SL within 2 weeks of opening the account.

Next day I went back to the bank and spoke to a different agent. She knew the exact requirements and had my account created within 5 minutes. Few things to note are

1. You will have to maintain a minimum balance equivalent to 25000 rupees in your bank portfolio (this includes all you RFC, savings and checking accounts) else I believe there is a penalty.
2. You will not be able to deposit USD notes at the counter unless you have proof you worked overseas and returned within the last 6 months.

Again the above might not be entirely correct as bank staff seemed to be mostly clueless about current regulations and I don't blame them with SL regulations changing every other day :).

Surfing on a WiMAX Connection

Ah.... Finally I have a 1Mbps WiMAX broadband internet connection at home. Dialog Broadband installed the connection within few days after applying for the same. Installation was a pain due to multiple reasons and took almost a full day. Reasons been:

1. The WiMAX antenna requires a direct line of sight with a base station for proper communication and that can be a difficult task depending on where you live in Colombo. (With all the tall buildings and what not)

2. The installation crew was a bit inexperienced and thats sort of understandable given the service is not even officially launched yet.

Once the hard part was over (installation of the antenna and testing the link with base station) it was as easy as setting up a dialup connection. Dialog provides with you with a username and a password and all you have to do is create an internet connection on your computer using the username /password details.

I opted for the 1Mbps package which is called 'Speed' and from what I have seen during the last couple of days usage, it really gives you download speeds of 1Mbps (128 kilobytes per second) consistently.

I hope dialog will maintain the high level of service as more and more subscribers get onboard since as with ADSL, WiMAX is a shared technology and bandwidth can deteriorate with more subscribers. Good thing about the technology is it is capable of delivering lot more bandwidth than 1Mbps and Dialog already has a package with 4 Mbps down link.

Overall it's really good (No disruptions and blazing fast, compared with other internet options in Sri Lanka) and well worth the additional 2000 bucks you pay over what you would have paid for a crappy ADSL connection from SLT :).