IraHayes wrote: ↑Sat Jan 22, 2022 10:17 am I was feeling sympathetic to the guy till I saw his selfie…. No sympathy for gingers I’m afraid!!

Do gingers even have souls?

Big Daikon wrote: ↑Sun Jan 23, 2022 6:16 am

IraHayes wrote: ↑Sat Jan 22, 2022 10:17 am I was feeling sympathetic to the guy till I saw his selfie…. No sympathy for gingers I’m afraid!!

Do gingers even have souls?

Fill your boots boys, in a year or two such anti-ginger comments will be a hate crime in every 'progressive' society.

Unless you deliberately grow it on your face, whereupon you are fair game.

Doc67 wrote: ↑Sun Jan 23, 2022 9:46 am

Big Daikon wrote: ↑Sun Jan 23, 2022 6:16 am

IraHayes wrote: ↑Sat Jan 22, 2022 10:17 am I was feeling sympathetic to the guy till I saw his selfie…. No sympathy for gingers I’m afraid!!

Do gingers even have souls?

Fill your boots boys, in a year or two such anti-ginger comments will be a hate crime in every 'progressive' society.

Unless you deliberately grow it on your face, whereupon you are fair game.

The Ginger Hate is a strange quirk of those other people. Not common in the US. A Geordie roommate taught me more than was necessary.

(Red hair can be quite attractive on the right lady. )

Big Daikon wrote: ↑Sun Jan 23, 2022 10:17 am

Doc67 wrote: ↑Sun Jan 23, 2022 9:46 am

Big Daikon wrote: ↑Sun Jan 23, 2022 6:16 am

IraHayes wrote: ↑Sat Jan 22, 2022 10:17 am I was feeling sympathetic to the guy till I saw his selfie…. No sympathy for gingers I’m afraid!!

Do gingers even have souls?

Fill your boots boys, in a year or two such anti-ginger comments will be a hate crime in every 'progressive' society.

Unless you deliberately grow it on your face, whereupon you are fair game.

The Ginger Hate is a strange quirk of those other people. Not common in the US. A Geordie roommate taught me more than was necessary.

(Red hair can be quite attractive on the right lady. )

There was a stunning half Irish, half kazak girl in Almaty with very ginger hair. Collar and cuffs matched, so I presumed genuine, and very alluring. Actually, a bit formidable, too.

Don’t knock it- there’s whole hoards of folks in certain nearby countries who deliberately have a ginger rinse in deference to their belief that Mohammed was a ginge.*



*in my mind, always an odd affectation, given their views regarding blasphemy and copying/comparing themselves to the revered prophet.

In Thailand, there are more options but still big problems if you test positive or are deemed high risk. The article is paywalled so copied in full here, minus the photos.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/wher ... -jpxmklklp

I wasn’t actually infected when I checked in to the Covid “leper colony” somewhere east of Phuket Town late on New Year’s Day. The nightman on the front desk was expecting me. He wore a hazmat suit, with latex gloves and was double-masked and visored. He kept his distance. “118,” he said.

Having been mothballed for two years, the down-at-heel three-star hotel had been hurriedly pressed back into service as one of a growing number of “hospitels” to hold paying foreigners who tested positive after arrival in Thailand. With me now branded an “HRC” (high-risk case), this resort presented my least-bad option.

But back then I wasn’t to know that I was stepping out of the blistering Siamese sunshine into a parallel Kafkaesque universe, where 289 farang — a Thai collective term for foreigners — were already incarcerated in their alternative quarantine “paradise”.

Remember Lost, the TV series where plane crash survivors find themselves marooned on a deserted tropical island, forgotten by the outside world? Like those bedraggled survivors, these farang medical refugees had had their two weeks in “Amazing Thailand” shredded — dreams of white-sand beaches, snorkelling on coral reefs and cheap, delicious spicy food, all turned upside-down.

It was after 9pm by the time I wheeled my luggage through the lobby and turned left towards room 118 — only to run straight into a boisterous party. In the humid tropical night, an exuberant international collection of drunk and maskless Covid-positive revellers, were blasting disco on a boom box, tables strewn with toppled Chang and Singha bottles. The tiled floor was slippery with beer. They coughed a lot. And danced.

The scene was completely nuts. But it wasn’t like they were exactly putting anyone at risk of catching Covid. Everyone had it! A cheer went up when they spotted me.

“Welcome to Hotel California!” a cheery Brit yelled at this new inmate. “Relax! You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!” I grinned at them, pretending to myself that this was normal. Such a lovely place. They’d clearly been inside too long.

Iman, my partner, had already unpacked. She’d got in from Australia days earlier but shortly after that, had tested positive and, as per Thai law, was ordered into mandatory state quarantine. We’d been apart for 21 months, her in Fortress Oz, unable to get out, me in Thailand, unable to get in. Now we were destined to share a small room for the next ten days.

Tourists were piling into Phuket, flagship of Thailand’s Sandbox scheme, which allows them to enjoy freewheeling holidays as long as they stay Covid-free. They call it Test & Go — all you have to do is test negative on arrival and then again on Day Five. But with Omicron spreading fast, this was fast turning into Holiday Russian Roulette: your fate hanging on the result of those PCRs. Turn up a positive result and Hotel California beckons.

The shellshock on the faces of those who then test positive and slowly take in what’s in store is pure Edvard Munch.

Tourism is the backbone of the economy in the Land of Smiles but the industry crumbled at the onset of the pandemic. The 40 million foreign tourists a year vaporised overnight. Tumbleweed blew through ghost-resort towns, businesses collapsed, millions lost their jobs.

The Phuket Sandbox programme and the Thailand Pass — by which tourists can apply for visas — began last July and by peak tourist season, over Christmas and new year, the industry was making up for lost time. By early this month, more than 4,000 international arrivals were piling in each day from Europe, the US, Russia, Australia, India, Israel and the Middle East. Now though, nearly one in ten was testing positive, most with Omicron. There’s a useful Thai proverb which goes: “You can’t hide a dead elephant under a lotus leaf for ever.”

I’d driven down from my home in Bangkok to meet Iman when she flew into the Phuket Sandbox from Sydney on Boxing Day. We’d booked a small beachside place at the end of a jungly road. A perfect getaway after so long apart. Six days later, she was being carted off in an ambulance after her second PCR test proved positive. I thought I’d better take myself off to isolate somewhere remote.

So we agreed to shell out £1,500 each for what was sold as quarantine in paradise. As rum choices go, the hospitel option, when it landed in the WhatsApp group set up by our Covid minders, seemed like manna from heaven. Our “wellness” would be monitored “with a qualified hygienic standard and well-trained staffs to ensure that your quarantine experience can brighten up your journey”. There were pictures of palm trees and pools and crisp white sheets in big sunny rooms. The PDF brochure also depicted what looked like a delectable and varied menu.

We remain naively hopeful that our insurers will look kindly on our plight. After all, this was a hospitel, a mandated “medical” facility under the supervision of a Phuket hospital and Thailand’s public health authority (no need to mention the pool or the parties).

It took me several days to catch Covid but when I did it came as a bit of a shock for someone more used to the occasional ravages of man-flu. The rule is your ten-day quarantine period at the resort starts when a PCR confirms your result but it was already clear from our fellow inmates’ post-ironic “Quarantine in Paradise” group chat on WhatsApp that getting PCRs was proving problematic.

That wasn’t the only thing bothering people. My infected fellow inmates were whingeing mostly about the food, delivered three times a day in cardboard boxes which contained inedible delights such as congealed noodles accompanied by stone-cold chicken nuggets laced with sweet mayonnaise, a slice of processed cheese, a small portion of dragon fruit and a carton of sickly juice. Tourists who’d been liberated but remain on the chat receive imploring messages: “SEND FOOD!”

The brochure oversold the swimming pools too. Only one was servicable. Scores of inmates had rooms backing on to manky pools with scum and dead frogs floating on top. One pool area was nicknamed “the swamp”. The nearest beach was miles away and out of bounds.

The rooms were, well, bijou. The TVs didn’t work, water pressure was low and wi-fi ropey. There was none of the promised health monitoring and anyone who questioned why on earth they had to have an x-ray was told they would not get the documents they needed in order to leave if they didn’t have one. So everyone had one. PCR tests cost 4,000 Thai baht (£90) a pop. And those booze-fuelled Hotel California parties? There was no beer in the minibars. The Chang and the Singha had to be bought for you by hospitel front desk hazmat staff from a nearby 7/11.

The only service that matched the promise of the brochure was the daily room cleaning service. We were blessed with Neung, who arrived every day just after 4pm, triple-vaxed, double-masked in her hazmat gear and cheerfully cleaned our room, just as she’d cleaned dozens of others that day. She always had a smile on her face.

A week in, and the tone on the Quarantine in Paradise group chat turned noticeably more shrill. Many felt they were being fleeced by profiteering companies in partnership with hospitals and everyone was suffering insurance angst. The hospitel was understaffed, its administrators uncommunicative. No one sure what was going on. On top of that, there was total confusion about ever-changing airline rules and what sort of “fit-to-fly” tests were required for various home countries.

Result? Daily tumult in reception as indignant internees remonstrated noisily with the forgiving, patient hazmat people over on the desk. Still, the one decent pool remained inviting and bronzed, infected travellers continued to party on, some dancing to remember, some just to forget the viral chaos that had enveloped their holiday dreams.

To leave Hotel California you had to have done ten days’ quarantine after your positive PCR. You also had to have had your x-ray and, of course, paid your bill — although a handful of inmates managed to get themselves released in return for promisory notes from their insurers. After at last testing positive, it had taken me five days of begging to get a confirmatory PCR. But Thailand is a land of compromise and I eventually negotiated to have a photograph of my date-stamped positive antigen test accepted as evidence that I’d caught Covid. I was finally able to run for the door last week, a full fortnight after first checking in.

The rules for entering Thailand have changed slightly. Having suffered an Omicron panic, the authorities suspended the Thailand Pass Test & Go scheme. Now though, it’s to be rebooted from the start of next month. But be warned: those testing positive will still end up as prisoners in Hotel California. And tempting as Thailand’s tepid turquoise waters might appear from wintry Britain, a holiday in The Land of Smiles could be heaven — or it could be hell. Well, -ish.

techietraveller84 wrote: ↑Sun Jan 23, 2022 11:23 am

Jerry Atrick wrote: ↑Sat Jan 22, 2022 1:02 pm Whiny fucker, lucky to be let off so light for fleeing quarantine

He does state that he only did so, because they wouldn't provide another PCR Test. If they won't test him, then how can he ever leave? He had to do something to get their attention and to let them know he isn't going to bend over and take their BS.

I watched his videos and he came across well, not whiney, just presenting the facts (backed up by images) in a calm and professional way. The authorities obviously did not hold it against him for his escape attempt so it did not affect the way he was treated.