Today I was having my car serviced whilst in Chiang Mai, so while it was being serviced I got a Tuk-Tuk over to Central Airport Plaza shopping mall. I did some shopping and had a bite to eat, whenthe time came to get a taxi back to the Toyota dealer I found that the Taxi drivers operating outside the shopping mall are operating a price fixing scam, and that included the so called “Meter Taxis”

There were 5 meter taxis there, all claimed that their meters do not work and wanted 100 baht to take me just over 1km, I declined and asked to be taken “on the meter” they just laughed at me, but not just me, they were cheating all the people both Thai and foreign visitors alike.

The Tuk Tuk drivers were in on the scam, they refuse to accept less than 100 baht even for a 1km journey.

Of course not all Taxi drivers in Chiang Mai are thieving scumbags, and the ones working from the Airport Shopping Plaza are giving them all bad name.

In Chiang Mai as in Bangkok you should stubbornly refuse to get into a meter taxi that won’t switch on the meter, if you accept their “offer” you can be sure it’s at least double the correct price.

Click Image above to Zoom.. 

When the police in Chiang Mai started to clamp down on unregistered bikes I sold my Kawasaki Vulcan and my Suzuki GSX400 and bought a cheap chinese 200cc road bike.

I also bought a new Platinum PX 175 enduro style bike for riding short journeys around Chiang Mai and also because I take a couple of short cuts on a bike that have bumpy and unpaved roads.

I read up all that I could on this bike prior to making the decision to buy it, and it’s fair to say that lots of people have bought earlier Platinum PX175’s and had nothing but trouble, but this is a second generation Platinum PX 175 which is actually a whole different bike built in a different factory.

I remember back in 1981 my friend bought a new Honda XL125, I rode his bike a few times when it was still fairly new and this bike really does feel like an early 80’s Honda XL 125 with a slightly more powerful engine and electric start. Really it’s an old honda design made on the cheap in China with engines made in a factory that actually make OEM Honda engines, hence whatever the complaints about these bikes nobody has ever criticized the engine.

Things I like about this so far:

• Great Engine
• Full Size Bike
• Very Cheap

Things I dislike:

• Gearing is wrong, needs to be changed.
• Front Brake not very strong.
• Indicators hard to cancel.

I can fix the gearing by changing the sprockets easy enough, I can buy a Honda twin pot brake caliper on eBay cheap enough, and I can change the switchgear to Honda just as easy.

The bike was 52,000 baht, I reckon that if I need to spend another 20k on bits and bobs to bring it up to standard then it’s still a bloody good deal.

This is my second Chinese bike, so I knew that I had to go over it with a torque wrench, to my surprise there were no loose nuts and bolts on this one and it seems to be well assembled.

If Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki or Kawasaki sold a full size enduro style bike for under 125,000 baht in Thailand then I would have bought one, but they don’t. Platinum fill a gap in the market, time will tell if this was a good buy or not, but I’m willing to take a chance and I’m confident that it will be OK.

I have been riding my Gusto Rumba since I bought it last week and it’s just about ready to go in for it’s first service.

This is a Chinese built motorbike, imported and assembled in Thailand by JRD who are the exclusive distributors in Thailand.

The engine on this bike is a 200c twin with twin carbs, and it really does pull strong for a 200cc bike, it’s also smooth and quiet.

The engine appears to be based on a Honda 250cc twin, this particular engine is also found in the Lifan 250-4 (in 250cc form, mine is only 200cc) and quite a few other Chinese bikes.

There have been some problems with the way it was assembled, from a over tight chain and no brake free-play to a rattle from the headlight and a incorrectly fitted exhaust, but i’m confident I have checked and adjusted everything now and hopefully it will be OK.

There is no problem with the electrics, but the connectors and the wires look cheap, also wires are routed in a couple of places that look like there should be grommits to prevent chaffing in the future, so when I have time I will attend to that.

Above all, this bike feels good when it’s out on the road, and it has more than enough power to keep up with the traffic and overtake safely.

The bottom line here is that if you are looking for a full sized and well spec’d bike then the Gusto Rumba is well worth a look..

Have been the proud owner of a Gusto Rumba for more than 24 hours now, and have been slowly clocking up the kilometers.

I did an inspection and found the following assembly faults:

• Chain far to tight
• Brake adjustment incorrect
• One of the exhaust flanges incorrectly assembled
• A few loose nuts and bolts!
• Idle speed needed adjustment
• Exhaust joint bolt positioned wrong.

Chain being too tight is almost expected in Thailand, but annoying none the less. Took just a few moments to adjust.

The back brake was binding slightly, adjusted the free play in the pedal and now it seems OK.

One of the exhaust flanges was not fitted correctly, if I had not noticed this then I’m sure the bolts would have fallen off before the 500km check.

When going over bumps today I heard a knock, that was just before noticing the exhasust flange problem, when fixing the exhaust flange issue I noticed that the clamp between the 2 into 1 downpipe and the silencer section had the bolt about 1mm from the frame, causing it to knock when going over bumps, easily fixed.

The idle speed seemed a bit slow but the adjuster is easy to get to on the twin Mikuni Carbs.

I checked lots of nuts and bolts and found a few were loose, I don’t know what torque wrench settings to use so I just tightened them carefully.

I will invest in some locknut stuff and treat the threads of all the nuts and bolts around the frame and ancillary stuff, just to be on the safe side, I will also change as many of the visible nuts and bolts to stainless hex fittings as these are really cheap in Chiang Mai and the shop (just down from the railway station towards the bridge) will match nuts and bolts so I can pull up outside the shop and and hand them a handfull of nuts and bolts at a tine.. but I need to check that this won’t make problems with the warranty.

I’m sure now that I will discover a few more little problems in the following days, but these are issues relating to the assembly of the bike after it was shipped in a crate and not issues with the quality of manufacture so I’m not too bothered. Actually I did expect to be sorting a few minor issues after reading about other peoples experience with chinese manufactured bikes.

A couple of my mates who have seen the bike have been quite impressed with the overall quality, I think it’s better than they expected it to be anyway.

I expect to be up to the 500 km first service/inspection in a couple of days so it will be interesting to see what they check.

Conclusion: I have bought 3 new bikes in Thailand before (all Yamaha) and none has ever had any of these kind of issues, It’s not a problem for me as I have the time and patience to fix these little issues but it suggests that JRD as a distributor are not doing as good a job on assembly and pre-delivery inspections as they could. Still: I’m happy for now.

I bought a new Gusto Rumba today from Scooter Arena (Thailand).

I was looking for a new bike since the police started impounding bikes that don’t have number plates (my other bike is a Jap Import with no reg number) and demanding 10,000 baht to release them.

So far I have ridden only about 30km, enough to form an impression but only just.

I paid a total of 60,500 baht, thats 59,000 for the bike and 1,500 for the Registration, Tax and Insurance.

It’s a big bike in terms of size, but only 200cc engine, thats fine for me and I really am quite impressed with the performance but it will be another 500-1000 km before I will really open it up and see what it can do.

It feels comfortable to ride, all the plastic bits seem to rattle a bit but I’m hoping that once it’s all settled down and I have properly tightened all the nuts, bolts and screws that it will be OK..

It has a nice sturdy feel to it, it feels much more like a 400 or 550 bike rather than a 200, but the exhaust note gives the game away, it sounds a bit tinny.

The engine seems sweet enough though, no noise or undue vibration.

The first thing to change will be the handlebar grips, they look plasticky and they do not feel comfortable at all.

I will update shortly and include a lot more pics of details. So far I reckon it was a good buy for me, but I do acknowledge that it will not suit everyone’s tastes.

Yesterday I bought an Asus Eee from Pantip Plaza (Thailand) and it’s an amazing little notebook that is great fun to use and does everything well.

I bought it to use when I travel around, as do quite regularly. It was important to me that I can use it with EDGE so that I can have internet access everywhere and not just within range of a wi-fi access point. To my utter amazement I plugged in my Novatel Merlin XU870 via a USB adaptor and the Eee recognised it immediately and virtually set itself up and even recognized Dtac and set up the APN correctly.

What makes this machine so special?

1> It’s cheap, very very cheap.

2> It’s the lightest notebook I have ever seen.

3> The screen and keyboard are amazing for the size.

4> Long battery life and miniture charger.

5> Works with my EDGE card

6> It’s fast.. really fast.

7> Boots up in seconds.

8> Switches off in seconds.

It’s fair to point out that good as the screen is, it could do with being an inch or two bigger with slightly more resolution, and the trackpad is small and not so easy to use.

The reason this is so fast is because it uses a SSD instead of an old fashioned hard drive, and the Operating System is a customized version of linux that works faultlessly and feels very much like windows, only faster.

Every now and then a technology comes along that changes the way we live, the BBC iplayer is not a new technology but it’s a new way of using technology and it’s changing the way I watch TV.

Being an expat and living in Thailand is great, but there have always been things that I miss, and good quality English TV is one of them.  Not that I watch much TV, but on those occasions when I do sit down with my feet up to watch some TV it’s nice if it’s English and good quality.

Bring on the BBC iPlayer.  I downloaded it to the Windows XP partition on my MacBook Pro and then it complained that I was not in the UK..  Hmm I thought, surely its just my IP address that it does not like so I logged in via a UK proxy server and it was happy.  Even better, it only checks country once and then it’s fine over my Thailand broadband connection.

My Mac Book pro has a DVI connector, and I recently bought a DVI to HDMI cable by mistake so I decided to try hooking my MacBook to my LG 42″ LCD in the living room.  Wow, the picture is super and it set the resolution by itself.

I dont want to take my MacBook Pro into the living room, and anyway my bootcamp partition only has 30gb space, so I decided to take my little Acer computer, which is a “small form factor” PC running 3.2ghz P4, 1gb Ram and 160gb hard drive.  It already had XP on it and I don’t really need it for anything else.   It sites nicely next to my DVD player and sat receiver, and it works a treat with BBC iPlayer, except that I need to use a mouse, I will soon buy a wireless controller.

My son, who is just under 2 years old, loves the BBC kids stuff, I love the documentaries and Doctor Who and it’s really nice to be able to choose when to watch.   I just select the programs I want and go to bed, next morning it has downloaded loads of programs and I can wait up to 28 days before watching them, then after the first time I watch it I can watch it again for up to 7 days.  It would be nice if I could keep the kids stuff, but all the time there are more programs coming in overnight its no real problem.

Oh yes, and the picture quality is really good.  I’m fussy, but I can’t really tell the difference between the BBC content and a good DVD.

I have been running an ecommerce web site here in Thailand for some time now, it’s got easier over the years for two main reasons.

• The Postal Service has got more reliable.
• It’s easy to accept credit cards and get paid to my Thailand Bank.

For years I would only ever use International Registered Airmail, but last year the cost of International Registration doubled and that has had a serious impact on my postage costs. I need to keep my postage costs low because my customers have the option of ordering from a UK seller which would mean lower postage, so I subsidise the postage a little based on my making a decent profit from the goods that I sell.

A couple of months ago I got about 8 packages returned, all but one had a sticker from the UK post office to say that delivery had been attempted and due to nobody being home a card had been left, and nobody had collected the parcel from the sorting office. The other one said “no such address” which is strange as it was verified by the credit card company.

It’s fair to say that a great deal of my time is spent dealing with cutomers who are waiting for their parcel to arrive, and if it gets to 14 days after posting I always suggest that they check the sorting office. But recently I have started sending items by plain Airmail with no registration, the result is that items are getting there faster, and the level of complaints of non delivery have gone down to virtually nothing.

I know that if a customer makes a chargeback based on non delivery then I would not have a leg to stand on, but I guess that’s unlikely given the kind of product I sell online. And I’m saving lots of money on postage too.

Now that I have downgraded my Sony Vaio VGN-TX56SN to Windows XP it runs like lightening.  It starts up about 12x faster than it did with Vista, and the whole experience is totally different.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking Vista, I’m just saying that Sony Thailand made a big mistake choosing to supply Vista on this machine.

Sony DO NOT provide XP drivers for this machine, I had to go to the Sony UK site and download drivers for the Vaio VGN-TX5XN, which is the same.  The only bit I cannot get working is the bluetooth, but as I don’t want to use blusetooth this is no real hardship for me.

I’m not enterely sure why Vista was so slow on this machine, the Sony shop (Chi Chang) offered to install more memory but I did not see that an increase from 1gb (supplied) and 1.5gb (Max) would make such a difference. 

These days I use a Apple Mac for everyday computing, but my little Sony is so easy to carry and has such amazing battery life that it’s hard to resist using it when I’m on the move.  Interestingly I read a website with instructions on how to install Mac OSX Tiger on my Sony Vaio, but it’s a bit too much trouble for me, I simply dont have the time.

If you own a Vaio VGN-TX56SN in Thailand (or anywhere) then get rid of Vista and Install Windows XP, it makes such a difference.

I expect to get better battery life too on XP, as with Vista the HD was continously churning away and it took so long to boot under Vista that it must have had a negative impact on battery.

If you need any help with drivers for this model, just ask.

This morning I had a delivery from Fed-Ex, nothing unusual about that except this one had kept me awake at night in anticipation since I placed my order on eBay.com for my sim free iPhone.

I won’t go into the nitty gritty of how much this sucker cost me, but let’s just say that it was expensive by any standards, especially when you consider the cost of shipping. My real concern was that It may be intercepted by customs, I have had that happen before and It takes all day to get it sorted as technically your need a licence (costing 1500 baht) to import communications devices.  No problems with customs getting my iPhone today.

I should point out here that this iPhone is unlocked, most of the ones on eBay are locked to AT&T which would not work in Thailand at all.  It cost more than a standard iPhone, and I should say here that I have no idea at all about how to unlock a iphone, either for use in Thailand or elsewhere.

Like all Apple products the iPhone is very nicely packaged, it’s obvious from the start that this is a very high quality product.

I slipped my AIS sim card into the iphone, switched on and after a moment and an impressive startup I now have a working iPhone in Thailand.

I’m going to play with setting up my email, browser etc.  I have already made a couple of calls to check that it’s all working and it seems to me to be very high call quality indeed.

One problem that I need to get sorted is that my AIS prepaid sim charges me 1 baht per min for data transfer, this thing seems to be using the data connection all the time so I need to get that changed to an unlimited plan, perhaps DTAC will be a better option.