Year: 2014

Murder on Lower Fort Street, December, 2014.

By John Stapleton Whichever celestial being anointed Pru Goward as NSW Planning Minister had a divine sense of humour. You couldn’t have created a bigger debacle at Millers Point in Sydney if you had been planning it since birth. In mid-September of 2014, in a scene being repeated a number of times across the historic […]

Is Thailand the ‘world’s deadliest place to be a tourist’? An interview with John Stapleton, One Weird Globe, 21 November 2014.

We interrupt the usual string of awesome destinations and posts about traveling to offer an interview – and a warning. In case you’re not tuned to the Thai interwebs, a controversial new book has just been released by a British fellow named John Stapleton entitled Thailand: Deadly Destination: (I can’t prove it, obviously, but this […]

Thailand Deadly Destination, UK Daily Mail Coverage, 15 November 2014.

Thailand ‘one of the most dangerous tourist destinations on Earth’: Expat investigation lifts lid on dark side of the Land of Smiles Thailand: Deadly Destination penned by Australian author John Stapleton Writer says tourism boom has created hatred and contempt for foreigners Death rate of tourists is ‘worst scandal in the annals of modern tourism’ […]

Thailand bans Briton’s book that ‘defames monarchy’, The Telegraph, 13 November, 2014.

  Full text Abstract/Details Show highlighting   Abstract Translate [unavailable for this document]   “In 2014, just as in the years preceding it, there were train, bus, ferry, speedboat, motorbike and car accidents, murders, knifings, unexplained deaths, numerous suicides, diving accidents, robberies gone wrong, anonymous bodies washing up on the shores and a string of alcohol- and drug-related incidents,” […]

Cheap, beautiful and dangerous: the trouble with Thailand, The New Daily, 6 November 2014

By John Stapleton The recent slaying of two young British backpackers on the holiday island of Koh Tao in southern Thailand was remarkable as much for the fact it garnered media coverage around the world as the extreme brutality of the murders themselves. The Thai media is heavily censored, and bad news stories about tourists […]

Thailand: Deadly Destination. Seven. The Dissolving Present. Pages 232-256. 2014.

Thailand: Deadly Destination. Six. Human Traffic. Pages 215-231. 2014.

Thailand: Deadly Destination. Five. The Varieties of Expatriate Experience. Pages 194-214. 2014.

Thailand: Deadly Destination. Five. The Varieties of Expatriate Experience. Pages 174-193. 2014.

Thailand: Deadly Destination. Four. The Many Scams. Pages 150-175. 2014.

Thailand: Deadly Destination. Four. The Many Scams. Pages 129-149. 2014.

Thailand: Deadly Destination. Three. Mayhem. Pages 96-128. 2014.

Thailand: Deadly Destination. Three. Mayhem. Pages 74-95. 2014.

Thailand: Deadly Destination. Two. Passports. Pages 60-73. 2014.

Thailand: Deadly Destination. Two. Passports. Pages 44-59. 2014.

Thailand: Deadly Destination. One: Fruit for the Picking. Pages 32-43. 2014.

Thailand: Deadly Destination. One: Fruit for the Picking. Pages 12-31. 2014.

Thailand: Deadly Destination. One: Fruit for the Picking. Pages 1-10. 2014.

PASSPORTS: INTERPOL CLAIMS WORLD’S GREATEST THREAT TO SECURITY, EXTRACTED FROM THAILAND: DEADLY DESTINATION

PASSPORTS Visitors to Thailand are not warned by travel agents, airlines or their own governments that their passports are highly prized in Thailand, and stand a very good chance of being stolen. Depending on the nationality, a passport can fetch thousands of dollars on the black market, several months pay for many Thais. There are […]

Speech for Travels with My Hat, GleeBooks. Sydney. 28 March, 2014.

SPEECH FOR TRAVELS WITH MY HAT    I would like to welcome everybody here, and thank you for all for coming on such a cold, wet night; in particular our special guest Ita Buttrose, and of course, the author and photojournalist Christine Osborne. And I would like to thank Gleebooks for hosting this event.   […]

Extracts from Thailand: Deadly Destination

  FROM CHAPTER ONE FRUIT FOR THE PICKING The daily robbing, bashing, drugging, extortion and murder of foreign tourists on Thai soil, along with numerous scandals involving unsafe facilities and well established scams, has led to frequent predictions that Thailand’s multi-billion dollar tourist industry will self-destruct. Instead tourist numbers more than doubled in the decade […]

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