food – Slow boat to Laos

August 23, 2018January 16, 2021

Chiang Rai

I didn’t post for a couple of days because we didn’t really do much of interest, and then when we did do some stuff – Hedgehog Cafe! Kayaking! Walking tour through a local market! – there was no time to post! We’ll try and do a couple of posts when we’re stationary in a couple of days. I really loved the market tour and want to get it ‘on paper’ before I forget what I did and ate.

Meanwhile … we caught a luxury bus to Chiang Rai on Tuesday, spent a night there and then caught another bus to Huay Xai in Laos yesterday. That can be a very confusing experience, so I’ll fill in more detail about how we did that later too.

And now we’re in Laos! We stayed at the Sabaydee Guest House last night – comfortable room and a very helpful owner who is organising our boat tickets for us. This morning we’re doing Day 1 of the 2-day ‘Slow Boat’ trip down the Mekong to Luang Prabang. It’s been pouring with rain here all night, so this might be interesting. And wet. Very wet!

Waiting for the bus to Chiang Rai at Chiang Mai

August 17, 2018January 16, 2021

Chiang Mai

We had some time before our afternoon flight to Chiang Mai on Tuesday, so we had another crack at visiting Wat Saket, theTemple of the Golden Mount. We checked out of our hotel and took our bags with us – one of the nice things about travelling light is that we can just take everything with us not leave it in hotels and have to collect it later. We hopped on another canal boat down to the Wat, but I wasn’t feeling very energetic so stayed with the bags while Greg walked to the top. He said it was ‘good’, but wasn’t enthusiastic enough to make me feel like I should do it. Back on another canal boat to the Skytrain line that connects with the Airport rail line. There’s a quirky restaurant called Hungry Nerds near Ratchathewi station. They serve salads, grilled meats, chips and all the wait-staff wear over-sized glasses. That confused me for a while because I kept thinking every waitress was ‘ours’ until I realised they were all bespectacled!

The airport train was very easy and it took far less time and cost a fraction of the taxi we caught when we arrived in Bkk. Lesson learnt – next time catch the train! We had allowed ourselves several hours, which meant a long wait at the airport, but rather that than miss a plane! The VietJet flight was fine and we used Grab again to get us to our apartment.

We’re staying in a 1-bedroom apartment in the Astra Condo complex, a very modern 2-building, 16-floor, 589 unit project that only opened last year. There are at least 3 floors of car parking and 2 of them are still being completed. We’re on the 6th floor and there’s a pool, gym, sauna and steam room on the 16th floor. The Shangri-La Hotel is next door. We found this place on Airbnb and you can see photos and more about it here

The apartment has a kitchen and washing machine, but while I may have had intentions of cooking here, the most I’ve done is pour yoghurt over my morning muesli! There are so many great food choices here that struggling with a small saucepan, tiny frypan and very few utensils seems pointless. The washing machine is handy though.

We haven’t done anything super-exciting in the 3 days we’ve been here. Walked a lot, eaten a lot, swum in the pool. There’s a (push)bike sharing scheme here and Greg took one for a spin a couple of days ago. Sam & Brianna gave us some recommendations – we couldn’t find the original Roti stall on Wednesday evening, but found one in the night bazaar. Yesterday we walked a 7km round trip to SP Chicken in Old Chiang Mai for rotisserie chicken, green papaya salad, stir fried vegies & rice and it was delicious. Last night we went back to the Night Bazaar to an outdoor food court full of stands offering what I think of as ‘the next generation of street food’ – Greg had a burger and ‘handcut fries’ which were slices rather than chips … so they could be shallow-fried in a wok rather than deep-fried. I had steamed prawn dumplings and a steamed bun filled with marinated chicken, with a coconut drink made of young coconut flesh, coconut water, coconut milk and ice. It was all delicious and I’m sure we’ll go back there again and try something different next time.

I like to follow fashion – not clothes, makeup, jewellery or interior design – and probably maybe more accurately termed ‘food fads’. In the Western world, it’s all about fermenting at the moment … sauerkraut and other fermented vegetables, sourdough breads, yoghurt and other fermented dairy products and fermented drinks including kefir and kombucha. It’s not a ‘thing’ in Thailand at all – here they are putting ‘fibre’ and ‘collagen’ in everything from drinks to foods to skincare products. But wait! Yesterday on our walk back from SP Chicken, we detoured to have a look at the An Teak Hotel, where Sam and Brianna like to stay when they’re in Chiang Mai. And what did we see advertised at the hotel’s cafe but Kombucha! Unfortunately the cafe was closed so we couldn’t try some, but the truly delicious irony here is that Sam works for Mojo, a Willunga-based company that makes Kombucha!

Shared Mobike for riding around Chiang Mai

Getting Roti from a street seller in the Chiang Mai night markets

August 15, 2018January 16, 2021

Chinatown, Ikea and street food

Let’s catch up on our last few days in Bkk. We flew to Chiang Mai yesterday afternoon, so I’d better write down the Bkk stuff before I forget what we did.

When we were staying at the Sawasdee on Soi 8, we walked a minimum of 3kms a day – the hotel is 700 metres from Sukhumvit Rd and we walked up and down that stretch at least twice a day. I’m probably just trying to rationalise our decision to have 2 desserts each instead of dinner on Monday night … more on that later.

We took the MRT (different train system to the Skytrain) to Chinatown on Sunday, but a lot of it was closed because it was a national holiday to mark the 86th birthday of Queen Sirikit. Mother’s Day is also celebrated on August 12. We visited Wat Traimit Wittayaram Voraviharn Traimit Royal Temple to see the Golden Buddha, which sits 3 metres tall and weighs 5.5 tonnes. Wikipedia estimates it to be worth USD$250 million! Very interesting history including being covered in stucco for a couple of centuries and stored in a shed with a tin roof for a while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Buddha_(statue)

I’d brought a pashmina with me to Thailand, but of course forgot to take it to the Wat that day. Women aren’t allowed to wear shorts in temples, but it’s okay for men. When we were at the entrance to the temple taking our shoes off, a flower seller told me I’d be okay in my almost knee-length shorts, but came over and tugged them down a bit, just to make sure! The Golden Buddha was very impressive, and the temple he’s in is gorgeous – hand-painted walls, beautiful floral arrangements.

We had lunch at Texas Suki in Chinatown – very large restaurant that specialises in steamboat cooking. Full of local families and a few farang white people. We didn’t do the steamboat thing, but just picked out a few things from the menu – dumplings, wonton soup, fried rice and black sesame dumplings in ginger soup for dessert. I’d seen them in a video and was keen to try them. They tasted a bit like a sesame seed version of peanut butter in a soft dumpling pastry and the ginger soup was very tasty.

We keep going back to Terminal 21 because there are so many food choices. Dinner on Sunday night was at a Thai place on the 4th floor, can’t remember what it was called, can’t remember what we ate. I probably had noodles, Greg probably had rice.

On Monday we went to Ikea! Caught the Skytrain to Samrong which is at the end of the Sukhumvit line, then got a Grab car to Ikea in the Mega Bangna Shopping Mall. The Ikea is incorporated into the shopping mall, and it was possible to just walk in and out of different areas without having to walk through the entire store … unlike every other Ikea we’ve ever visited. We had lunch there – Swedish meatballs, steamed salmon, Swedish apple cake. The shopping mall is huge and it was full of people shopping and eating.

I still wanted to try street food from either the omelet stall or the mushroom stall on Soi 8, but they were both closed when I went looking at around 4.30, so I got myself some Pad Thai (Thai noodles) and corn on the cob for Greg. Total cost 40 + 20 baht = AUD$ 1.70. Then later in the evening we went back to Terminal 21 to After You, a busy dessert restaurant. We had to wait for a table, and they only had 2 menus for the whole place, but we enjoyed what we had – I had affogato (ice cream with a shot of espresso to pour over it) and a Lavender-Lychee soda to drink, Greg had a warm just-baked choc-chip cookie thing topped with ice cream, chocolate sauce and more choc chips. On our way back to the hotel we found a food stall selling Thai roti – a thin layer of dough stretched out and cooked on a hotplate, then folded over either a banana (him) or an egg (me) and cut into bite-sized squares. The seller offered a variety of sweet toppings including chocolate sauce, condensed milk, something pink and some other kind of chocolate but we just had ours plain and they were delicious & cost less than $1 each.

On the canal boat again. a very efficient way to get across town, although we were not quite as nimble getting on or off as the locals.

August 12, 2018January 16, 2021

A day on the river

Every morning we have breakfast at the hotel’s ground floor cafe. It is open to the street and my favourite table is by the low window boxes that line the edge of the cafe by the road. There’s a Thai eggplant growing there, and I like to check the progress of the fruit. The first morning we ate there, it had one fruit on it. Now there are 5 and they are growing fast!

There are at least 2 dozen street food stalls in our street, mostly up the Sukhumvit end. We haven’t tried any of them yet, but I’ve picked out a couple that I want to eat at … sometime when I’m not so full of all the other food we’ve been eating. There’s the Thai omelet on rice stall and the mushroom soup stall. The omelet stall doesn’t seem to keep long hours, but the mushroom soup lady works hard. We see her in the mornings, and one night she was wheeling her cart home when we were walking back to the hotel at around 8.30pm.

Yesterday we took Liam’s advice and caught an Orange flag ferry up the river to Nothaburi. We got a Grab car to take us to Saphan Taksin Pier. The Skytrain also goes there, but we wanted to see what it was like driving there. The roads were crowded and mostly slow, but our driver was excellent. When we got to the pier, a man tried to send us to the tourist boats, a reasonable assumption I guess, then pointed us in the right direction when Greg told him we just wanted to catch the ferry. There’s a huge assortment of river craft, ranging from very upmarket tourist cruise boats, hop-on-hop-off tourist boats, passenger ferries and ferries that just go across the river. The one we took went between Saphan Taksin Pier and Nonthaburi and it was packed full of locals and tourists but by the time we reached Nonthaburi it was just about empty. Most tourists got off at the Grand Palace or one of the temples along the way.

When we got off the ferry, we saw lots of stalls selling brightly coloured versions of the packing beads we call ‘ghost poo’, which we use when we pack boxes to send to customers. I bought the smallest pack just before we caught the ferry back to Bkk, it cost about 40c and after I’d handed my money over I said to the seller ‘Now, tell me what it is’. His reply – ‘Fish food’. Ha! It was worth the 40c for the laugh and the photo. We took a photo of it when we were sitting on the ferry and I watched a Thai guy looking at me. I’m sure he was waiting for me to start eating it! I left it on the ferry.

Nonthaburi has a large food market, lots of shops and lots of street stalls lining the footpaths. And lots of places to eat, of course. We found a little cafe that sold 6 different dishes – Greg had pork with rice, I had noodle soup, total cost $3. We wandered through the food market and found more things to eat – rice crispy biscuit things with caramel on top, little bananas on skewers cooked on a char-grill and multi-coloured dumplings – orange / carrot, yellow / pumpkin, green / spinach, purple / taro. I ate them so quickly I forgot to get a photo! The ferry back was less crowded & we got seats on what turned out to be the splashy side of the boat, but we dried quickly. The ferry trip took about an hour each way. We caught the Skytrain back to the stop near the hotel and rested up before dinner.

There’s a Korean shopping mall on the corner of Sukhumvit and Soi 12. Lots of BBQ and other restaurants, bars, shops and a dessert cafe. We had Korean barbecue at Jang Won, a 4-storey place that had private rooms on a couple of floors, but as there were only 2 of us we just got a table on the 4th floor. What feast! We ordered pork slices and beef bulgogi, which came with about a dozen little dishes of kim chi, pickled onions, sauces and other things. The pork slices came first, on a hotplate on a gas stove. The wait-staff were very attentive and at one point took the tongs away from me because apparently I wasn’t cooking the meat properly, or something. When we’d finished the pork, they took that hotplate and stove away and brought the bulgogi on different kind of hotplate on a stove. And then just left us to it, but this time we didn’t know what to do! We waited for someone to come back, but no one did, and eventually the Korean guy at the next table told us to stir it up and eat it before it burnt!

It was all delicious and cost a total of about $30. And then even though we really had eaten enough, we went to the dessert place and ordered 2 desserts which were huge! We should have shared one, and realised that that is what most people do after we’d sat down and looked at what people at other tables were doing. There was a group of 5 girls next to us sharing one dessert and when Greg went to collect ours, the young woman at the counter asked ‘how many people?’. We did manage to eat them both, though.

Toast is a ‘thing’ here – there are street food stalls that sell savoury and sweet fillings on thick pieces of toasted bread. The 2 desserts we had were both toast-based. 3 thick slices of toasted bread which are then assembled in a tower, covered or sprinkled with toppings and then cut into small squares. I commented to Greg that those desserts would have to be about as far away as possible from the sourdough bread I bake at home.