sybarites

Our last day in Bangkok was spent milling around CentralWorld, a new mall with a grocery store of culinary delights. It was rated the 3rd best food retailer in the world and best in Asia. Grocery aisles intertwine with sit-down options, where customers can order sushi, bistro food, or New York pizza. A liquor section had dozens of brands of beer we had never seen before. We mainly stayed near food court that overlooked the store.

The Murahata Fruit Boutique, which was attached to the store, was particularly intriguing. Rather than buying a dozen apples or a bag of kiwi, one buys one apple the size of a softball or perhaps a pair of different apples, including one with a chinese character printed on the side. Whether the fruit is apple, kiwi or melon, each piece is the best of the farmers’ craft, the pinnacle of a simple tradition. Each is perfect in appearance and exceptional in flavour. The melons have perfect T-shaped stems, the kiwis are the size of a fist and the strawberries are bright red. I was able to sample one small piece of apple, which was mild and sweet, not acidic or sharp. As tempted as a was, I couldn’t convince myself to buy the $4 apple or the $20 melon.

We did spend the extra $2 to get the sofa seat at the movie theatre when we watched Pursuit of Happiness. In addition to the typical cup holder, a small tray was provided and the seat backs reclined. And best of all, no arm rest to prevent snuggling.

-I –

We went to the Starbucks the other day for breakfast. It’s right in the most touristy area of the city called Khaosan road, where the hippy:Thai citizen ratio seems like 3:1. Anyway, we were waiting in line behind a tourist, maybe our age, who was having an enormous amount of trouble placing her order. She had a North American accent so this cannot be her first experience ordering coffee. Granted, Starbucks does have its own language but all she had to do was order from the menu hanging above the counter; how hard is it to order coffee with milk? The two fellows behind the counter speak Thai, English and Starbucks -at least- and they couldn’t figure out what she wanted.

I tuned out because it was too painful to listen to but tuned in again when she said she was going to the Indian embassy that day for a visa. I asked her friend (who was standing near the back, too embarrased to be standing with her) if they were indeed going to the embassy, and if so, to bring alot of patience and a book. He said they were just going to pick up the visas but had already experienced the worst part of the waiting. Sotto voce, Marc said, “If she has trouble ordering coffee at Starbucks, India is going to eat her alive.”

– II –

This is great: there’s a gas station near our hotel that has been transformed into a bar, but it’s not what you think. It’s not some kitchy-retro remodeling of a an old station- it’s an abandoned Shell with folding tables. The pumps (hopefullythey’ve been turned off) are draped with old blankets, and the huge lighted Shell sign that once displayed gas prices looms darkly in the corner. The tables have twinkling candles and the bar is a mobile cart with a bunch of liquor bottles. There’s actually a menu (pretty good for an unliscenced operation working in an abandoned site that doesn’t belong to them) and servers who bring drinks and work the dj booth set up near the big speakers. The whole thing is pretty an extrordinary. We’ll try to get a photo.

– III –

Speaking of classy set-up, here’s the work station from which we’ve been operating:

Recently, we’ve come across a series of “Best of” items. The first three were not something I expected to discover while in Bangkok. The fourth is something I never expected to discover.

Best Steak & Best French Fries – This is no exaggeration (though we have yet to visit Argentina, so it’s possible this blue ribbon for steak will not last long).

We came across both of these things in one restaurant, or rather, a micro-restaurant that just opened its doors on Th. Phra Arthit, called Mr. Pas. We think we understood that the chef (a Thai fellow who owns the place with his brother) studied with Gordon Ramsey, of “Hell’s Kitchen” fame. (I can’t believe we were lucky enough to stumble upon this place as we were walking by!) We ate lunch the first time we walked in: Hawaiian Chicken Burger and Fish & Chips, henceforth known as “the Best Chips/French Fries”. Simple enough dishes but they were crafted exceptionally well, and were remarkably reasonable in price, especially considering the care taken in preparation. We could barely wait 30 hours to return for dinner, which was a parma-wrapped steak with asparagus mashed potatoes for Marc and a mustard-crusted pork chop for me. Now this- this was outstanding. The steak was done perfectly to request and just melted in the mouth. Melted! My chop, served with warm raisin compote, was golden, garlicky, tasty, brilliant. Oh yeah! We also had an exquisite starter of chicken livers sauteed in a whiskey reduction; though, as this is the first chicken liver I’ve ever had, it doesn’t yet warrant a “Best Of” rating. We are going back for dinner tonight and my mouth is already watering. Unfortunately, they don’t serve wine, just beer. No liquor license yet?

Best French Toast – This meal raised french toast to a whole new level. Another place we credit ourselves with findin is Ricky’s Cafe. (It’s actually in the most recent Rough Guide travel guide but we don’t have that guide so I take credit for finding it on our own.) The reason this french toast wins the “Best Of” award is because it is actually banana french toast. Who would’ve thought? Mix egg with smashed up, fresh banana and use that to coat the bread before frying = fantastic. It was out of this world. We’ve been back for breakfast there every day but one since we’ve been in Bangkok; they also serve a delicious blue-cheese omelette.

Best Outdoor Aerobics – I went out on Valentine’s day to the Tesco grocery to procure food for our hotel-bed picnic that evening. Outside the Tesco, near the doors to the KFC, a pile of people had assembled to do aerobics. There was a guy wearing tight shorts and a microphone who was directing the activity from a stage set up on one end of the block, and the people following his direction covered the entire sidewalk to the other end. I had to walk in the street to avoid being aerobic-ed. It was great. Plus, it was really hot (by Canadian standards) so these people deserve extra credit for not only exercising, but doing so in the heat, within spitting distance of a fast-food joint. Now that’s dedicated health management.

*not to be confused with Ladyboy.

Q: I am visiting Thailand and I am wondering, how many people is too many to transport on one scooter?
A: A maximum number has yet to be determined.  Currently, the number to beat is six, including one infant in arms.

Q: Whilst driving, I noticed that the traffic lights at intersections change rather infrequently;  just how long does a red light last in Bangkok?
A: A red light in Bangkok can last anywhere from 6 minutes to two years.  It is longer if you are sitting on the sunny side of a crowded, non-AC bus.

Q:  When I am in Thailand, where can I buy a T-shirt?
A:  Everywhere, always, for ever and ever, amen.  There is no corner that you will turn, no shop by which you will pass, no island remote enough or beach empty enough that you will not find someone from whom to buy a T-shirt.  Nowhere is safe from the T-shirt sellers.

Q: What is “ABF”?
A: ABF is an acronym for American breakfast.  Many places that offer accommodation for tourists boast an inclusive ABF.  In its most basic form, an ABF includes orange drink, 2 cooked eggs, toast, pad thai and fuscia meat.

Q: What is “fuscia meat”?
A: Fuscia meat is a spongy, meat flavoured substance in the shape of a tube which is served as part of any good ABF and which tastes remotely of hot dog. Its exact contents remain, blessedly, unknown.

Q: While relaxing on a beach, I sometimes like to fall asleep.  But how can I continue shopping while enjoying a pleasant mid-afternoon nap?

A: Rest assured that you will not be asleep for long. The thoughtful people who walk the beach selling various merchandise will be sure to wake you up to see if you wish to buy a book, a beer, a massage or a T-shirt.

Q: While in Thailand, I’m interested in experiencing something new and potentially uncomfortable: what is the quickest route to back pain?
A:  The quickest route to short-term back pain involves a visit to Wat Po and the payment of twelve Canadian dollars.  After viewing the largest reclining Buddha in the country, visit the building in the back for an hour’s worth of Thai massage.  Put yourself in the hands of a student of this discipline as he or she uses his/her elbows, knees, feet and chin to find, expose and force into submission every stiff muscle you didn’t know you had.  Enjoy.

Q: As a tourist in Bangkok, how do I find and eat a meal composed entirely of street food?

A: Step 1: Visit Khaosan road, also known as the place where everyone with a bad sunburn or the potential to receive a bad sunburn gathers to shop for cheap goods and cold beer.
Step 2: Stop in at the 7/11 for your first, cold, 630ml beer.  You can lash out and buy a Heineken for 80 bhat ($2CAD) or stick to the cheapest option, Chang beer, for 50 bhat ($1.25CAD).
Step 3:  Find one of the stands that serves meat popsicles.  Point at a couple of skewers of beef and/or chicken on display and watch as your selections are BBQ’d to crispy deliciousness.  Pay 20 bhat and order two more as you stand ravenously devouring the first two.  Conveniently, the meat popsicle can be eaten with one hand, thereby leaving your other hand free for beer-related duties.
Step 4: Walk down to one end of the street while enjoying your beer.  Turn 180 degrees and start the stroll up to the opposite end.  Repeat, as necessary, for the remainder of the evening.
Step 5: Finish your first beer.
Step 6: When you feel peckish, stop at one of the stands serving pad thai, BBQ corn on the cob, fruit, rice, popcorn, etc..  Request “one” and watch its quick preparation.
Step 7: Find another beer before you start to forget your first!
Step 8: Repeat Steps 3, 6 & 7 several more times.
Step 9: When your feet become tired, find a sidewalk bar, which is literally some guy with a booth, some liquor and a few chairs set up on the sidewalk.  Enjoy almost any cocktail you can imagine for 80 bhat.

Q: What is the statute of limitations for exploiting a movie’s filming location?
A:  Unknown.  One contender for “Best and Longest Exploitation of a Movie Location” is James Bond Island, for its appearance in a movie in 1974.  33 years and no sign of respite.  The newest location in Thailand to experience similar attention is Maya beach on Koh Phi Phi Leh, also known as “The Beach”.  About 10 years have passed since the making of that film and this beach will almost certainly surpass the legendary status of its predecessor.

Q: When visiting a beach in Thailand, what is an appropriate snack to bring for the monkeys who live there?
A: An appropriate snack for the monkeys is “nothing”.   A completely inappropriate snack is sour-orange-flavoured mentos.  Amazingly, a tourist from Norway was actually witnessed bringing this inappropriate snack to a beach in order to feed and get close to the wild monkeys.  How or why she conceived of this idea is a mystery.

Q: What is the stupidest tattoo that a person can get while on vacation?
A:  There are so many contenders for this honour that a winner is hard to determine.  However, the best one in recent memory is the “I’m with Stupid” tattoo on the chest of one man whose best friend has the tattoo “I’m with Dickhead”.  There is hope that they were henna tattoos.

Q: As a tourist in Thailand, how can I earn a bucket of rye, Red Bull and Coke?
A: That’s easy!  Volunteer to participate in a Thai boxing match in a tourist bar!  Approach the man carrying the sign that reads “Free bucket for volunteer fighter” and ask to be outfitted with boxing gear so that you can fight another tourist in the ring set up inside the bar.   Win or lose, you earn a bucket, my friend.
Note: Thai boxing has no restrictions on the fighting moves.

As soon as I read that we would be visiting a part of Thailand that was near where they filmed The Man with The Golden Gun, I made sure that we went out of our way to see it.  Imagine!  Scaramanga’s island!

Lucky for us, there is a plethora of tours on Phuket to choose from and they all boast a visit to ‘James Bond Island’.  I don’t know what the real name of the island is because everyone just refers to it by its nickname.  As a luxury, we chose one of the more expensive tours because it offered the opportunity to do some kayaking around other pretty islands in the near vicinity.   I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the kayaking was the best part.   Or rather, the second best part because Marc’s pose as a Bond girl is my favourite.

At several stops during our day tour, our small group would all hop off the big boat and onto little, inflatable kayaks that were each paddled by a crew member.  We skimmed around tall islands rising out of deep, turquoise water, and ducked through a bat cave into a contained, salt-water pool in the middle of high, sheer cliffs.

We saw wild macaques swimming to retrieve the pieces of banana that the some tourists tossed to them; we saw mud-skipper fish, the kind that can “walk” on land for short distances; we paddled through and around several picturesque islands and then were treated to a great lunch on board the boat.

Plus, I got to stand on the strip of sand where James Bond’s plane was blown up by the solex-powered ray gun!

It turns out that the beaches in Thailand are as spectacular as everyone said they were. The views? Stunning. The water? Warm, and the colour of light jade. The sand? Powdery, white, perfect. But with so much paradise at hand, we seemed obsessed with beach comparisons. As many as we visited, we were never too tired, or too satisfied, or – thank goodness – too sunburnt to visit yet another. Someone we would meet for two mintues would swear up and down that the best beach they’ve ever set eyes on is ‘xyz’. So, we would promply make plans to go to ‘xyz’ and agree that it is beautiful, but maybe the sand isn’t quite as powdery as ‘abc’ or the snorkeling not exactly as clear as ‘def’. At every stop, we had no reason to ever move on but I’m glad we did, if only to prove that all and none of the beaches here are perfect.

Worth mentioning are a few outstanding ones upon which we baked.

Long Beach on Koh Phi Phi [ed. Koh means island in Thai] provided our first taste of snorkeling in Thailand and Marc’s first snorkeling adventure ever. I saw more fish in five minutes than I’ve ever seen and Marc spotted a couple of harmless black-tipped reef sharks in the distance. In fact, we didn’t really even need to swim because the curious little zebra-stripped-yellow-backed fish would come to visit as soon as we were knee deep into the bay.

Of course, we made a special stop on our snorkeling tour at Maya Beach, also known as “The Beach” from the movie of the same name. Those location scouts really know how to pick a brilliant site to shoot a film. The colour of the water here is unbelieveable and our pictures could never do this place justice. Maybe the pictures taken by the hundred or so other tourists who were there at the same time would paint a better picture.

Kata Beach on Phuket island is near the top of our list because it had the best swimming. Oddly, we don’t seem to have a stupendous photo of this place…

Rai Leh Beach at Krabi is where we spent Christmas. (Actually, we stayed at the cheaper beach next door, Ton Sai, and just walked over to the posh beach at low tide each day.) Nothing wrong here with the long, wide swath of sand and the clear, tepid water which is the perfect depth in which to sit and drink a cold beer. The sheer cliff faces and small, off-shore islands made for some especially dramatic scenery.

We have just one more day to spend in the Land of a Thousand Smiles. Guess where we’ll be smiling.

This year, we were very lucky to be able to spend Christmas on a beach in Thailand. Even luckier, we were able to meet up with another Canadian couple, Julia and Jeff, whom we had met at the ger camp when we were all in Mongolia. Odd to think that we had met six months ago and only knew each other 36 hours before deciding to spend the holidays together, but we had a brillant time comparing travel stories and toasting our good fortune at actually having somplace to stay.

As mentioned in Marc’s post, we had spent a great deal of our time in Bangkok fooling around with reservations and such because this is ultra-high season and things are booked up right good and full. We were ecstatic to have found a couple of bungalow rooms at this place on Ton Sai beach, Krabi, even though we were paying over double the normal price and were obliged to partake in a compulsary, and relatively expensive gala celebration on Christmas Eve.

All week, we four had been joking about how we would make the most of this gala. Presumably, it would be buffet-style which would mean that we, the compulsary attendees, would be compelled to pull our chairs directly up to the shrimp platter and become bottomless pits. As it turns out, there were no shrimp, but plenty of thai food, some really well-done roast beast, a little turkey and a super ladyboy show.

After a few warm-up numbers, for which we applauded loudly from our front row seats wearing our festive elf hats, the feature act was announced, ‘Not only does Thailand have some of the prettiest ladyboys in the world, some of them were here to perform for us tonight!’ What followed was an excellent performance by some pretty ladyboys with outstanding costumes. The best part was when one of the solo acts descended from the stage to mingle with the crowd and made his way over to our table to dance with Julia. Truly, this was a Christmas highlight.

On Christmas Day, we spend a laid-back afternoon in the sun drinking Chang beer and floating in the sea before sharing some thai food at a beach-front place near our bungalows. We shared our first bottle of wine in a couple of months and had a grand time toasting everything.

P.S. For gifts this year, I got a cold and Marc got a bad case of heat stroke. Merry Christmas.

After three aggravating days planning our travel around Thailand, which required a dozen phone calls, two people on the internet, two failed reservations, and four headaches, we were more in need of a Thai massage than a hot trek to our first tourist destination, Bangkok’s Grand Palace and Temple of the Emerald Buddha.

As diligent and paranoid as ever, I followed the Lonely Planet’s tip of covered knees, shoulders and toes. Unfortunately, Janet, with capri pants and a scarf covering her shoulders, was turned back to borrow a long skirt and a blue shirt two sizes too big for her. Oddly, we saw several Thai girls wearing black mini-skirts wandering the grounds, suggesting the issue is not knees, but the casual pants, which reminds me that the Vatican requires women to cover their shoulders in St. Peter’s Basilica while they may feel free to reveal cleavage short of the nipple.

Upon entering the temple we were immediately besot by the splendor of gold tiles covering buildings with shapes I had never imagined, and statues of monstrous figures. Each building was unique, with little to tie it visually to the next, except for the gold tiles.

The most unusual for me was the gold bell-shaped temple, though I have seen many similar shapes since.

Most space for walking was occupied by a plethora of older Thai ladies in yellow shirts, the color of the Thai royal family,who were waiting to see the princess visit the Temple of The Emerald Buddha later in the afternoon. The women who arrived early held the prime viewing locations by placing their open umbrellas on the ground while they sheltered from the blazing sun.

The adjoining palace made me think of Disneyland, not in a clichéd way, but as if the grounds were too perfect, as if closer examination would reveal the hedges to be pâpier maché and the stones to be plaster.

It’s Christmas Eve and we are halfway around the world in Thailand, on Tonsai beach. White sand replaces snow and cold beer replaces eggnog but we’re happy to be spending the holiday with some Canadian friends and, can you imagine, a real turkey dinner at our resort. Our first toast on Christmas day will be to everyone at home, fourteen hours behind us and asleep in your beds with visions of sugarplums dancing in your heads.

Stay warm!