Boots in the Oven

Hightailing it straight out of Bangkok - to Kanchanaburi

Bangkok to Kanchanaburi, May 22, 2007

Things got a little sticky with the travel agent.  Turned out that we had to leave from Chiang Mai to go over to Vietnam a day earlier than we wanted to, or pay an additional $300, which we really really didn't want to do - so we elected to get out of Bangkok a day earlier than we had planned.

Unfortunately, we had to go by the travel agent at 3 to pick up our flight and train tickets before we could leave town. 

So we ate.

A noodle place on Soi Rambuttri provided a tasty brunch of pad thai (the second in two days) along with pad see-ew.  Lotsa savory noodles for us!

Husbear also went to grab a tasty-looking sausage from one of the other guys hanging out on the street.  It was tasty, but extremely sweet - a bit of a surprise for us.

Then we stopped and got pineapple juices.  I started to freak out about the ice, but... whatever. 

I suppose now is as good a time as any to get into a diatribe about Thai taxis?

They have meters.  Legally, the drivers have to use the meters.  Therefore, the drivers almost never will agree to use the meters.  Of course.

Also, they will often simply refuse your fare if they think there's too much traffic where you want to go or the place you want them to take you is too close.

So, whenever you want to take a taxi anywhere, you have to bargain and haggle and hope you don't have to be where you're going anytime soon, because even if you do find a taxi the traffic will be awful.

Also, sometimes you will go through the fun of finding a taxi, agreeing on the price, and getting into the taxi only to find out that your driver doesn't know where he's going, or that he wants to rebargain the fare for some reason.

Yeah.

I heart Farang, indeed.  (Farang is the Thai word for foreigner, and it's how you will hear yourself addressed ALL THE TIME.  If you want something spicy, say "Thai spicy, not farang spicy!"  If you don't understand something in a shop, you will hear lots of chatter liberally interspersed with the word Farang.)

Sometimes it made me want to do this.

We loved most of the Thai people we came in contact with, but almost all of the taxi drivers we had to deal with were infuriating.  Almost.

ANYWAY.  End of diatribe.

As soon as our tickets were ready, we grabbed them and our bags and haggled a 150 baht taxi over to the, I think Southern bus terminal (oddly in the northwest part of Bangkok) to catch a bus for Kanchanaburi and the River Kwai.  Two hours or so later, there we were, throwing our bags and ourselves into a modified pickup truck called a songthaew.

The truck got us quickly and safely to our hotel for the evening, the VN Guesthouse.  The guesthouse gives you the option of staying in a raft on the River Kwai (or Kway, as it's called in Thailand), and we jumped on it. 

You can also stay more cheaply in a room in the main building, up on the banks of the river.

The room itself was pretty barebones, but the view was so calming.

Except for the disco boat, though it only went by twice and was done before eight.  And was awesome.  We considered swimming out to it.

We got to enjoy our elephant beers while watching the bats skim over the surface of the water.

Then we went inside to try to figure out the toilet.  The step-by-step instructions were helpful.  I've never stayed in a hotel where you flush the toilet by pouring a bucket of water down it, and the thing I learned is - it really doesn't take that much water to flush a toilet!

Eventually, we started to get hungry.  Our original plan was to walk back to the area around the bus station, where we had seen a huge variety of streetfood when we arrived, but after walking past the war cemetery we realized this was a really long way to go.

We ducked into a place with their kitchen out on the street.  From the frontage, the place looked tiny, but once we got inside the true dimensions were revealed, along with a singer doing wonderful things to Beatles favorites.  (Hearing a Thai man phonetically sing the French in "Michelle" - can't be beat.)

They had an English menu, which was presented to us by four or five waitstaff who eagerly waited for our order.  We tried to fend them off by ordering beer, and one woman tried to explain that if we ordered Beer Chiang, we got something for free.  We didn't understand what it was, but learned quickly enough when it came to our table just behind the beers themselves.

A chicken foot soup with blood cake!

The waiter who put it down on our table told us that this was one of their best sellers, and we dug in.  It was delicious - just amazing.  The broth was thick with spices and rich with meaty flavor.  I couldn't (and still can't) get much of anything off chicken feet, but Husbear likes them.  The blood cake tasted a little like liver and a little of iron, and had a gelatinous texture that was actually really tasty in the soup.

After that... what to do?

Sour spicy beef salad.  Approximately the spiciest thing I have ever put in my mouth.  The flavors were intense and a revelation - balanced perfectly just below actual pain (No, there was definitely pain -L. Pants).

Not knowing what it was, we ordered the "serpent head salad."  We certainly weren't expecting a whole fish, expertly fried and topped with a raw salad of onion, peppers, carrots, cucumbers, and little unidentifiables.

With the exception of the yet-to-be-blogged Fat Duck, I don't think I've ever seen a restaurant meal make Husbear this happy. 

We did a pretty good job on all of the food, including the shrimp crackers that I didn't include a picture of.

Note to readers - beer does a very good job of washing the spicy out of your mouth, but careful not to be like Girlie and accidentally chug two large ones (at 7% abv) trying to eat the delicious food.  Temper with water.  Please.

The dynamos cooking in the kitchen were more than happy to allow us to take a photo while we were leaving.  Again, it's just mindblowing that such great food comes out of such barebones kitchens!

Husbear still rates this as the best restaurant we ate at in Southeast Asia, and we don't even know the name.  How stupid are we?  All I know is that it's south of the war cemetery on the southwest side of route 323, and I think it's before you get to Ban Nue Road.  Good luck.  We'll try to meet you there.

(Ok. I really don't think that's it's possible to describe just how awesomely delicious the food at this place was.  It was everything that I had been led to believe real Thai food is- sweet, salty, sour, a touch of bitter, aromatic herbs shoved in everything and spicy as all hell.  Small tears are running down my face even now as I think about it.  Unfortunately, this was not an experience that we were able to duplicate or even really approximate very often. Don't get me wrong, we had a lot of great food, but I often got the sense that my big white head doomed me to the tourist approved version more often than not.  In all seriousness though, when I get back to Thailand I will definately be spending a night or two in Kanchanaburi just to eat at this place as many times as possible in each 24 hour period. I may sleep on their floor.  -L. Pants)

(Oh and for the record, it's not like we forgot to look at the name or lost our notes or something- this place was bent on maintaining anonymity; no name on the menu, no signs, no embroidered napkins, nothing.  They did have a big banner with a crazy looking chicken on it with the website www.aomteenkai.com, but this just appears to be some sort of  business directory.  So if anyone can help, please, please, please tell us the name of this place. I have a tattoo artist on retainer, I just need the correct spelling.  Thanks)

Next day - The Bridge.  And a six-hour, non a/c bus ride to Sangkhlaburi.  Oops.

Bangkok - getting to know Khaosan Road and making onward plans

Bangkok, May 21, 2007

Good gawd, y'all.  The real-time blogging experiment, that went fairly well from southern Italy, sure did fail miserably when put to the test up against the heat and humidity and balls-to-the-walledness of Southeast Asia. 

We're back in the States, now, squatting with Husbear's wonderful folks in Mandeville, Louisiana.  There's ice in our drinks, dinners out are novelty-sized, and our cats were so happy to see us that they pooped in the tub.  (FATTY!)

Husbear's brother was happily married off on Saturday, and he and his lovely lady wife are down in Costa Rica right now on their honeymoon while we get to know their amazing bundle of three-year-old manchild.

But there's still blogging to do, while this trip is fresh in my mind!

First things first.  Since the place we originally checked in to in Bangkok's backpacker haven, Khao San Road, was filthy and disgusting, we had to find a new place to stay.  (Lesson - avoid the Siam Oriental if you're staying in that area.)  On the way, we were almost dragged bodily into one of Bangkok's approximately 73 trillion tailors.

We did want to get clothes made, just not immediately, and something about the name of this place really put us off...

We had some trouble finding it, but were soon checked into the hugely preferable Baan Sabai, off of Khaosan Road on a quieter street called Soi Rambuttri.  Bangkok is really difficult to navigate - the city appears to be completely unplanned.  Case in point - the fastest way to get from Khaosan Road to Soi Rambuttri is to cut through a felafel place, but you have to go upstairs through their internet cafe.  Huh?

A group of smily ladies were selling fruits in front of the Baan Sabai, and we slowed to buy one of their durians.  These fruits are revered by many Asians and hated by most Westerners.  Their smell is... pungent, to say the least, sort of blue cheesy and garlicky and ammoniac, and the best description we can give of the flavor is to liken it to a garlic walnut pudding. 

They taught us to say "Thank you!" in Thai and sent us on our way, giggling.

It was, at this point, well past lunchtime.  We had passed a small enclave of street stalls while we were looking for the Baan Sabai, and we went back to them for lunch.  We were too hungry to really do any comparison shopping, so we basically ended up at the first place to shove their menu at us, but we did have a pretty reasonable pad thai and a good tom yum goong (hot and spicy shrimp paste soup).

We had no idea what to do with the sugar the cook placed in front of us - I guess we telegraphed our confusion, since she came back and covered our noodles with sugar, chile, and lime juice.  Those three ingredients, plus fish sauce, can be found on every Thai table.  They make up the main components of Thai cuisine - hot, sweet, salty, and sour.

After lunch, we did several hours of comparison shopping at a few of the many, many travel agencies to be found in the area, trying to set up the next month of travel.  Apparently, it's almost always easier and cheaper to set up ongoing travel from Bangkok after you get there.  Visas are easier to obtain, air tickets are downright cheap, and train and bus travel doesn't make much sense before you get there.

Four hours or so later, and several hundred dollars poorer, we staggered out of our chosen travel agency.  We were to return the next day to pick up night train tickets to Chiang Mai for a date a few days down the road, as well as air tickets from Chiang Mai to Saigon and then back to Bangkok.  Pretty easy to take care of, though we had worked up an appetite...

A vendor of what we'd heard was a ubiquitous backpacker treat, the banana pancake, was frying up crepes right in front of the travel agent.  So we stopped.

She took a little knot of dough out of the metal container on the right, worked it into a large disk, and cooked it on the griddle.  Just before it was done, she sliced a banana, put the slices on the pancake, and folded the pancake around it; she then put a dab of bright yellow fat (coconut or palm oil?) underneath the pancake and fried it crispy.  Then, off the heat and topped with sweetened condensed milk!  A yummy, sweet treat.

We walked slowly up and down Soi Rambuttri, looking in shop windows at tailored suits, checking out used bookstores, and seeing what black-market DVD's were going to be played to an audience at the various guesthouses.  Across a major street, we saw this woman walking along with two panniers balanced across her back with a yoke.

A Thai woman stopped her in her walk, and she put down the panniers and started preparing her specialty.  Chilies and garlic went in, followed by sliced green bananas (peel on!), a handful of unfamiliar and very astringent green seeds, lemon slices (again, with peel), a whole small crab - seriously - dried prawns, and several sauces out of squeeze bottles and jars on her tray. Oh yeah, and a handfull of very tiny chilis.

We had to try it, so we ordered one.  The five-minute sequence of pounding and stirring began anew.  She handed us our styrofoam container of green banana salad, and we tasted it... it was like a huge condiment.  Very spicy, sour, shrimpy, and STRONG.  I guess the Thais aren't afraid of strong flavors...

We had to sit down somewhere and get a Beer Chiang (Elephant Beer) to wash it down. 

We weren't able to finish the green banana salad - honestly, it was just too overly astringently powerful for us!  So we watchedthe backpackers go by, and when the sun went down, we returned to the Baan Sabai and changed for dinner.

We were going to do dinner at a place nearby called Hemlock, recommended by Mia at Nosh, an amazing person who sent us an insanely helpful document she typed up with information from her travels to Thailand in February.

The restaurant turned out to be very nice, with somewhat odd artwork on the walls for sale and a yooge menu.  We ordered the Miang Kam, which the menu described as dried prawn wrapped in tea leaf.  It turned out to be a beautiful presentation and couldn't have been simpler - leaves, and raw chopped onion, lime pieces with the peel, dried shrimplets, peanuts, toasted coconut, and chiles.  Fresh, and light, and delicious.

We also orderded a vegetarian jungle curry with tofu, which was flavored with lots and lots of fresh peppercorns and full of bitterly strange little pods of something. (We later discovered that these little balls were called pea eggplants and people love to throw them in almost every type of curry.)

We also ordered Rhoum, which from the description I thought would be like a Scottish fried egg - but stuffed with prawn and chicken in lieu of sausage.  Instead:

Seriously filling dinner.  Looking back at these pictures, it looks like all we did our first day in Bangkok was eat, but that's just because we didn't take any shopping pictures.  Ah well.

On to Cowboy!

Soi Cowboy is an area of a certain... flavor, shall we say, that has a history stretching back 50 years or so.  It started as an area where GI's went to blow off steam.  Now, it's full of expensive strip clubs where ladies do anatomically improbable things that I won't go in to here. 

I will say that I was most impressed by the 30 or so darts fired by one woman and leave it at that.  And no, you can't take pictures inside any of the establishments...

We were out rather late.  Next day, on to the River Kwai.

girlie