Blogs from Thailand, Asia - page 12

After 30+ long hours of travel, I made it to the hotel and breakfast. Not much sleeping last night. I had to take a walk around the local area when I got in, just out of curiosity. Not surprisingly, there were lots of changes I saw at 1:00 in the morning from the last time I was here, nearly 3 years ago. I’m sure some of it is the normal in and out of businesses, and some related to Covid. Covid probably cause more than it’s share of places to close. For those of you who have been here, the Ambassador is pretty much same same. There are a couple more fish tanks coming in the doors. They did renovate the breakfast area, and it looks really nice. Tables are spread out much more (Covid) and ... read more

Jomtien, just south of Pattaya, isn't the sort of place we'd normally be drawn towards on a trip like this. There were, however, some very specific reasons to visit, and it led to a slight change in our anticipated itinerary which worked out very well indeed as you'll find out in future posts! Getting there was easy once we'd found a driver who would accept the ride. Bolt proved to be frustrating as a few drivers accepted the job, then cancelled it as soon as they got stuck in traffic on the way to our hotel. This seems to be the downfall of the system, but a lovely lady driver on the best alternative, Grab, came up trumps and we were soon on our way. As well as the agreed price you have to pay any ... read more

Although they eat some very unusual shit in Thailand, cooking with poo is, thankfully, not literal. It's the cooking school of Poo, a lady from the Khlong Toei slum in Bangkok. Before starting her cooking school, Poo spent 14 hours a day cooking food and making live-in-a-slum money, about 200 bhat ($7usd) a day. But a bubbly personality, a pinch of escape-life-in-the-slum tenaciousness, a dollop of getting-a-business-started help from an Australian missionary, some very clever branding, a well-titled cookbook (Cooking with Poo), and an endorsement from celebrity chef Jamie Oliver were the breadcrumbs leading her out of poverty. Despite the change in fortune, Poo didn’t move the cooking school into a shiny antiseptic space on Sukhumvit (i.e., the fancy part of town where poor people wear uniforms). Instead, she takes tourists to the ‘real’ market and ... read more

Raw sewage. Carrion. Vomit custard. Rotting fish. Death. Someone compared it to eating ice cream in an outhouse. Anthony Bourdain said it was like “French kissing your dead grandmother,” and one 19thcentury journalist said, "To eat it seems to be the sacrifice of self-respect”. None of that matters. We have to do it. We have to eat durian. And we’re making the kid eat some too. Although allegedly banned on the sky train, we smelled it yesterday on the way home from school. It was only a hint, much fainter than the wall of stink that wafts through the grocery store, but definitely durian. There is no way to contain the stank. If it is cut, it smells; uncut, it smells; vacuum sealed, it smells. The prodigious funk is apparently an advantageous evolutionary adaptation. When the ... read more

Koh Tao is a diving mecca famed throughout the world, and also known locally as Turtle Island. It's been a long held dream to visit this magical little island, and finally I have the opportunity to add Tao to my ever expanding list of places visited. There's a daily high speed ferry (and also a catamaran) that both zoom across to the island from Koh Phangan, with the sea journey completed in just an hour. The arrival at the pier proved to be a typically effortless Thai travel experience, where the resort had organised free transportation and I wasn't even aware I had booked the service! It's all part of travelling in this wonderful country, as the Thais really are here to help! Before you know it I was checked in to a lovely resort that ... read more