Giving in to gluttony

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It is said that an army marches on its stomach; well, we travel on ours. Without wishing to demystify the romance of life on the road for any armchair travellers browsing this page at the office, or at home with a nice cup of tea and Eastenders on the telly, often is the time that lunch ends up being the standout highlight of the day and, whilst happily digesting whatever tasty Thai treat we recently enjoyed, we often struggle to find sufficient motivation to fill the interminable hours that loom before us like a gaping chasm that separates the past pleasure of lunch from the future one of dinner. It can sometimes be a hard gap to bridge, especially when stuck on a small island suffering the 5th day of rain in a row. Which, for all you lovers of Schadenfreude out there (and I know there are many), is exactly what happened to us on Ko Phayam, a small island in the Andaman sea in the north of the Kra isthmus, near the Thai border with Myanmar.

Rather than being means to complain, we found in our situation a convenient excuse to stop worrying about the authenticity and weight of our between meal travelling experiences, and instead to focus our efforts entirely on our stomachs instead. This forced transition from conscientious cultural comminglers to base bacchanalian burpers was an easy one to make, and one from which it will be very hard to return. Due to the lack of any discernable dawn, with the damp dark of night segueing almost unperceptively into the sodden grey of morning, we happily gave our previously proudly worn habit of greeting each new day with a swim a dignified sea burial in the grey and churning waters that breathed asthmatically a few yards away from our hut. This had the twofold benefit of filling the hours before breakfast with a much more restive activity (sleep) and delaying the partaking of said meal till further into the day, bringing it conveniently that much closer to lunch. Lunch we extended from its usual languid hour to a more somnolent two or three, which meant that, providing we found time for some fine wine and cake in the afternoon, we could easily walk the entire pavement of our day, from breakfast through to midnight snack, without once stepping on the cracks of activity.

Our heroic disregard for any activity more demanding than dragging ourselves out of our hammocks to brave the rain between our hut and the restaurant, was made that much easier to achieve thanks to our fortuitous choice of accommodation. After looking at most of the hand full of bungalow operations that dot the wide sweep of sand that is Aow yai beach, we made the easy decision to stay at Baan Suan Kayoo bungalows, which nestled themselves in amongst the forest at the rugged, mangrove clad northern end of the 3km long beach. We chose to stay there on the basis of its delightfully appointed, large wooden bungalows and the welcome we received from the lovely Wasana and her lovelier daughter Far. We chose to stay as long as we did for the food. The restaurant at Baan Suan Kayoo was conveniently located no more than thirty yards from our otherwise secluded hut and, furthermore, had the most extensive menu I've yet come across in Thailand. They had but four copies of this menu, and confusingly each one was almost entirely different from the rest, with the items that did tally in name not doing so in price. On interrogating Wasana, we found to our pleasure that there was not a single dish on the menus, including dozens I'd never heard of before, that she would be unable to prepare. We had found the perfect table under which to stoically place our hungry feet; the field of combat had been selected, battle was about to commence...


Facing each other across the wooden table of battle sit the two opposing forces. On one side are the two paragons of gluttony, the ambassadors of greed, master masticators and vanquishers of Sunday lunch: Scott and Anny. These two dashing combatants are armed with battle hardened stomachs, steely jaws, specially reinforced lower digestive tracts and almost incompatible appetites. On the other side are arranged their enemy; hunger. Of Hunger's main weaponry, the most devastating has to be the extraordinary power of the chilli bomb, but this is well supported by a large army of Khao Niaw (sticky rice), the debilitating triumvirate of Leo, Singha and Chang beers, and the rear guard of dessert. Perhaps the greatest threat standing in the way of Scott and Anny's hopes of destroying Hunger is the insidious menace of Thaibaht. Though ostensibly controlled by Scott and Anny, Thaibaht has long been known to sympathise with the cause of the enemy. Thaibaht is a mercenary wing of Scott and Anny which, though essential to their progress, could easily prove their downfall. For each dish eaten, for every battle won, the price of victory is paid for by a depletion in the number, some would say a desertion, of Scott and Anny's Thaibaht. Should hunger prove resistant and slow to slay, then the amount paid in Thaibaht could be so great that not a single tattered note will remain. Without the means to pay their dues, Scott and Anny would be defeated; even with their appetites still intact and healthy...

Well, that is how I like to mythologise it anyway. It turns the pleasurable but otherwise distinctly mundane activity of eating into an interesting confrontation in which there can be winners (me) and losers (my wallet and occasionally my arse) and where it is always acceptable behaviour to have a second dessert. Also, in the face of our forced withdrawal from all things cultural and physical, we felt the ability to vigorously consume vast amounts of Thai food in some way helped to compensate for those deficiencies. After all, our past experiences teach us that on returning home from a long trip, the most efficacious triggers for our memories, like the madeline cake was for Proust, are the smell and taste of certain foods. For example, here in Asia, if I come within twenty yards of a pig that has been out in the sun for too long I'm instantly transported back to a greasy spoon in Blighty, fried brecky and a steaming mug of tea before me, perusing the back pages of the Sun. We eat to experience culture and we eat to aid memory; we don't eat through greed and boredom. Honest. Justifying it thus, allow me to bore you by describing a mere spoonful of the barrel consumed.

The first meal I ate produced by Wasana's expert hands, was a Thai staple and a particular favourite of mine, the Thai Spicy Salad. The reason I love these so much is for their simplicity of flavour. The four cardinal points of the Thai seasoning compass should all be present here and, if the dressing is mixed to perfection, perfectly balanced. Sweet notes from palm sugar, sour ones from tamarind paste or more usually lime, hot from the ubiquitous chilli and salty notes from fish sauce can all be tasted both cumulatively and, importantly, separately. Other flavours such as garlic, ginger, herbs or galangal can be added to the mix, but they should never obstruct the four main tastes.

I asked for the mixed seafood variety and, in compliance with experience and habit, I asked as usual for it to be "pet". I'm not sure what the literal translation of this command is, but on previous visits to Thailand I have learned that by saying this the chef will up the chilli quotient in my dish. I do this not because I am a masochist (though there is plenty of evidence to support this prognosis), but due to the fact that most restaurants that cater predominantly to tourists have learnt that more than a trace of chilli will have them sending the food back stating that it's broken. I like my Thai food to be cooked "Thai style", and that invariably means pretty freakin hot. Not spicy like Indian cuisine; just unashamedly, palate evisceratingly hot.

I was not to know until later that Wasana was a proud exponent of cooking authentic Thai dishes for Farang, unless they specifically asked for it "mai pet", which I think means without heat, but basically shows one up for being a total wuss, though one with a smattering of Thai. Consequently, the dish that was presented to me harboured a potency I have yet to encounter in my lifetime, and hope never to do so again. What, upon being presented with my dish and giving it a cursory inspection before ingestion, I took to be a great deal of roughly chopped salad onions and tomatoes, turned out to be, when my first mouthful necessitated a rapid reassessment of the facts, hundreds of halved, red and green chillies. Wasanas skill was such, that no matter the amount of heat in the dish, she was still able to balance this with the sweet, sour and salty notes to create a harmonious dressing. Not that that in any way lessened the phenomenal power of her dressing, it only meant I was unable to return the dish on the grounds that it was poorly prepared and tasted bad.

It took me the best part of an hour and four Chang beers to eat a dish that I would normally have dispatched in minutes. I could only manage to eat a single mouthful at a time and it took five minutes between each to return my palate to something approaching baseline. I achieved this each time by tilting my head back and gargling mouthfuls of beer for minutes at a time. Seriously. My pride would not allow me to be defeated by a salad, it just doesn't have the same macho ring to it as being thwarted by a fiery curry. I expended vast quantities of sweat and tears in eventually clearing my plate and, lovers of Schadenfreude again take note, the blood followed later that night. Wasanas authenticity and skills well and truly established by my inadvertent bravado, we elected to never again, so long as we stayed on Ko Phayam, to eat anywhere but at home.

We stayed on Ko Phayam for for four, wet and windy nights, never venturing more than a couple of hundred yards from Wasana's restaurant. We were like a pair of old agoraphobic; if we strayed too far from the safety of the restaurant we would get nervous and have to hurry back. Breakfast, lunch and dinner were all consumed at Baan Suan Kayoo, as well as a few meals we invented just to fill the gaps. My favourite dish had to be the Kari Curry with Seabass. I had never heard of this curry before, but it tasted a little like a panang curry, but much hotter and far more sour. In this respect it echoed a Tom Khai, but the peanuts and roasted red peppers gave it a pleasant nutty sweetness that took it in a whole other direction. One night, we ate an enormous whole grilled snapper that was served with a delicious sweet chilli sauce and a fantastic nam prik. The latter is a kind of dipping sauce that can come in a whole plethora of flavours. The one we had was a salty, musty, fishy affair that had clearly seen plenty of shrimp paste or fermented fish. This was all balanced however by a generous amount of lime, chilli, coriander, ginger and garlic.

Noodles, deep fried pork with black pepper and garlic, the incredible banana fritters with banana cream sauce, green curries, Laap (my personal favourite amongst all Thai food), Som Tam, Tom Yam, and delicate steamed squid with lime and ginger dressing were all greedily and happily consumed. On one evening we were even persuaded to leave Baan Suan Kayoo to venture elsewhere. The previous day, on a mission to buy Anny some chocolate, I had got talking to the french chef at a small restaurant in the middle of the island. He told me that on the following day he was having a lasagna evening, and asked if I wanted to attend. For 250 baht we would get a slice of lasagna and a selection of different salads. When away we almost exclusively eat the food of the country in which we find ourselves, but the smells coming from his kitchen as he prepared the tomato sauce, smells such as thyme, basil and fresh tomatoes had me salivating at the mouth. When he showed me his cheese selection I was instantly sold. In the end, the lasagna was only average, but the spicy salads prepared by his Burmese chefs were exquisite, and the glass of very decent red wine, the first in four months, more than compensated for the lasagna's failings.

Upon awakening to our fifth consecutive sodden morning, we decided to catch the ferry back to the grey border town of Ranong and make our way back down south in an attempt to reacquaint ourselves with the glorious weather we so stupidly abandoned there a week ago. In order to minimise the amount of time stuck in the frigid monotonous hell of an over air conditioned Thai coach, and also so that we would never be too many hours away from a decent restaurant, we decided to break the journey in Krabi. Most people come here to travel onwards to Ko Pipi, Railay or Ko Lanta, we came here for its night market. A night market, for those of you who don't know, can easily be inferred from its title. It is a food market, comprising of many small stalls and carts which all sell different, often unusual, tasty little snacks and which is, unsurprisingly, held exclusively at night. They are a food lovers delight, and the best tactic to employ when visiting one is to make like a cow and graze.

It is possible to sit at a table and order from a menu, but the most fun is to be had when selecting from the bewildering array of snack items on offer. For as little as 100 baht it is possible to sample five or six different dishes and still have money, if not room, left for dessert. A common thematic trend at night markets is that many of the items available will be served on a stick. It is therefore possible to eat liver on a stick, chicken, crab, stuffed squid on a stick and, in a nod to convention, some delicious kebabs (on a stick). Krabi's night market is famous for its seafood and we tried several delicious dishes, all emanating from the ocean. We had crispy fried shrimp with sweet chilli sauce, deep fried crab, the above mentioned and utterly delicious stuffed barbecued squid on a stick and deep fried seabass salad. We passed up on the fried cockroaches and crickets as we have tried these before, but we did deep fried ice cream in pastry, which although sounding as though it would be more at home in a chippy in Scotland, was none the less absolutely devine.

That evening also happened to be the highly revered King of Thailand's 83rd birthday. Just as we were about to order a whole grilled mackerel, all the lights went out, candles were lit and the entire crowd started singing what I can only assume was the Thai version of happy birthday. It was touching to witness such outpouring of emotion, that though obviously orchestrated was never the less apparently genuinely expressed. The following day we made the remainder of the journey back to Satun which we found, upon disembarking the coach, to be just as grey, wet and windy as the weather we had left on Ko Phayam and, to add insult to injury and to give all you lovers of Schadenfreude I final shot in the arm, upon checking the weather online, we found that the north was now basking in sunshine. At least England had won the cricket, it just seemed as though my own declaration came that little bit too early.

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Comments

[MisterMunkey]

I can almost feel those chillies going down!. 20 years ago there, it was an easier battle. The Thaibaht were stronger, the Chilli, not so. Even so, you are a true Brave of the international community. Reading that from the discomfort of my snowbound Yorkshire cave took me away for fifteen minutes. Subsitute "nice cup of tea" with nice can of Stella & change "Eastenders" to a Disaster Movie On Corrie & thats a pretty spot on Blog there Matey!! Cheers! :-)

[cabochick]

Yum!
food and travel go hand in hand! Nice blog.

[Donna and Neil]

We somehow missed this blog...
A bit of a late comment, but we somehow missed this blog of yours when you published it. The description of the mixed seafood salad had us laughing...we always have at least one instance in Thailand visits when the cook decides to make it Thai spicy rather than the toned down spicy. Donna always asks for her food spicy and always gets caught out once...cue tears rolling down her face and the slow, slow eating.like you described!