Trip to Thailand, January 2013
The girls rode with us on our way to dim sum together, and we followed the mother’s car to what she said was the best dim sum restaurant in the area. Dim sum is 15 baht ($0.50) a steamer, and they open at 5:00 a.m. When I commented on that, Pat said, very critically, “Yes, but they close early—at eight p.m.!” Wow. Well, I’ll take that. You choose what you want from the steamers of perfectly formed raw dumplings outside and they cook it for you to order and deliver it to your table. At the end they tally up the number of steamers at your table to figure out the bill. Marcus expressed his deep love of fish cakes—he ate two steamers full of Hello Kitty-shaped fish cakes and one of Angry Birds fish cakes. He also admired the Ovaltine the four-year-old girl was drinking, so her mother ordered him one too, in a tall frosty glass over a cascade of ice, and he finished it happily. Samantha loved a different kind of fish cake most (stuffed with shrimp paste) and a skinless shrimp-paste dumpling with minced carrots in it. Everything was delicious and fresh, and though all the ingredients and techniques were recognizable to me, the way they were combined in each dish was new. At the end of the meal I used their bathroom (Western-style toilets? Perfectly clean? Extra-cushy toilet paper? Heaven!) since I knew we’d be getting right on the road, and we headed out.
We rode out to the main road with the girls in our car again, and Marcus, shy no longer, trying in vain to engage Bulan, the four-year-old: “Do you like this toy horse? You can play with it if you want. Do you want to use this drawing toy? Okay, I’ll draw—what do you think this looks like? You can guess if you want.” She remained silent and answered him with just nods and headshakes, though. Apparently, she made an impression, because later in the day he said plaintively, “Mommy, I liked that little girl. When am I going to get to play with her again?” Bulan’s mom sent us off with six packs of sticky rice and two dozen pork sticks before we all said goodbye, since she didn’t want us going hungry. Since everyone in our party loved the pork sticks, and George and I also liked the sticky rice, it was actually a fabulous parting gift, and we set straight to driving.
At dim sum in Surat Thani.
Angry Birds fish cakes! Hello Kitty fish cakes not pictured.
Pork stick in the car. Delightful.
We only made one more stop that day, at a 7-11and a gas station for candy and a bathroom, and then we plowed straight through, south too the island. We noticed more and more Muslim families in the area—at the rest stops, riding on the motorcycles all crowded together—and I remembered we were getting very close to Malaysia now. It was fascinating to see how the people and the surroundings have changed as we headed south—everything was far less congested, with way fewer farang (though that would change again once we got to Krabi proper and the islands, and the tourism district started up in earnest).
Along this southern stretch of road, what Pat and George called the “new” road, George, and every other car and motorcycle for about the whole ten minutes we were there, got pulled over for speeding. George tried his bland lack of responsiveness again, but this cop was clearly beyond getting bored—he just waved George over to another of the 4-5 cops all standing around, and eventually someone did issue him a 40-baht ticket for going 42 kilometers over the limit. Since the ticket was issued to George Carroll of Green Bay Wisconsin (per his American license), George doesn’t exactly think they’ll be hunting him down trying to make him pay. Still, I offered to pay the $1.30, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He said the crowd of stopped drivers parted to let him go first, and then the cops applauded him when he laboriously wrote his name out for their ticket in the Thai script.
We kept eating pork sticks, sticky rice, and 7-11 candy along the way and finally we came to the ferry to Koh Lanta. Actually two ferries—first we crossed onto the northern part of Lanta, then, on a smaller boat (this one only holding about six cars) onto the southern, more developed part.
The view ahead and left from the ferry.
On the ferry, in a tropical rain.
More ferry!
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Created: 1/15/13. Last Modified: 1/15/13.