It's now Friday morning and I've been at this post, on and off, since Thursday afternoon.
But first of all I would like to show you our Thai office. Please note that the pic was taken when I first started writing this post, and not at 9am in the morning ....
There may be some items in this picture that appear at odds with an office environment, and you would be right in thinking that.
First of all there is the Singha beer, as those of you that have followed our stay in Thailand would know, is not normally the beer of choice for me. I prefer Chang, but our friend Tony left a couple of bottles of his favourite, Singha, behind and so I felt it the right thing to do and not waste it.
Secondly, there is a mug of dark liquid to the right of the bottle of beer.
Again, some of you that know my preferences for "mixed" drinks might think it's a "black and tan".
The explanation of this drink is long so, if you're interested, go here to read more about it.
And please don't ask why on god's earth it is harder to get than chooks' teeth in a pub or RSL (a reference that only my best mate Greg would understand) at home, as it would only "light my wick".
Back to the mug with dark liquid .....
Tiz doesn't drink beer. Every human has to have at least one fault. This is her one and only.
BUT, when she was an exchange student in the Philippines, in the early '70's, her friends introduced her to, in my opinion, a most vile mixture - beer and cola, which in the Philippines is Pepsi.
🤢 Yeah, but nah! 🤮
As time goes on we may introduce a much nicer brown liquid .... like, let's say .... Guinness to the replace that vile stuff, which in todays case was Coca Cola.
Sunday 12th
Lunch Dinner
Mango with sticky rice Green curry with prawns,
and coconut cream sauce chicken, vegetables and rice
and those two dishes were the highlight of our Sunday!
Yes, life can be veeeery slow here in Cha Am 😀
Monday 13th
A really clean late model Ducati Monster,
which I think might even be made here in Thailand, we saw on our morning walk
Some little tacker had left his Crocs, fakes of course, behind 😞
They were so cute, by way of their size, I just couldn't resist the shot
The morning air was humid and still, as was the sea.
Way out was a lone boat with its lone passenger.
I took another "cleaner" shot, which I think may well end up as a poster
This is what I was thinking of as I took the picture
Below are a series of pictures of Soi dogs
This lot were just chillin',
which is a poor choice of words considering it was 33℃ & 75% humidity
The black dog on the left had just received a very stern "sex + travel" from the dog you see in the middle of the road, to the right of the picture.
I've seen them both before in their respective soi.
The black one belonged to a soi on the left, but out of the pic, and not on the "beach road",
which is the one you see to the right.
In this picture you see two dogs to the left.
These two had just transgressed into an area that belonged to the dogs on the right.
The owners of the area had just given a good bollicking to the two intruders,
one of which was giving it back as good as he got.
It cracked me up just how funny the whole thing played out.
It's all noise and bluster and if one of the passerby dogs calls the ruffians out, which was the case here, the bullies back off and the two passerby dogs just continue on their way.
It was a day for stoushes between mutts. Top pic show a dog getting ganged up on and the bottom shot shows him hightailing it out of where he wasn't welcome, double quick.
Driving into Bangkok is always an "eye opener", which I never tire of.
From the large building covered in African jungle animals to massive new buildings off in the distance to the now familiar bridge we travel along
The view from our room in the Ambassador Hotel, located in what feels like "Little India"
Soon after we arrived we went for a walk to a place called Lumphini Park.
This is a billboard we saw advertising a new highrise development in "Wireless Road".
The bundle of wires above the signage seemed to mock it.
Inside Lumphini Park, which is massive.
There were hundreds of people running around, which Tiz believed was an event.
In the evening we went to Rot Fai Night Market 2
On this map you can see the location of Rot Fai Night Market 2, up top, and Lumphini Park, on the bottom left. Our hotel was halfway between the two.
To walk the ~4kms would take ~50 minutes but as rain was forecast we caught a Grab taxi, which took us just as long! Traffic in Bangkok is every bit as congested as they say it is, and often far worse.
Yay, we're here! Not everyone shared my enthusiasm.
Some people need a far more sterile environment with much blander food
and served up the way they are used to in Melbourne.
This did not dampen my enthusiasm one iota.
A plate of seafood for <AUD 50, which is a steal.
Salt encrusted sea bass
BBQ pork spare ribs, which Tony and I later ordered
Little nigiri, for less than AUD 50 cents each.
But, not the tastiest nigiri I have had.
Beer ....
... and more beer!
This guy was like a Dan Murphy in a Tardis!
Tony had just opened the package without really looking at it
Now he had a good look at it
My pork rib order, which was predictably larger than Tony's,
and probably enough for a small African nation ..... for a week 😛
They even supply you with latex gloves ....
... which made me think of Janine Lindemulder (Jesse James' ex-wife), and other things.
I think this is her doing an ad for the Rot Fai Market BBQ pork spare ribs .... or maybe it became the cover shot for a Blink 182 album. I'm not sure.
Adrian, a big shout out to you my friend!
Let the feast begin
Job done 👌
Tony couldn't go past the charcoaled corn cobs
Helmet protectors.
Ummm, I'm not quite sure what was going on in the mind of the person that designed this t-shirt
I thought about getting this hoodie, but I don't like hoodies that much
nor do I take enough drugs to think that the design is worth wearing
Durian as a desiccated snack
How good is that?!
This OLDSKULL brand gets pushed around Thailand much like Bathing Ape does in Japan,
but they only do t-shirts
Everyone I've seen wearing them are young, hip and well off.
Some of you readers of this blog may know what I'm talking about.
I'm reasonably sure Kath & Kim own this brand
This sign had "tears of laughter running down my leg".
I need to attribute that saying to my mate Greg 👍
.... and then the rain came down, which meant it got steamy and then wet, BUT not cold.
As a collective, it was decided to go home.
It made me think of Tiz and her brother that use those exact words instead of saying .......
Tuesday 14th
One of the reasons Tiz and I were in Bangkok was because we wanted to vote for the next bunch of muppets that will run our country, i.e. the 2019 Federal election, and the only way to do it from Thailand is to go the Australian Embassy.
So we looked at Google Maps to figure out how to get there from our hotel and set off.
This way is fine IF you want to end up at the Australian Embassy's back fence,
which looks like it's about 5-6 metres high and topped with enough razor wire to reach Mars.
I must say though that it was a great way to see the real inner suburbs of Bangkok, and when we came to the supposed end of our journey this absolute lovely old local woman just looked at us, said something in Thai and pointed us in the right direction.
It was not the first time Google had sent some stupid farangs to her little soi,
and whom she had helped out.
DO NOT TRUST GOOGLE MAPS
This is the way we should have gone.
And this is "Wireless Road" and if you continue down here for a long way you get to our embassy
We Australians also pay homage to King Maha Vajiralongkorn of Thailand
Way off in the distance you see the main road, which we need to walk back to to get home.
Red fire hydrant, dead smack in the middle of the footpath,
half way to the main road is an interesting touch.
After our visit to our embassy, which was a real eye opener due the security and just how nice it was inside, the collective decided to go the the Grand Palace and the Emerald Buddha,
which are next to each other.
Once we got there we queued up for a while only to find out that our long shorts (long enough to cover our knees were not long enough) and that we would need to buy long pants,
conveniently sold at the entrance for AUD 10.
This was over and above the AUD 25 that we, as farangs, pay to get it.
Thai get in for free, as is the case in many Thai national monuments and parks.
It really got a bit much and I just turned around and left,
after telling Tiz I was not going to support this sort of extortion.
To be honest I was really tired of some of the other nationalities' pushy behaviour too.
In retrospect, when I think of the cost of doing anything in Australia I may been a bit petty about it.
At least in Australia we rip everyone off - locals, Russians, Chinese, Americans and on and on.
Everyone pays more for anything and everything than almost any other country in the world.
I think it's called being victims of our own success.
No favouritism in Oz mate!
What follows are some pics I took on the way back to the hotel
Motorcycle helmets for <AUD15!
Good luck with one of those as protection when your head hits the pavement.
A Schwinn bicycle in raw steel, with a cup holder!
I think it was NOT a fake. I nearly fell over when I saw it.
I love those bikes.
Behind it you some blatant ripoff helmets but also a lot of genuine HJC's etc.
A crammed but well equipped machine shop.
It was part of what we call a Tech school
This was on our way to a very special treat.
It was ~6:30 pm and we had to go about 3 kms to a restaurant,
which happened to be very close to a train station.
As we were also close to a station and it was raining we thought we would catch a train.
It was going to be faster than walking or a Grab taxi.
6:30 is part of peak hour(s) in Bangkok and the trains are packed.
They're not as packed as Tokyo peak hour, but very close.
We missed the first train which came past, but they come every 2 minutes so it was OK.
The next one had a lot more people getting off and we therefore got on a bit easier,
but so did a shedload of other people.
Jammed, and I mean JAMMED, in between us and the door were a couple of younger Indian guys and we started to laugh together at the situation.
One of them said "I've lived in Bangkok for 11 years and I've never seen it this packed!"
I laughed and said "Mate, you need to go to Osaka in peak hour.
You'd wish you were on a train this empty!"
He cracked up and they got off at the next station. Couple of softies 😁
and by all means go through to other pages as they are worth a look at.
Sweet honey tea over ice, as a welcome
Bo.lan Signature cocktail - lime, ginger, lemongrass and white rum
A 40% alcohol based palate cleanser which required you to drink, eat, spray
Me, being arty
Entree
..... what used to be entree
... the next dish ...
The Thai rice wine above was a very interesting experience.
I will preface the following by stating, for those of you that don't know, that nihonshu, aka sake and being Japanese rice wine, is my favourite drink.
Therefore, Thai rice wine was very likely to be very good as well.
It was "interesting".
Those amongst us that think themselves as supertasters and like to bang on about "full bodied", overtones and/or undertones of blah blah blah, with a finish of blah blah blah would describe this rice wines as ...... just read the above.
My description is that it tastes nihonshu mixed with varying amounts of Vegemite.
Don't laugh. I love nihonshu (sake) and I love Vegemite.
Putting the two together makes an interesting drink.
Would I order it again if sake or a cold beer was available?
No, unless I was about to eat a cheese sandwich.
Mains
... the aftermath
Dessert #1
Dessert #2
... and finally we were taken to where we started and served another round of sweets.
I had a double espresso and Tiz had a limoncello
Wednesday 15th
We left our hotel at 8am on Wednesday 15th and discovered first hand what is meant by
"Bangkok peak hour traffic".
It means sitting at a traffic light for 10-20 minutes each,
and you can do this at many lights during your commute.
We sat here for ~15 minutes watching people stopping to buy coffee, chicken skewers, fruit pieces etc. I love the whole street food culture, even if it does come with the rarely mentioned and occasional stomach discomfort.
Thursday 16th
Below are a series of pics taken on the morning of Thursday 16th, being the day that school starts .
It shows how empty the beach becomes from one day to the next.
The first shot is a panorama from the north end of the beach road.
The pics that follow show empty sections of beach, which do not exist during the long break.
They were all taken during our morning walk which takes in ding the length of the beach twice.
This couple of cyclists were loaded up to the hilt.
The roads around Cha Am are quite flat but these two looked like they were going much further and into steeper terrain. As much as I like riding a bike around I think this way of getting around is a lot of hard work.
Lots of parking and no need for the sign to show how to park
A pic of the monument, which is a little hidden,
from the northern side, at the end of Narathip Road
Wow, so deserted! Great for our morning walks.
There are some "umbrella area owners" slowly setting up.
We're not sure why though as the ratio of deck chairs to people is now about 500 to 1
This is the southern end of of the beach road, looking north.
Just a couple enjoying the quiet.
Tiz taking a break on the rope and bamboo swing at the south end
Near empty beach for as far as you can see
This is the sort of sight that would alarm us back home, but here it's common.
A man in military camo with a full balaclava .... in 35℃!
Here, he's just a guy delivering vegetables to roadside food stalls.
And to close off ......
We hope you're all well and that we see you here again, soon
