Nong Khai

From Loei to Nong Khai we stopped in Udon Thani just to see an orchid farm where they produce a special hybrid
orchid used to make perfume. The orchid is called "Miss Udorn Sunshine."


They also have a special plant called "dancing tea." This plant, in the pea family, has young leaves that respond to sound by moving up and down. Supposedly, the plant especially likes smooth jazz. Unfortunately the plants did not have any new growth and were too weak to dance for us.

In Nong Khai, we took a tuk tuk to the most popular guesthouse in the city, called Mut Mee. This place was really great. It was run by a community of American and European expats and it was really nice to be around native English speakers. One girl even knew where Walnut Creek is! The guesthouse has excellent food and loads of atmosphere. One night, one of the neighbors named Pancho played an acoustic guitar set at the bar on the river. It was lots of fun with singing along and audience participation on the percussion section. We can't recommend this place enough. In fact, our guesthouse was so nice, we really didn't do much in our nights there.

The thing to see in Nong Khai is the Salakaewkoo Sculpture Park. The story goes that this man was walking one day and fell in a hole and onto the lap of a hermit. He stayed in the hole for 3 years where the hermit taught him about the gods, the underworld, Buddhism, and all things mystical. When he emerged, he wanted to display these teachings in a visual way and chose sculpture. The park was full of bizarre amateur concrete sculptures (that was the cheapest material to use) of Hindu and Buddhist gods and all sorts of other things. Some of the sculptures were huge-- one of the Buddha meditating under the naga was probably 6 stories high. The sculptor died in 1995 so several sculptures were unfinished. I'll let the pictures below do the rest of the talking.









Nong Khai also had an interesting market that sold a lot of Vietnamese things like jackfruit chips and other dried fruits, as well as Vietnamese pork sausages wrapped in banana leaves. Cheap Chinatown-style toys, knives, and china could be found there as well. We ate a salted grilled fish at the market. Lyndsay had been craving this since the first time we saw it in Bangkok.


It was stuffed with a bundle of herbs consisting mostly of lemongrass and was served with a lot of different sides that we failed to take a picture of. The sides included a basket of basil, mint, coriander, lettuce, and cabbage, as well as a plate of lemongrass, garlic cloves, shallots, ginger, lime slices, and pickled cabbage. It was served with noodles and rice.

In terms of street food, the highlight was this Chinese inspired dish.


We have no idea what it's called but it has a thick broth similar to the broth in sizzling rice soup but thicker and with egg in it. It came with your choice of chicken or pork, a hard boiled quail egg, shitake mushrooms, and your choice of pan-fried sen yai (wide noodles), pan-fried sen mii (thin noddles), or deep-fried egg noodles. I picked the fried ones and Lyndsay chose sen yai. We got soy milk to go from the busiest stand on he block. He was so busy because his freshly made donuts were delicious-- some of the best we've had to far. He also had more soymilk options than anyone else we had seen including black sesame soymilk, yellow corn milk, add-ins like coconut jelly, basil seeds, grass jelly, tapioca balls, and palm seeds, and even the option of iced soymilk.

Next stop, Laos.

Loei

Loei (pronounced a little like lery, or if you speak German, its like an o with an umlaut) is the coldest city in Thailand. It is in the northeast, and they were clearly not as used to tourists as other places in Thailand. This was one of the first places where people asked us (in Thai) if we could speak Thai. We had really good banana roti here and also some really good pork with rice. The pork tasted like it was slow cooked with soy sauce, molasses, and lots of anise.

The big story of this city was Phu Kra Deung. Our Lonely Planet told us that this park was fairly easy to get to and had a nice, paved, 6 km hike with stops for food along the way. This sounded like a perfect day trip for us and we decided it would be worth the steep 400 Baht entry price most national parks in Thailand had. We had to take a bus to a bus stop a few kilometers outside of the park and then take a songtao (pickup truck taxi) the rest of the way. The lonely planet told us the bus would cost 30 baht each and the songtao should cost 10 baht each. The bus ended up costing around 60 baht each and the songtao ended up costing 40 baht each. We weren't too surprised, since the lonely planet is pretty much always wrong about prices and distances.

It turned out that it was a 6 km hike one way straight up a mountain along a sometimes rocky and sometimes slippery dirt path. It had makeshift stairs in some of the steepest places, but I would hardly call the path paved. We stopped along the way to drink some young coconut juice and the lady seemed to be telling us that there was no way we could just hike up and back down, that we had to camp up at the top. There were tents and bungalows available, but you had to make reservations at the bottom, plus we didn't have time or equipment to stay at the top. We realized there was no way we could make it and we were both very angry at our guidebook. It was a cool park because as you hiked up you could see a transition in vegetation with the altitude change. It started off as dry, deciduous, dipterocarp forest and slowly became greener and cooler. At the very top of the mountain (more like a plateau I guess) was pine oak savanna and lots of beautiful waterfalls. Unfortunately we did not have time to make it to the top and had to turn around. Our legs were very tired and sore for several days after rushing up and down that trail. Here's what we did see of the park, from bottom to top.








On the way back, we figured all the transportation prices would be the same, or less. We got on a songtao, but they didn't leave right away. We figured they were waiting for more people. They told us it was 200 baht for 10 people. Some people who spoke some English came over and talked to us. They talked to the songtao people and we told them we needed to leave soon so we didn't miss the last bus at 6pm. Our translator told us the last bus left at 2pm and that they would take us all the way to Loei for 200 baht. This seemed like an okay deal to us. About the same price, just a bumpier and windier ride. The songtao instead took us to the same bus stop and let us off just as a bus back to Loei was pulling it. Lyndsay and I were very confused. It was past 2pm. Obviously there was some miscommunication. So the songtao still wanted 200 baht, but we couldn't pay that because we wouldn't have enough money for the bus then! We gave him what we could and I think he understood (plus he was overcharging us). We had no money for food until we could get to an ATM. We literally only had 10 baht in our pockets (enough for a drink or some green mango, but not for a meal). We found a bank, but neither of our ATM cards worked. We tried two more banks with the same result.

We went back to the hotel and with some skillful pantomiming to a girl that didn't even make an effort to understand us before, we explained that our ATM cards didn't work and that we had to call our bank and pay her tomorrow. Then we couldn't figure out how to call our bank. There was an emergency number on the card, but we had to figure out how to make an international collect call and how to dial a number outside of our hotel.

We went back downstairs and three of the employees all tried their hardest to understand us. They even called English speaking friends on cellphones, but I think "international collect call" is a difficult concept to explain, plus even if someone asked you in your native language, would you know how to do that? I mean, I would have no idea how to call Thailand collect from the US. We eventually had to give up and went to spend our last 10 baht on an internet cafe which really didn't help us at all. We decided to try the ATM once again on the way home and miraculously it worked! Woo!

This was our second very scary moment in Thailand. Thank god it was just a temporary problem with the ATM.

Nan

In Nan we decided to do some adventuring and the guidebook recommended Fhu Travel. We wanted to do a 2 day trip with hiking and river rafting, but with just two people, it was too expensive. We went to the nearby morning market to try and round up some more farang to go with us. I spotted a couple that had been on the bus with us from Phrae and noticed they were eating khanom krog (a delicious breakfast sweet) for the first time. Using food as a conversation stater, we chatted with them for a while, but ultimately chickened out when it came to asking them about the rafting trip. Fhu Travel was closing soon, so we went back and instead decided to sign up for a 1 day jungle hike.

The next morning the guides picked us up in a jeep at our hotel and to our surprise, the couple from the market had signed up for the same trip. There were two guides who never told us their names. They were both young, one thin, and one larger and more muscular. It was soon apparent that they were both tricksters, especially the bigger one. On the drive, they pointed out different crops and plants we drove by, and then the big guy pointed at a motorcycle and said "Tiger" and then laughed and said "No, Thai girl!"

The thin one led the hike and made us all walking sticks out of fresh bamboo using his machete skills while the big guy made his banana into a pig puppet for us (I'm still trying to figure that trick out).

The first half of the hike was through bamboo and dipterocarp forest. They showed us termite mounds, an ant-lion trap, and they even cut open a big stem of bamboo to harvest bamboo grubs, which people in Thailand love to deep fry and eat. Another trick they showed us is how to take this grass, which was a lot like pampas grass, and make a little dart launcher out of it. We had contests to see who could launch their grass stem the farthest. The guides had a lot of fun scaring us and scaring each other and shooting their slingshot at red ant nests in the trees. They also had us taste this fruit called a broad olive.

It was about the size of a small lime and was one of the most bitter and astringent things I've ever tasted in my life.


Lyndsay, of course, liked it. They said that if you ate it, water would taste sweet afterwards. The water did taste a little sweet, but it was barely worth eating that thing.

The giant bamboo was beautiful, and we also saw some other great plants. I spotted this flower and immediately grabbed it to take a closer look.


Then I heard the guide shout "DON'T TOUCH IT!" Apparently this flower could give you a very very itchy rash. They helped me rinse my hands off and I was somehow rash free. Here are some other flowers we saw.



The second half of the hike was through slashed and burned forest converted to corn production. It was still beautiful--Lyndsay didn't even notice the corn at all.



We ended up at a hill tribe village where the kids thought Lyndsay was Thai (a Tiger) and the bigger guide put some berries in my hand and squeezed.


They showed us different plants and fruit trees growing in the village including this flower that Thais use in making garlands. Aren't they cool? I think its a milkweed species.


We stopped for a snack consisting of a soda, a quarter of a pineapple per person, and some fishy, sweet, chewy things on a stick that I liked a lot. We were so full after eating all this since for lunch we had pork and rice with si ew sauce and they had given us a whole hand of bananas and a bag of som (Thai oranges) to eat on the hike!

On the drive back we stopped at a paper making place as a surprise. The paper was made from a tree bark and was used for making paper flowers.

Then they pulled off the road again at a temple. We though this was another surprise stop, but they told us to stay in the jeep and they both jumped out excitedly to pick some fruits from a tree. They brought them back and the big guy stuck his fingernail through the skin of the fruit making it bleed a milky sap. Lyndsay has forbade me from posting a picture of this fruit on the blog, so all I'll say is that it was somewhat obscene and pretty hilarious. The funniest part though, was that they stopped at this temple just to show us this trick with the fruit.

We had such a great time and really loved our guides. They really had a lot of fun doing their jobs which made the trip great for us. I'm really sad we never got their names, so we can't specifically recommend them to anyone, but Fhu Travel seemed like a pretty good place.

When we got back from the trip we signed up for a full day of kayaking with the same company. There were no guides this time, just a two person kayak and a lunch for each of us. They drove us up the river and we were to paddle back at our leisure.



After a while of floating, we realized we weren't really getting anywhere with just the current pushing us. We started paddling. The river was so slow that we had to paddle almost the entire way and it still took us more than 6 hours (they had told us 4-6 hours). It was pretty scenery, but after 6 hours of paddling, we were getting pretty tired of seeing the same riverside gardens and fishermen. No more kayaking on this trip.

The food in Nan was pretty good too. They had a great morning market that had a variety of things we didn't really see anywhere else. One of the weirdest things we saw was live bee larvae and pupae. These are supposedly a delicacy and the couple that went on the hike had tried them (and somehow thought we were adventurous for having tried fried crickets). This was also the first time we had fried chicken in Thailand. Now I understand why Wat Mongolratanaram in Berkeley (AKA "The Buddhist Temple") serves fried chicken--Thailand knows how to do it right. We also happened to be there during a food festival by the river. It had a lot of beer food like grilled clams, fried peanuts, fried spring rolls, and various fish, pork, and chicken meatballs on skewers. There was a pretty awful middle-school aged band there playing traditional music through extremely loud speakers. Lyndsay and I escaped the noise and walked along the river and listened to the frogs sing instead.

Yes, we're still alive!

Sorry we haven't been writing, but between me being sick twice and being in the care of a protective mother in Hanoi for 5 days, we haven't had much time to update the blog. We're really behind now and we probably won't catch up before we come home. Expect updates to be sparse at best for the rest of our trip. Don't worry, we'll catch you all up when we get back.

Phrae

We decided to stop at Phrae on our way back south from Chiang Rai and we aren't sorry about our decision to take a different route. Phrae was another small, manageable city surrounded by city walls and seeming to specialize in copy centers and computer stores. Our place for the night was the first real hotel that we have stayed in. We were able to determine this by the small foyer between the door to our room and the actual bedroom as pretty much every American hotel has. The most amazing thing about the room was the way the lights worked. To turn them on, the magnetic key fob needed to be inserted into a slot next to the light switches. Our hotel was just outside the city walls and we arrived there late enough for the area to seem dead so we waited until the next morning to venture out.

We decided to see some of the city's attractions and headed for the small morning market. The market contained mostly produce and meat rather than prepared food so we bought some fruit and ate some noodles elsewhere instead. The small shop charged us 12.5 baht each for our bowls which was the first time we were ever charged half of a baht for anything. We continued to walk to the Vongburi house, a teakwood building that was the former home of Phrae's last prince. A nice woman gave us a quick tour of the many rooms and artifacts despite the little English she spoke.



We then stopped at another example of teakwood architecture which we walked through on our own.




Next we walked to the bus station and, after some confusion with translation, we chartered a songtow to Phae Muang Phi, meaning city of ghosts. The forest park contains unique rock formations often characterized as mushroom-like. They were different from anything I have seen before, so I took lots of photos.




Unfortunately few of the signs were written in English leaving us with many questions. We had time to hike down the paths surrounding the formations and spotted many trees coated in lines of mud created by termites.


When we tired of exploring the park, we returned to the city to explore again. The area is known for their indigo-dyed clothing, in addition to the teakwood, so we each bought a shirt from this nice Indian couple who spoke very good English.


The man, who had lived in Thailand all his life, told us of his plans to send his daughter to the U.S. as an engineer and where to go for the best trekking in Thailand. Because of his recommendations, we decided to travel to Nan before heading to Loei in northeastern Thailand. The next morning we packed our bags and set out for Nan with plans for adventure.

Food in Chiang Mai

Probably my favorite restaurant that we have eaten at so far is Heuan Phen in Chiang Mai. This place has more atmosphere than any other restaurant that we have been to. There was nice wooden furniture and wooden antiques and plants all around. Their specialty is northern Thai food which is served with sticky rice which is meant to be dipped into a dish's sauce. We had been anxious to try banana flower so we ordered a pork and and banana flower soup and also a grilled eggplant salad. The pork broth was simple but delicious and was more bland than other Thai soups that we have tried. We dipped balls of sticky rice, served in straw boxes to keep from drying out, into it.


The salad was also excellent with small pieces of grilled green eggplant. As we were eating, we noticed another list of appetizers on our table and spotted fried, stuffed bamboo shoots. They were greasy and hot but great too. Each of the three shoots were filled with pork and covered in like flakes of breading.


After all of that we were too stuffed to think about trying dessert.

Another Chiang Mai specialty is a bowl of noodles called Khao Sawy. Although it is a well-known dish, we had a hard time finding a place that actually served it. Our search was worth it and we finally found them near Chiang Mai's mosque as it is originally a Thai Muslim dish. The noodles are similar to baa mii (egg noodles) but thick and chewy and come served in a rich curry broth. They are served with crispy fried noodles on top and with lime, raw sliced shallots, and pickled cabbage on the side. Khao Sawy commonly contains chicken or pork and ours came with chicken. The broth turned out to be much sweeter than I expected so I added lots of lime, but it was very flavorful without the addition and the noodles were a great texture.


Also in Chiang Mai, we had a variation on Sukothai style noodles which we had missed out on while in Sukothai. They are served with all sorts of delicious sides including green beans, pickled cabbage, pork rinds, coriander, peanuts, green onions, and chilis. I liked these even better than Khao Sawy partly because the woman who served them to us was very friendly.

Okay, while I am on the topic I might as well tell you about one of my favorite types of noodles, baa-mii, even though they are not specific to the north. As much as I love rice noodles, these fresh thin egg noodles are wonderful in soup. What makes them even better is that they are often served with small dumplings made with a similar egg wrapper. These dumplings contain just a small circle of meat with the wrapper folded up around it. They also come with pieces of morning glory and what is called red pork in Thailand but what I would call cha-siu. These thin pork slices are tender and flavorful. The broth is slightly sweet and fragrant. We had these noodles for the first time in Sukothai when we went out of a late-night snack. Although we had already eaten noodles twice that day, we couldn't pass up this vendor whose tables were packed with happy customers.

I hope this catches you up on northern foods for a while.

Chiang Saen

The next morning we went on what we thought would be a day trip to Chiang Saen and the Golden Triangle. The Golden Triangle is the area where the Thai, Laotian, and Burmese borders meet, and it's most famous (or rather infamous) for its history of opium production.


After getting off the bus in Chiang Saen, we walked 2 kilometers to a guest house that rented out bikes (it was only 10 km to the actual Golden Triangle area), but they were all out of bikes. Slightly annoyed, and getting hungry, we waited for one of the infrequent songtaos to take us the rest of the way. We got some pad si ew and stir-fried morning glory and walked about 2 more kilometers to the Hall of Opium. This was a top-notch museum. Everything was translated to English, and it had great modern architecture and good exhibit design. It even had a super fancy introduction video that showed the location of all the fire exits. The exhibit was really informative--did you know it was the British that introduced opium smoking to the Chinese and not the other way around?

After the museum, we walked around Sop Ruak, the town that has made itself the Golden Triangle. It was less than spectacular. There was a lot of touristy photo opportunity type stuff.



This fat Buddha was kind of neat.



You put coins in a funnel and they rolled down a ramp into his belly.


We got back to Chiang Saen and it was already pretty late. We were a little worried about missing our bus back to Chiang Rai, but I really wanted to see some of the ruins there because they seemed very different from the Sukkothai and Ayuthaya period ruins we had seen before. We walked down to some ruins and on the way back, while arguing over whether we should wait on the street for the bus, or walk back to the main bus stop, we missed the last bus.

After some crying, we made it to a guest house where we cried some more. That night, this bowl of noodles cheered us up.


We pointed to a bowl of pork blood and the vendor motioned whit his hand that he would leave it out for us. "No! Yes! We want that! Good! Dii! Arawy arawy!" He looked at us like "Really? OK..." I know it sounds gross, but pork blood makes the broth so much better. You really should try it if you ever have the opportunity. I hear some Pho places have the option of pork blood in the broth.


After those noodles and a bowl of soy milk, we had forgotten all our troubles.

Chiang Rai

Chiang Rai was a good city. It seemed to attract younger tourists than Chiang Mai and definitely seemed to attract more hippies. This is probably because one of the main attractions here is trekking. There are a lot of hill tribe villages in the area and it is quite popular to visit them on 2 or 3 day treks by hiking, boating, elephant riding, or a combination thereof.

We stayed at a very quiet guesthouse called Boonbundan and there was this awesome rasta Thai dude selling handmade leather crafts down the street. His name was At and when we told him we were from California, he invited us to toss around the Frisbee sometime after dark when the traffic would die down.

Our first stop in Chiang Rai was a really great cultural museum called Hill Tribe Museum and Education Center run by Population and Community Development Association (PDA). In addition to the collection of artifacts and a great time line about the history of opium they had a narrated powerpoint presentation and a video about the different hill tribes in the province and how they were impacted by tourism. The PDA also ran culturally sensitive treks from an office there and we were pretty excited to finally find a trek we felt good about. We especially wanted to visit a village called Ban Lorcha that is the only community supported hill tribe tourism operation in Thailand. That means that the guides are people from that village and all the money goes to the village. This means you get a more genuine educational experience, and that you're not supporting begging or the near slavery of some of the other hill tribe tourist traps (for example, all the long neck Karen in Thailand are physically imported and forced to live in "rustic" settings as tourist attractions). Unfortunately, none of the treks they were booking looked interesting to us, and none of them visited that village, so we passed on the trekking.

Downstairs was a branch of the restaurant called "Cabbages and Condoms."


The profits of this restaurant go toward making condoms as easy to find as cabbages in Thailand. It was here that we had one of the most delicious dishes I've had so far in Thailand (Lyndsay was not nearly excited as me for some reason). It was hor mok served in a young coconut.


Hor mok is a souffle-like seafood curry usually made with fish and served in a banana leaf packet. This one featured squid, shrimp, and big delicious fish balls. Oh, and the young coconut meat had been scraped out and cooked in the hor mok. My mouth is watering thinking about it again. We also had some little fried chicken nuggets wrapped in pandan leaves. They were very good but a little fatty.


That night we went to the night bazaar, which is similar to the one in Chiang Mai, except with much more unique souvenirs. We were still pretty full from the hor mok so we just got a sausage on a stick. The sausage I picked turned out to be this one they make by mixing ground pork with lots of garlic and lime juice and wrapping it in a banana leaf packet. This packet is then left out to sit for something like 3 days and gets "cooked" by the acid in the lime juice. Don't worry, this one was grilled in addition to its lime juice cooking.

Later we got the spiciest som tam (papaya salad) we've had so far. The cook held out a handful of chillies and we shook out heads until she was only holding three. One and a half chillies per person was enough to make our mouths burn painfully.

On our way back to our hotel we stopped for dessert and ran into Aaron Mandel, a fellow Whitman graduate in our class. We were not too surprised to run into him since we knew he and a bunch of his friends were going to be traveling in Thailand at some point, although we though they had already returned by then. Turns out they had already been traveling for three months and are still planning to visit Lao and Vietnam (they'll be in Hanoi at the same time as us). Here is their travel blog.

Aaron told us lots of good stories about a guesthouse named Mr. Whisky run by an alcoholic with a cat named "Meow." We also heard good stories about Adam Sachs (another Whittie) including his week-long Buddhist retreat, him crashing a motorcycle into a parked tuk tuk, and him falling out of the bed of a pickup truck.

They all happened to be staying at the same guesthouse as us, but no one was in their room when we checked before going to sleep. Oh, and on our way home, we saw that At had lost his Frisbee on the roof, so we didn't get to play with him.