Meanwhile on the otherside of the Mekong………

So I have switched countries again and am now lounging around in Laos.  Last couple of days in Chiang Mai were ok, fair few people to hang around with so all was good.  The final day of the cookery course was again a success, though slightly less so seeing as I managed to slice the tip of my finger off (well a good portion of my fingerprint anyway).  Not much else to report on Chiang Mai, took a trip out to the zoo which although relatively modern did little to float my boat, the lion enclosure was a disgrace.  The main reason for taking the trip out there though was to see the pair of pandas that Thailand has on loan from China.  All pandas in captivity are technically loaned out by the Chinese for silly amounts of money, but process had led to a much better understanding of how to look after pandas in zoos.  They were certainly the best looked after animals in the zoo anyway.  I’d never seen a panda before and after seeing the quality ‘Kung Fu Panda’ at the cinema in Bangkok I thought now would be as good a time as any!  Very cute looking, except for the photo on the wall that showed the pair doing it ‘panda style’ if you get my drift……nudge nudge wink wink and all that.

Left Chiang Mai yesterday afternoon and took a public bus to Chiang Khong, the nearest border point with Laos on the western edge of the Mekong River.  Quite a strange experience sorting it out yourself as pretty much everybody just books a package with a guesthouse that includes the bus, food, night in Chiang Khong and the slow boat down to Luang Prabang (main Laos city nearest to the border).  Got some strange looks from people along the lines of ‘independent travel, huh? How did you sort that out?’…..enough said really.  Anyway woke up and went to the border this morning, got across without a hitch apart from the $12 fine I had for overstaying my visa by one day.  The boats used to cross the river are completely flat bottomed so you are no more than about 8 inches from the water, you should be able to see that in the pictures.  It is only a 2 minute trip over the river but definitely the best way to cross a border, quite exciting!

Have manged (through a bit of luck) to get myself on the Gibbon Experience for the next 3 days .  This is basically a series of treehouses built in the rainforest that according to the disclaimer I signed earlier can be anything up to 100-150m up in the canopy!  That’s a hell of a big tree but will see when I get there tomorrow.  You do a bit of hiking through the forest, possibly 7 hours on the first day if you cannot cross the road using a truck but your mode of transport mostly consists of a series of zip lines that have been erected throughout the National Park!  Again the disclaimer I signed my life away to earlier says that you have to be prepared for lines that are up to (but not excluding anything else) 150m high and 1000m long!  That is a heck of a zip line!  It was pretty pricey at nearly 100 quid but for 3 days and the overall experience it should be worth it hopefully!

After that I’m not sure what I’ll be doing.  Definitely be taking the slow overnight boat from Huay Xai at the border to Luang Prabang and will probably stay there for a week or so, maybe do a trek.  I should be meeting up with someone from Chiang Mai for a week or two to go down through Laos so a bit depends on that.

Other than this there is not much else left to say!  So I will see you when I get back in a couple of days!  Oh and obviously my phone will not work out there so I’ll be out of contact from tomorrow morning (saturday) until Monday afternoon.  Need to sort out a Laos SIM as well, but my Thai one still works here at the moment as the border is only 100m away.

xx

Cookery School – Day Two

Moved outside of the city today to carry on the course.  The school as a second site adjacent to the house of Sompon the owner.  Much nicer than being in the middle of the city!  Bigger and better facilities, the pace seemed a bit more relaxed and just to make the American girls day (and mine too I must admit) there were 4 stupidly cute puppies just willing you to play with them!

First was an introduction to Thai ingredients which was a bit of a bore to be honest, passing round bowls of rice and smelling fish sauce etc, but for people who know nothing about Thai food I would imagine it is excellent.  It was all done by a very funny Thai girl however so her constant jokes meant I managed to stay awake for the duration.

The first dish of the day was that most Thai of soups, Tom Yam Goong or Hot and Sour Soup with Prawns to you non thai speakers.  Sompon himself (owner, tv chef) led the demonstration in a thankfully air-conditioned room.  We all piled in after he had finished to see if his cooking matched his extremely impressive knife work, you will be glad to know that it did.  Bloody hot though, he had put seven birds-eye chillies in a soup made for one!  My attempt was pretty successful I must say, only used 4 chillies seeing as all I had had eaten so far today was a cup of coffee and a sweet basil leaf.  Definitely one to do at home:

Second up was Thai Fish cakes, again demonstrated by Sompon, who was loosening up a bit now.  Very easy to make apart from the actual cake making part.  We had to do it one handed and then slide the patty into the frying pan….it’s a bit hard to make something round and flat when the oil is spitting up at you!  Anyway they don’t look that great but they tasted fantastic.  I didn’t make the sauce and kind of spilled it over the plate a bit, apologies.

Third dish of the day was Green Chicken Curry.  The paste had already been made so it was basically a case of chopping up a load of ingredients, cooking them in coconut cream and serving it up.  Mine tasted ok, not as good as Sarah’s (that is a damn good curry I must say love) and thanks to the very dark paste we used looks kind of grey in the pictures!  When they cook curries out here, at least in decent places, they apparently use brass woks as the more even heat allows the curry to keep its color better.  Considering how much a brass saucepan is I don’t think I will be buying one any time soon!

For the last dish of the morning we did that backpacker favourite (mainly because it costs about 60p or less off the street) Phad Thai.  Basically fried noodles with peanuts and whatever else you want in there to bulk it up.  Not much explanation here and they tasted bloody good, better than the green curry actually.  The addition of sugar balanced the flavours out nicely.

The afternoon was taken up with a Minced Chicken and Mint Salad and a desert of water chestnuts with sugar syrup and coconut milk.  The salad was pretty tasty actually, if you put a lot more mint in there and boosted the flavours it would would be much better.  A big bowl of this stuff as a sport on tv snack would be great, make a change from sarnies anyhow!  The water chestnuts were really refreshing, really easy to do and the food colouring added to them looks awesome.

So I have one more day tomorrow and then I’m done, I might extend it to do the two final courses but I’m not sure yet, will see how I feel on the day.  And finally for the picture you all wanted to see from the beginning one of the puppies and Sompon chopping away at a cucumber.  More later!

Cooking Course in Chiang Mai + A Few Photos

So today was the first day of a three day cookery course I am doing in Chiang Mai, pretty cool I have to say.  Not having cooked a single thing for myself over the last 6 months my knife skills and gernal cooking ability was a bit bruised and battered but I got back into the swing of things fairly quickly.  Over 6 hours you cook 6 different dishes, eating each one after you have cooked it (missing out on breakfast was not a problem).

The day started with a lesson in vegetable topiary, as in those pretty little roses you see made out of tomatos are leaves made out of carrots.  The roses are actually pretty easy, a bit like trying to peel an apple without breaking the peel.  We then made a lotus leaf, again from a tomato which looked pretty cool.  I did fail first time on the carrot leaf though…..it looked like something that had been gentically modified to assume an appearence that was anything but leaf like.  My second attempt was a bit more respectable but still a bloody fiddily process.  They all made good decoration for my plate of spring rolls though.

First dish we did was a minced pork and glass noodle soup, very nice and suprisingly easy to make, only took 10 minutes of cooking once the ingrediants and been prepared.  After that was the spring rolls, seems the ‘pastry’ of spring rolls is very different to anything else but I guess the nearest thing in the UK would be a slightly thicker filo pastry, actually much thicker.  They came out pretty good and looked great next to my tomato rose/lotus flower: (sorry about the quality I forgot to change the setting on the camera):

 After that was my favourite dish of the day, a royal roasted duck red curry.  Rather than just the usual kaffir lime leavels, basil and eggplants (they have about 8 types over here) you had fruit in as well, grapes, pinapple and a couple of other bits.  Tasted fantastic after we had made it, presentation wasn’t quite up to scratch but who cares really?

The rest of the afternoon was taking up making a chicken and ginger stir fry, chicken in pandanas leaves and sweet sticky rice with mango.  Personally I though my chicken and ginger stir fry recipe was better but I will admit that theirs looked a lot nicer!

Can’t remember what I am cooking tomorrow but I am heading out to the guys house in the countryside rather than the restaurant kitchen in the city so that should be interesting.  Chiang Mai itself is nice, very calm and peaceful compared to the chaos of Bangkok but there is still plenty of nightlife knocking around and things to see.  Despite being much smaller than the capital, Chiang Mai has almost the same number of temples (300), went to a couple yesterday which you can see at the bottom of the page.  Will probably go out to do some trekking after I finish the cookery course but it is so damn humid up here at the moment, the threat of rain hangs over you from the moment you wake up until you step back into bed. 

Might go to see the Muay Thai boxing tonight but it is bit of a trek from where I am, from anywhere actually.  I have taken up walking everywhere again which is nice.  After being in Bangkok and Kao Tao where I either didn’t move around a lot or took tuk tuks it is nice to be using my legs again.   Have to do something to counter the effects of all the food I’m eating at the moment! 

So the photos below are of the Ko San Road at night in Bangkok, a very funny headline in the Bangkok Post newspaper, the beach in Koh Tao and one of the caberet act.  There are a couple more up on flickr but not many, haven’t taken many interesting pictures recently but I shall get back into the swing of things!

     

   

See you all next time!

xx