Our adventures

Well, I’ve seen hot and I’ve seen hot, but it is really too hot here in BKK.  To quote a Good Morning Vietnam line “it’s hot and wet.  that’s nice if you’re with a lady, ain’t no good if you’re in the jungle”…..

Bangkok is a giant city, with lovely palaces, vibrant streets and great food.  It also has to have the highest numbers of dirty old men I’ve yet seen.  Our first night here, near Jim Thompson’s silk factory, we stopped for a beer on a patio and watched the parade of old white (nay, pink) men waddling down the street.  The fanny pack (hip pack to UK guests) was prominent, as was a giant gut on most of these tourists. 

Onto more pressing matters…the food is incredible.  Although right now at breakfast, lynn is making bad faces at the hotel pad thai she is pushing to the edge of her plate.  We’ve found an old popular vegetarian restaurant (Mai Kaydee’s) off Khao San road.  Oh boy oh boy oh boy.  It is good.  No A/C, so we pay for the palate pleasing pleasure we are perusing through sweat.  We went for lunch yesterday and then in a unanimous vote, we decided to return for dinner.  My favorite was the Tom Yom soup (so spicy) though the curry and pad thai were also good.  Just thinking of the food right now makes me hungry. Not really, as we just had an enormous breakfast.  I get plain noodles and add crushed peanuts, a ton of greenery (herbs and onions etc), an assortment of sauces and some sliced chili’s.  Good stuff.

Back to Khao San road.  It is a very cool area (much cooler than where we are staying – more on that later).  In the daytime, full of thai people it looks very cool.  In the evening, it is 90% foreigner….No, not the band, the people (though I did hear a cover version of hot blooded).  It is fun and vibrant but a bit like West Edmonton Mall’s bourbon street.  Not entirely real, but not necessarily bad (though truth be told, I don’t remember West Ed to be that good).

Onto our hotel, we booked a very nice hotel on tripadvisor.  Why? I don’t know.  It’s easy might be the only reason.  It is rated high and is very nice.  The problem, it is in the business district and there is nothing nearby to do.   This means travel. We have been advised that the best way to travel is via the skytrain as it is cheap and quick.  For two days, I believed this, but last night I gave up, and we took a taxi.  As reference, the skytrain/boat combo cost $3.20 and took 75 minutes. The taxi cost $2.25 and took 15 minutes.  I need to stop listening to people about this.  While the hotel is poorly located, after a day of walking in 35 degree heat, the huge outdoor pool is heavenly…..so, now that we know about taxis maybe the location isn’t that bad.

Highlights so far:

• Seeing a giant rat walking down an outdoor market
• The strange sensation of being served by a ladyboy (truth be told, more man than either lady or boy)
• All the glorious outdoor markets, which are almost completely full of brand new crap that do not interest either lynn nor myself
• Swimming in the cold pool
• Eating at Mai Kaydee’s
• Taking the water taxi along the river (we were sitting right beside the driver and got the full experience)
• 60 minute thai massage with yellow herbs in the famous massage school in Wat Po (note that although Lynn’s massage was the best of her life, my massage was rather bland)
• People constantly trying to swindle us
• Watching a fellow (a loaded aussie actually) eat a scorpion from the man with the beetle cart.

Tomorrow we leave for Luang Prabang in Laos.  I’m very excited to get out of the city and LP looks very nice.  We want to be pretend Mahout’s (elephant trainers) for a day or two and soak up the atmosphere.  From LP, we make our trip down towards the capital of Ventiane and then to Angkor Wat (where we have been instructed by cheezer and Shauna Mac that we must, Must, MUST go here).  So, being compliant and agreeable people, we are going there.

Finally, still loving the netbook, but my fingers are getting bigger or the keys smaller as typing is tougher….

PS – Lynn thinks that we should change a previous title in Hong Kong to “Sweet and Sour in Hong Kong”

Let’s start off here with honesty: I’m not normally a fan on chinese food.  Being a vegetarian, pretty much everything is off limits.  What is usually available is fried vegetables in a gelatinous sauce.  Yuck.  Being in Hong Kong, I thought that maybe we just needed to get to the real thing, and real cantonese food would be delicious.

So for brunch, we went to one of the better dim sum restos in HK.  It looked good, packed full of people, and we were the only obvious tourists.  Right from the start, I realized that my hopes for a vegetarian oasis were not going to be realized.  When asking about vegetarian options, the waiter recommended some pork options “you don’t eat pork either?”.  After some discussion we decided to have some shrimp options, otherwise we were going home with only tea.  It was average, except for the deep fried long spring rolls with shrimp.  Which, like anything deep fried, were exceptional.

While we were eating our Cantonese dim sum, our guidebook pointed out that there actually was a veggie Shanghaiese resto in Causeway Bay area.  Excited (and still quite hungry) we made the journey.  Unfortunately it had moved, but Lynn was incredible, asking shop keepers over a 10 block journey where the restaurant had moved to.  Eventually we found the new location and sat down for another meal, only 90 minutes after our last one.

Now, this meal was good.  Excellent dumplings, sweet and sour tofu balls (lynn’s favorite) and my favorite of cold noodles with about a dozen sauces.  It was a bit like Buddha’s veggie in CalGary.

After these two meals, we waddled around for a bit, eventually getting on one of the trams (which  I loved) and then coming back to the hotel for a swim, a read and a nice rest.

At dinner, we went to  japanese restaurant, where for $5 Lynn got a deep fried soft shell crab.  She was happy.  Well as happy as can be when the people at the table behind us had exceptionally bad body odour.  It is rare when the stink coming off of a person overpowers the smell of raw fish, but tonight it did.  It reminded me of going for trumpet lessons when I was 12 at Bonavista Music.  My teacher (who shall remain nameless) was one of the worst smelling people I have ever met.  I remember walking into his office and the smell overpowering and making me want to wretch.  Within 5 minutes though, I would be accustomed to the smell and would not even notice it.  We kept waiting for the smell to dissipate last night, but no such luck….

Today is our last day in HK, and the plans are for a foot massage, a ride in the bay and a bit of a rest by the pool.  Bangkok tomorrow should be manic.

This is my first effort at typing on the netbook.  Although I was advised that this would be impossible, it is actually much like typing on a regular computer, even with my chubbby fingers.

We started off with a stop over in Frankfurt.  Expecting something incredible, we took the train into town, walked  in the rain for an hour and then went back to sleep in the terminal.  Frankfurt is pretty…unremarkable.  A couple of nice buildings and lots of expensive cars and golf shops.  I did love the trees on the train into the city though.  That and the pretzel sandwich’s….

Coming into HK, wow!  I have never been to this part of the world, and this is one beautiful city.  Big mountains,  big buildings and everything a little bit different.

We are staying in MongKok in Kowloon.  This is where people live, and it is fun to be a rare tourist in this part of town (as opposed to HK proper, which abounds with tourists).

Highlights:

• the architecture – especially the narrow (30′ by 10′) 30+ story sky scrapers in mongkok
• drinking a beer in an outdoor food stall in Temple street (alas, the food wasn’t as good as the ambiance)
• watching a guy drive a car while we were having the beers above. This was so good as the guys expression was that of a man terrified that he was driving, he was trying to push the wheel away from him and shy his face away from the road.
• the food.  i can’t believe how good everything has been. and Cheep cheep!
• the indian restaurant (curry in a hurry).  we’ve eaten a meal there everyday so far….
• roof-top pools.  enough said.
• the mid-level escalators and the life around them.  bars, restaurants, people.  incredible stuff
• the vibrancy of the city
• the advertising.  people’s faces in the ads are so expressive.

Two more days here, then we head to Bangkok.