Category Archives: Travel

Cooking Curry

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Panang CurryIMG_0908Everyone here in Trang knows that we’re hung-up on a great-tasting Panang Curry made at Mai Muang, a restaurant that has moved much farther out of downtown than when we first became affectionados. We’ve been enjoying Panang Curry at least once a week in the outskirts now, and sometimes twice when we can find another source in town.

ChoAnother restaurant, owned by a member of the Trang Cycling Club, has added it to their menu and we need only park our scooter outside their dining deck and the Panang Curry starts simmering on the gas stove. We don’t even have to order any more.

Stanna has tried to replicate this dish in Durango, with a Chaing Mai cooking school cookbook and ingredients from an international food store in Albuquerque. It just hasn’t been the same: too runny to appreciate the fine flavors and tastes. So we mustered up our courage to ask if we could have a lesson at Mai Muang on just how to cook Panang Curry her way.

IMG_1748Surprisingly, Lee the wife and chef, enthusicatically welcomed us into the kitchen, and even offered to let Stanna try to cook it herself. (“Next time,” we said.) We just wanted to photo document and watch the process as she produced it.

 

IMG_1811Lee turned up the flame under one of her many woks to high, and poured in a cup of coconut milk.  This was such a surprise, because we’d figured in Durango that our recipe was in error, since our Panang was so runny we thought we must be using too much coconut milk.

IMG_1816With the coconut milk boiling she added the simple ingredients: sugar, fish sauce, Panang curry, chili paste, kaffir lime IMG_1825leaves, sliced red chilies and chicken.  This was more of a soup boiling in the wok and we couldn’t imagine what would happen to turn this into a succulent sauce with chicken.

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Boiling.

Simply boiling the milk down to a sauce, stirring occasionally, adding fresh basil leaves near the end, and then sliding the meal onto a plate was the answer.

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shoppingWe got treated to a follow-up lesson this next week when Sunsern (our cycling fixer friend) volunteered his wife to come to  Wassana’s kitchen to show us how she cooks Panang curry.  This lesson started with a trip to the market, where she selected the ingredients and said we needed to cook some vegetables along with the curry.

IMG_1891Thai cooks use a meat cleaver rather than a variety of knives for chopping or peeling, and Toi (Sunsern’s wife) was deft at wielding one whether she was pounding garlic flat before mincing, severing a chicken breast or peeling a mushroom.  (BTW the preferred chopping board is a 3″ tree BW Kitchenround sliced like a carrot and dished-out from wear, like granite temple steps.  Wassana’s kitchen is so modern only a white polycarbonate one was available.)

Once again we photo’d every step, primarily for our memory, and took hasty notes to record measurements on an iPhone. Sunsern had to repeatedly request Toi to use a spoon so we might glean whether she was pouring a teaspoon or multiple tablespoons of seasonings into the wok.  Her choice of measurement was her taste buds, when she spooned a bit of sauce between her lips.

IMG_1919Her stir-fried vegetable was unique in several ways: after she put in the oil and garlic, she added about 3 or 4 bites-sized chunks of chicken (for flavor we assume), in addition, she’d pre-soaked some angle hair rice noodles and added them to the vegetables when all was thrown in the wok.  She used oyster sauce as a seasoning along with fish and soy sauces, and finally she threw in a splash of water.  On medium to high flame the stir-fry was done in minutes.

IMG_1936Her Panang curry was basically the same as we’d learned earlier, only the order of ingredients varied.  She only put in half the coconut milk to start, before adding the curry paste (we’d purchase pre-blended red curry and chili paste from the market, rather than the special blend Lee at Mai Muang had in store). Two other variations Toi used were half a bullion cube and coconut sugar rounds.  IMG_1938And her preference was three times the amount of Thai basil which Sunsern extracted so a comparison might be more fair.  Again, the secret to the sauce was boiling down the mixture to a thick viscous liquid before turning off the flame.

two dishesNot quite the same as Mai Muang, but we agreed if our Durango version could be this good we’d have a new family standard.  And just to be sure Stanna knew how to do it, Toi insisted she try, preparing the entire meal a second time after we’d finished lunch. (Dinner was wonderful having Panang Curry “left-overs”.)

Lingua Franca

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We’re always thinking about language, talking about languages, interpreting languages and learning languages as we migrate around during our winters. In fact, one important reason to learn Spanish in America is that most likely our end-of-life care-givers will be native Spanish speakers and it would be good to know what they are saying about you.

Unfortunately Americans don’t put enough emphasis on learning a second language and when we do, it’s in high school when kids are already too embarrassed to speak in front of classmates, let alone speak in a new foreign language. There just isn’t enough reason to speak French, German or Chinese yet in America. But there could be an excellent case for Spanish since we border on, trade with and travel to Mexico and Central America, not to mention the always growing population of Hispanic neighbors and co-workers in the States.

Thai’s have a much bigger problem and an opportunity to learn a second language, And that language is English.  Right now most of the private schools and many of the public schools in urban areas have native English speakers as teachers. (They are mostly recent university graduates from English-speaking countries who, while traveling over here, find that they can extend their stay, earn some money and postpone returning to the inevitable: a job search in their home country.)

This program has been good for many Thai students as well as the travelers, but there are too many shortcomings in the system.  Primarily the teachers are more transient than is good for the students, because those native-speaking teachers may only “teach” for a couple of months or a contract year at best.  And every teacher speaks a different dialect of English (which we found almost comical when talking to, or trying to understand, the Irish English teacher here in  Wassana guesthouse last year).  And lastly, the entire emphasis is on passing a written test, not on simple conversation.  The average grammar school graduate speaks no better English than an American high school student who has taken one semester of Spanish:  Hello or Where you from? in Thailand, or Buenas Dias or ¿Como Esta? in the States.

Certainly there are many, many Thai’s that speak passable English and we appreciate each and every one of them, but they are few and far between.  We’ve turned down, every year, the opportunity in Trang to teach an English class for business professionals and more specifically the Provincial Court employees. (We don’t want to be on a schedule.)  Our best friend here in Trang is a Court Mediator who speaks English and they feel it’s mandatory for at least two of the rotating Mediation team members to speak English.

What has really struck home this last week was learning that Thailand’s participation in the recently formed ASEAN Alliance of 10 countries in Southeast Asia, means that they are economically binding with a population of 600 million people: twice the population of the US, and probably the size of the US and Europe combined.  This is now an Asian “Euro Zone or a Union” where the only Lingua Franca between all these disparate countries is English.  All the trade, commerce, tourism and business needs to be done in English.

And this is where Thailand is aware of their shortcoming.  Not enough of their students are learning sufficient English to supply the managers, directors, salespeople, engineers and workers to fill all these new employment positions that the ASEAN Alliance and the global business world demands.

How do we convince our young US students to learn Spanish, but more urgently how will Thailand improve their younger generation’s English language skills to compete with Malaysia, the Philippines, Myanmar and Indonesia who can easily migrate to fill those positions?

We’re so fortunate that we don’t have to struggle with a Global Lingua Franca.  Every tourist that comes to Thailand has to communicate in English, and most often their proficiency in English is far better than the hotel desk clerk or the bar tender servicing the tourist needs for a room or a beer.  My favorite story is listening to a Korean scientist and a French physicist discuss over coffee scientific theories at a level that we could only identify as English words, their Lingua Franca.

Ice creamI thought this was my Lingua Gastronomica:

Thai’s like theirs with sticky rice and peanuts topped with condensed milk.

 

 

 

But after seeing a text photo of Captain Al spinning on Dragonfly.  I realize that my Lingua Franca has been bicycling here in Thailand.

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Pak Lak Peninsula

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PennisulaEven though Trang is 40 km (as the bike travels) from the coast I’ve managed two weekends in a row to visit an island and now a peninsula that I’ve never seen before. These locales have been much further (150 and 90 km) from “home” but do offer the warm Andaman Sea vistas and waveless water.  Winds for half a year are predominantly East to West and then West to East when we aren’t in Thailand.

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However we don’t always get in the water, since it’s often only a highlight of the ride.  And in my case bringing the swimming kit (extra shorts and a sarong) on my road bike isn’t always practical and I don’t often like cycling in my padded cycling shorts wet with salt water.  Not that I haven’t done that, but generally where there has been fresh water to rinse.  And on these longer rides, even though it dries sooner, chafing is common.

IMG_1764This Sunday’s event (again, I never quite know what, where or why – just a distance number and type of bike recommended) was another rally of sorts to plant trees near the coast.  It was one of three national rides sponsored by the Thailand Tourism Board, the local Province Tourism Commission (State) and a willing Sub-Department (County).  In this case the location was just about as far north in the Trang Province you can ride so it had two starting points: one in Trang (80 km away) and one in proximity to the tree planting site (15km).

IMG_1758As with all these Thai events, participants all relish the souviner T-shirt featuring the event and it’s sponsors. (Printing a T-shirt in Thailand must cost less than a dollar because even when one must buy one [without sponsor logos] they only cost $3).  And with the ubiquitous advent of Facebook everyone is snapping and posing the entire time. They expected 500 planters and if you add the riders from the local start point and the local school kids to the 120 riders from Trang, they must have filled every T-shirt.  They only had 600 trees and the planting only took a few minutes per rider.  I got to plant two since I was a novelty (actually they wanted more photos of the only foreigner).

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Whether this was symbolic (we planted 24″ mangrove slips next to the road on a vast peninsula of mangroves similar to where in November 1956, Castro and 81 revolutionaries sailed from Mexico aboard the Granma, crash-landing near to Los Cayuelos [wikipedia]) or they really needed to revegetate this narrow strip along the road on this remote peninsula doesn’t matter, it was fun being part of this mass tribute to ecology, cycling and Green Tourism.  I did ask three different English-speaking Thais (including a reporter) and never quite got a suitable answer how this effort benefited tourism as this half-kilometer bare strip certainly wasn’t a blight along this otherwise desolate road.

IMG_1802I just like the interaction and the off-the-beaten-path experiences my Thai cycling friends expose us to each weekend.  The tree-planting was over, just about noon.  We had started from Trang at 6 AM, the cadre of Trang cyclists I ride with said they were going to hang out until the heat of the day was waning (3 hours) and would I be interested in seeing a fresh water well right on the beach.  It ended up being in my estimation a spring along the rocky limestone cliffs in a sandy cove.  Never-the-less it proved to be an even more interesting cycle to the bitter end of this peninsula thru several tiny fishing villages built on stilts in the tidal mangrove swamps.  Our splinter group of five made an even more remote detour and went right into a beachside village and I’d swear one of the riders asked a Muslim lady in one of the nicer cinder block homes if we could rest and and have water on her front porch.  Shortly thereafter we were drinking green coconut water and scooping green coco meat from trees in her yard and chilling on the cool tile front porch.  A very pleasant way to spend an hour or more of our “beating the heat” delay.

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All in all it was a 13+ hour day and 154 km on the Strava log, but like backpacking, when you spend all day going that distance it’s surprising how easy it is.  Thai cycle touring includes lots of rest stops, food and diversions.  Most the riders use a mountain bike and cycle in Crocs.

I’ve gone somewhat “native” in that I’m trying riding with a tubed head scarf like many of my friends wear.  Made of polypropylene you cover your face up to your eyes and down into the neck of your jersey.  I’d alway sworn that was way too hot for me to try, but the last two long afternoon rides in 36 to 37 C (98° F) heat it has felt remarkably cooler.  Mike Taylor reminded me that all the desert camel jockeys wear a head scarf, and I even have one I got from a Tuareg back in the Sahara in the 70’s.  head

Stanna says I look like a cycle terrorist, but at least I’m not wearing the black tights my Thai cycling friends all wear.  I hope to try this in the Southwest backpacking. That will bring out all the stares, but first I’ll have to weigh it, and see if it qualifies as Ultra Light.  They come in all the Dirty Girl Gaiter patterns if you’d like to order one.

Holiday vision

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Before breakfast ride to the end of the island

It’s been 90 photos since the last post, and that’s after editing out the foot and finger shots. For some odd reason one looks forward to getting back to the condo for a long rest, but that might just be after a particularly active week, if you could include both weekends. In eight days of cycling, Strava has logged 754 km and the map shows tracks on both coasts, with a mid-week climb just to get some vertical in the mix.

Koh Lanta Ride

 

As per usual I have no idea where the weekend rides are going, nor what to expect the feature or event will be.  This weekend it was “camping on an island”, so who could pass up that chance since the island was unfamiliar.

Turns out we rode 130 km to take part in a 20 km rally with 300+ riders kicking off the annual Laanta Lanta Festival in Old Town, Koh Lanta.  Gathering at a small college on the north-western corner of the island, we rode en masse along the east coast to the leeward “old town”. None of the photos captures the spectacle of a IMG_166520 minute swarm of cycles passing along a two-lane coastal road between villages, rural communities and into Old Town.  You’re constantly reminded of the spectacle uniqueness, when most everyone along the side-lines is holding a camera, with mouth open in awe or cheering.

Old Town Koh Lanta

IMG_1683Koh Lanta is one of the tourist hot-spots, where the more adventurous of the thousand upon thousands of Thailand tourist per day venture. We never wheeled by anything remotely exclusive or touristy looking, nor any of the brochure-worthy white beaches with rows of umbrellas, white and soon-to-be tanned European “foreigners.” They were only evident on wayward scooters, song-tows and vans paused on the roadside.

IMG_1681Not until we arrived in Old Town did one realize that we were involuntary “extras” in this larger than life village “movie set.” My aversion to being part of tourist throngs was pegged the moment the sun started to set and the festivities commenced.  This density of tourists is only reached in the Bangkok Arrivals terminal or at something like the New Year Chaing Mai Night Market. (Sure, Chinese New Year gathering in Trang had crowds, but that was locals.} The costume department worked overtime fitting out this crowd of foreigners on holiday.

IMG_1700Surely the night market in Old Town is a regular event, however for the Laanta Lanta Festival the entire town became the Studio set, with just about every flat spot or store front a venue for food, shopping, entertainment or art.  The famous restaurants set up whole “gardens” of dining, the various indigenous peoples marched in the parade and had booths to promote their ethnicity or handiwork. At least four performance stages were set up on the “lot”, one with the requisite three jumbo-tron screens giving you live action video if you can’t get close enough.

IMG_1702As in many of the coastal communities the primary population seems to be Muslim and in the 5-block double-sided phalanx of food stalls there wasn’t any MuPing to be had, but just about all the other Thai food on sticks or in cups and Styrofoam take-away containers could be had.  It wasn’t hard to replace the 4,092 calories Strava logged.

Walking along with the meandering throng, grazing the food stalls, didn’t quite pull in the entire cast of characters, tattooed European tribal millennials, and bit actors.  Only once you found a un-retail-covered flat spot to pause and let the extras flow back and forth could you envisage  this was just one continuous “take” like the filming of Russian Ark. At first it was easy to use the Disneyland metaphor, but the rides were few, only a traveling ferris wheel and kiddie train.  This is the set for the “foreigners holiday vision” of Thailand. All the kitschy trinkets, the side-walk pubs, restaurants and food stalls, the bars with lonely guitarists and jazz trios covering well-known and trite tunes.  The foreigner frenzy finding “Thai clothing,” clown pants, or jewelry (which no-one in Thailand wears anymore – except in parades or on stage) to take home as souvenirs. However, it’s their party and both the Thai entrepreneurs and the foreigners like this movie or theme park.  A symbiotic relationship.

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House front porch where we “camped”

Our group, some 18 or 19 riders from Trang, split into two groups: one snagged a house on the water with deck large enough for six tents and the other half went to the temple grounds and camped there.  We all grazed and “acted as extras” in town for a couple of hours after showers and bucket washing our lycra, but were eager to bed down for the following day’s 150 km ride home.

We got up early to watch the sun rise across the northern end of the Straits of Malacca with it’s tidal mud flats, and were among only a handful of people where there were hordes just hours before.

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Deck over the tidal basin

 

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House interior where we “camped” on the deck

 

Audax 200

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My rule over here in Thailand is that I don’t enter any races or competitions, which I’m continually encouraged to do. This does several things: keeps me from doing things that I probably shouldn’t be doing at 68 years old, keeps me from getting involved with the Thai emergency medical system, and allows me to keep doing all the physical things that I want to do here in Thailand without being laid up with an injury.

IMG_1426.JPGThe Audax 200 sounded like an event without competition involved other than the clock. Of course you want to get your best “time” and that brings out the oft-cited Joe Berry quote, “It’s always a race.”  Audax is French inspiration that has chapters across the world featuring events for long distance cycling of  200, 300, 400 and 600 km.  You have to “qualify” at a lower mileage in order to register for the next higher distance.  The big goal is to ride in the Paris-Brest-Paris 1200-km ride in September of each year.

IMG_1421.JPGAfter learning four Trang riders were going to enter, I hooked a ride to Hat Yai  to ride with 254 other aspirants to notch their handlebars with a 200 km ride. These retired guys only wanted to finish within the time limit and took most of the 13 hours.  I, on the other hand, went for time, and was doing real good until the 170 km mark.  I’d flatted after a long stretch of road construction along with another rider. It was there that I broke my plastic tire tools, which proved to be fateful later in the day. (Strava map below – red flags are course segments that Strava riders clock themselves on)

audax mapAt the 150-km check-in, our group of five was first into the 3rd Check Point, and we never knew how far ahead we were from the rest of the pack. At 170 km we entered the backside of Hat Yai, our starting point, I stopped at a traffic signal and realized I had a flat. The group started out and left me behind and so I sat on the side of the road holding up my wheel, hopefully indicating to another rider coming along that I needed some help, specifically their tire tools. It seemed like a long time but probably only 30 to 35 minutes with no one coming along. A customer at one of the local shops came over to see if I needed any help.  He knew of a local bike shop that was only just down the road and offered to see if it was open on a Sunday which it was. I didn’t want to jump in the back of his truck because that would void my riding in the 200 km, so I walked the “short distance” which ended up probably half a kilometer. But there, in the middle of nowhere, was a full-fledged mountain bike shop with probably 70 bikes inside.

IMG_1563They took my wheel and changed out the tube and I was ready to get on my way. I had the presence of mind to try to buy another set of tire tools, which I did, unfortunately they were also plastic but the guys gave the assurance that they were much stronger than my earlier ones. That proved to be false, because evidently the two young guys that repaired my tire with a brand-new tube must’ve used metal tools to get the tire back on the rim pin-holing the inner tube. I flatted about 10 km away from the shop.  I broke one of the new plastic tools getting the tire off and discovered that there was a small pinch made from a metal tool putting the tire back on the rim. I got that patched and flatted in five more kilometers, finding the second pinch from a tool 4 inches from the first, and then finally a third.

All the plastic tire tools had now broken and I was now resigned to finding flathead screwdrivers at various little food stands. There still were only a couple of riders passing and those didn’t see me or were on the home stretch and didn’t want to stop.  I’ve always loved Continental Gator Skins but they’re extremely hard to get on and off the rim.  In my four years of riding here in Thailand I think I’ve only had two flat tires before yesterday’s total of 5 in 1 day.

At one point just after the 2nd Check Point, we took a ferry across a sound.ferry audax

Arriving back in downtown Hat Yai, the 3rd largest city in Thailand with 160,000 people, I got lost finding my way to the finish line.  With the help of several locals I managed to get there. After shooting for an eight hour riding time I was disappointed to finish with a 10 1/2 hour time although my Strava GPS showed that I had eight hours and 25 minutes in the saddle. Good ride, good time and new countryside.


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Wedding Reception

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One of the Trang Cycling Club members had a small 240-person wedding reception on the beach outside of Trang this last Thursday.  Thai people get married on auspicious days that the monks divine.

IMG_1528 maxAbout 12 members cycled the 25 miles to the wedding and attended in full lycra garb.  We chose to drive the scooter over, like many, and stay less sweaty for the party.  The venue was idyllic and right out of the Thailand tourist resort brochures with pools, white sand beach location and all the amenities tourists clamor for.  If we hadn’t been recently to Myanmar this would have been the most “white” people we’d been around on our travels this year.  Total beach bikini scene right out of the movies. We couldn’t wait to get home and see what tariff was for nightly stays ($200 to $600).  Makes our $6 a night seem paltry.

IMG_1544This couple have been boyfriend and girlfriend for 21 years and finally decided to get married. He’s a distance cyclist who will be riding in the Audax 1200 Paris-Brest-Paris ride this September.  He’s completed his 200, 300, 400 and 600 km rides here in Thailand and now qualifies for the 1200 km.

IMG_1524Only family and very close friends attend the early morning wedding ceremony at their house (monk drops by to consecrate the union) and then they throw a big reception at a hall or resort.  This reception was a sit-down 11-course meal, served on a meter-wide lazy-susan placed in the center of 8′ circular banquet tables, menuthat takes much of the afternoon. We had a great time with our rowdy cycling friends.

Needless to say, most dishes were outstanding, only the final rice platter lacked for flavor.

Interesting to note, you don’t bring a present. Every guest (couple) received an invitation and into that envelope you place your tithing to the couple who come around each table to receive the gift and thank you with a small present (in this case commemorative candles).

Fun to be a part of this event.

 

Chinese New Year

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In researching the percentage of Chinese demographic in Thailand I learned that it’s over 9 million or 14% of the population and up to 40% of the population can claim some level of ancestral heritage.  No wonder Chinese New Year is such a big deal here in Thailand. It was most apparent when you notice how many businesses are shuttered during the days just before and for the 3 “travel days” after the new year.  Chinese travel to see their parents and relatives generally where they were raised.

IMG_1458Trang’s Chinese New Year is the reason we got waylaid here five years ago, as we didn’t want to be traveling during this very busy internal migration, with buses, trains and hotels packed with locals, coming and going much like the American Thanksgiving holiday period.  So we stayed another week in our Trang hotel and that’s when we got hooked by the Trang Cycling Club and all it’s activities, friendly members and the local community.

IMG_1456It’s such a big deal here in Trang that they cordon off several major streets and intersections for the week with several massive concert stages and  blocks and blocks of food concessions, not to mention of the decorations most visible after dark.

We only enjoyed the melee one night, since the best entertainment tends to be well after our bedtime. The people-watching is even better than seeing IMG_1450families at the shopping centers, if only because they often dress up their youngest children in festive costumes, and to see entire families parading along enjoying various foods and delicacies is wonderful as well.  This year they allocated a 500-meter stretch of matching art show tents to all the Trang hotels and restaurants so that they might feature their cuisines.

IMG_1453IMG_1454Among the displays of Chinese cultural traditions are the food sculptures and banner calligraphy.  They have a large pavilion with as many as 8 old men brushing large gold characters of ancient proverbs on vivid red banners on demand, entirely gratis for the backed-up crowds of souvenir collectors.

 

 

 

Weaving at Inle Lake

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IMG_1172 - Version 2IMG_1111Having visited a number of SE Asian weaving sites and villages, this was one of the most remarkable in production and craftsmanship.  Not only did they have the most weavers demonstrating in a single shop, but the variety of materials (silk, cotton and lotus), patterns and techniques were fun to see.

We ended up taking more video than still photos, so we’ll be eager to show the various flying shuttle looms in action.  We have never gotten our flying shuttle on the loom at home to operate as smoothly and effortlessly as on these primitive looms.  (It is alway interesting to see how similar our Swedish Glimakra is to these timeless, rudimentary looms.)  We even took one slow motion video of a man using two alternating shuttles on a flying mechanism, rotating the shuttles with each pick of the weft, quite a feat with the flying shuttles.  He was so quick it was hard to see in real time.

IMG_1100When we entered this 2-story stilted workshop above the Inle Lake waterways, the first thing we were shown the process of extracting yarn from lotus stems.  At a low wooden table ladies were pulling 20″ strands from the stems and rolling with a flat-palm motion to combine the gossamer strands that don’t even show up in a photograph into visible yarn.  Later one lotus scarf jumped into our purchase pile and will be winging its way home to Durango with us, we couldn’t pass up such a unique fabric.

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What was so fun was being able to stand over the various weavers’ shoulders on our self-guided tour thru their airy 2nd-floor workroom which had probably 15-20 looms.  Each of these looms was loaded with much longer warps than we usually attempt on our Glimakra; pictured here was one of the grand old ladies measuring a 24-strand multi-colored warp that could have been 40-meters long.  We saw ladies using spinning wheels to load bobbins for weaving the warp; we didn’t see any local spinning of yarn other than rolling the lotus.  The retail shelves were filled with locally handwoven textiles in Inle Lake traditional patterns, Shan district traditional patterns, and other decorative weaves.

IMG_1169In the same village we visited one of the purely tourist-y demonstrations: in the front of that IMG_1173stilted shop were 5 transplanted long-neck indigenous women wearing their coiled golden necklaces.  They had several 8″ and 9″ tall necklaces for demonstration purposes, weighing 8 kilos of coiled metal.  Three ladies were weaving on backstrap looms.  The two older women were clearly live mannequins sitting stoically, employed for photo opportunities for tourists. (See top photo)

 

IMG_1177Last stop was at the silversmiths  It was most fascinating to see the silver smiths working, one pounding out a 9″ flat disk to be later shaped into a mug-sized bowl, and the other operating his torch.  The fine gassed blowtorch was a foot-powered bellows vaporizing gasoline from a pint-sized antique cylinder.  This particular craftsman was working on very minute silver coils which he was shaping to later cut and form into IMG_1183links for a silver chain necklace or bracelet, or to coil around a piece of jade or other jewel.  In that second-story rickety workshop and sales area they had more silver jewelry inside of wobbly glass showcases than you might see in an American mall jewelry store.  Fun to see the intricate work and craftsmanship but we are more partial to our local silversmith and jeweler Carol Martin.

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Shrine Dance – video test

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On a ride last Saturday I got ahead of my group and stumbled across a Southern Thailand IMG_1369traditional dance being performed at a hilltop shrine.  As is common on most “passes” (high points) on mountain roads the Thai people erect elaborate shrines to Buddha.  It’s mandatory to honk when passing and some people stop to leave “tribute” in the form of flower wreathes, soda pop with a straw, burn an incense stick or light a reel of firecrackers.

 

As I crested the hill I could hear drums and chanting at the shrine, so I dismounted and climbed up to see what was going on at the normally dormant site.  Evidently a family was celebrating or invoking merit by having a troupe perform and lavishing an entire roasted pig to the alter.  Here is just a short clip of this lengthy performance with many different characters.  (appears to take a minute or more to load the buffer).

IMG_1372I could only stay for 15 minutes but got served a cold beverage while I filmed from ringside.  Fascinating slice of life along the road.

The road less traveled

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IMG_0949There must be several hundred bicycles to rent in Nyaungshwe, most of them Chinese cruiser bikes with a tractor saddle and a basket up front.  The going rate is $1.50 a day, and the most recommended tour, besides riding around town, is to go west to the hot springs.  As it was Sunday when we decided to ride, we figured the Hot Springs might be more crowed than usual, if not primarily with foreigners, which we were seeing too many all ready.  We had seen a couple of mountain bikes advertised and happen to run across the back street house on our wandering several days earlier, so we opted for the high priced models at $10 a day.

IMG_1285Our route was to go east around the lake and see how far we got and since it was and all day adventure having gears and an adjustable seat post seems like a priority.  As it was we rode about 70 km down and back on one side of the lake, and after about the first 4 k’s we virtually had the road to ourselves.

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Everything to the east of the lake was agricultural and primarily cane in the dry hills and rice and vegetables down in he low lands at lake level.

One thing that we didn’t appreciate in all of Myanmar is the smoke filled air. In Yangon is was very bad and up north with the dry season just starting all the farmers are burning whatever has dried out.

IMG_1288Add to the agricultural waste, the proliferation of wood stoves, sugar cane plants – large and small – the skies continually smoke filled unless there was a strong wind.  Never-the-less it was really interesting to see all the country folk going about tending their fields, hauling cane on ox carts to the processing plants.  We even saw a volley ball net strung above a field of drying cane husks.

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The net is barely visible in the photo to the left, and we later learned that one of the national sports is a form of whiffle-ball-type volley ball played with feet, knees and heads called chinlone.  In Thailand they use a hanging basket 6 meters in the air and try and put a tradition soccerball high up into the net like a hack-sack game played with feet, knees and heads.

IMG_1298One of the most remarkable things was seeing a “chip-and-seal” crew enlarging and resurfacing the single paved road.  After digging up the shoulder and place a meter-wide hot oilof papaya-sized stones in they come back with a single layer of golfball-sized stones that are laid in place by eight girls with rubber trays of the stones (12 to 15 stones at a time).  Once the smaller stones are in place a steamroller crushes them to the size of pea gravel and then two team of two boys carry hot oil from a roadside trench and ladel over the crushed stones between steamroller trips. The finished product looks very similar to our more high tech less labor intensive methods. When there are no minimum wage levels like Myanmar the day labor rate hovers just above $2 a day and that why all the projects seem to be done by hand.

decampQuite accidentally we stumbled upon the break-down of the rotating 5-day market that sets up in the five alternating lake-side communities.  An entire market place is transported each day to the various appointed site.  Most items are shuffled from boat to market stall in baskets suspended on bamboo poles. We’re numb when it comes to looking  at market marketstalls except when it’s fresh foods. It was with particular interest that we got to see them decamping entire market place into a hundred longtail boats.  It puts into perspective how th Swiss lords travelled daily between their castles.  With enough people you can move an enormous amount of goods from cart to castle or in this case boat to market.  I guess the closest thing we have to this phenomena is flea markets or  closer to our life river rafting.

IMG_1324Lunch in one of the remaining open restaurants was surprising in two aspects first they had a bilingual menu (Burmese and English ) with no prices so I suspect price varies on the clientele and second the servings were labourer-sized with soup side dish of fresh tomatoes.  On the way home we stopped for a beverage and were severed complimentary oranges.
IMG_1294We definitely travelled back a ways in time when we got off the beaten path. with ox carts, kids rolling dead motor cycle tires with a stick, and road gangs of young women. We managed the entire day without seeing and foreigners until we got close to town.
By the way, all those new Bianchi’s came across the boarder from Thailand and were very sweet rides. I checked out the Thai price once I got home and they can be had for $400 in Trang.
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Inle Lake

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IMG_1014We met someone at the airport at Heho (town above the lake) who said Inle Lake was the highlight of his trip to SE Asia.  And incidentally while we were in Inle Lake we met 3 IMG_1083different people who not only knew Durango but one Italian who had owned a restaurant in Aspen, a young traveller who had lived in Telluride, and English ladies who had skied at Purgatory.  Living in Trang, southern Thailand, we really don’t see many Westerners and if we do they are usually just waiting for the next train coming and going from the Andaman coast and the island resorts.  And we understand seeing the throngs of IMG_1059traveling tourists at the Bangkok airports, but we were still further overwhelmed by the number of tourists occupying the village Nyaungshwe at the headwaters of Inle Lake.  We asked a local how many tourists a day come to town and he estimated 100-200, but upon departure we saw no less than 8 airliners on the tarmac, with many more scheduled, so we estimate close to 1,000 or more tourists arriving daily, easily matching the local population.

IMG_1074The military regime of Myanmar opened the gates to tourism and commerce 3 years ago and the country is struggling to keep up with the influx of visitors (can’t imagine what is going to happen to Cuba).  It’s surprising that the country has been able to scale up airlines, hotels and tourist accommodations to this scale.  (Or maybe not surprising, since IMG_1207the airlines and resorts are reportedly owned by the friends of the regime.)  We appreciated the fact that they had basic broadband even though at evenings and mornings the bandwidth was untenable, for example we were never able to book a hotel at Inle Lake because in a half-day of trying the various websites never loaded.

IMG_0996Fortunately the airport taxi driver IMG_1215dropped us off in front of the boat ramp at a new small hotel (13 rooms) with one vacancy.  We soon found that Myanmar was at least two or three times as expensive as Thailand, not just because we were staying in hotels or flying, but almost across the board.  Hard to understand because the day labor wage is $6/day in Myanmar as compared to $10/day in Thailand.

Since we bypassed the Bagan temples, we planned to spend 4 days in Inle Lake.  Our 2 main highlights were an all-day boat ride on the lake and a bicycle ride along the lake.  IMG_1022Without a doubt the Inle Lake boat ride was worth the entire trip into Myanmar.  The narrow 45′ modified long-tail wooden boats powered by one-lung Chinese diesel motors IMG_1144were the primary and ubiquitous transport over the entire 13X6-km lake for tourists and locals alike.  The adventure starts dock-side negotiating a boat and fare, however thanks to Lonely Planet and consulting other tourists it is easy to know the going rate.  Our lady boat owner insisted on only 4 per boat, and $5/head, an unbelievable value, we realized, once we were half-way thru the trip.

IMG_1019The driver who spoke minimal English went out of his way to point out, slow down, allow for photos, and take us to the places seemed less travelled since there were probably thousands of tourists in hundreds of boats on the 44-square-mile lake.  Right off the bat there are several enterprising men dressed in fisherman costume on their 12′ wooden fishing boats, poised to demonstrate leg rowing which is a wonder I can’t wait to see McKenney or Joe or Al try once I show them the videos.

IMG_1241This blog is too short to cover all the sights: fisherman, floating gardens tended by farmers in boats, villages on stilts over the lake, temples, handicraft workers.  It was a full day, until sunset.  We’ll feature weaving and silversmithing in the next blog.

Myanmar

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We felt it’s time to expand our Southeast Asia experiences by adding Myanmar to the list since it shares a border and millennia of history with Thailand.  And being somewhat reactionary to the trend of changing country names with new regimes, I have more commonly referred to Myanmar as Burma, but we IMG_0908 - Version 2were chagrined to learn that the Bama people came to the region in the 9th century and called themselves Mranma and the r sounds like y in later dialects.  That kingdom was destroyed by the British in the 19th century and was replaced by Burma which only referred to the main tribe of Myanmar’s multicultural population.  So how far should you go back, my prejudice was with the current regime and maybe Myanmar refers to all the tribes still constituting the “Republic of Myanmar”.

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We chose to fly in and around the country, which is a precedent (I hope we don’t make a habit of it – you miss too much of the country and it’s people), because we really only wanted to be away 10 days from Trang, getting back before the Chinese New Year and we had to stage the trip exactly at the half-way point so as not to impact our two 60-days visas for Thailand.

IMG_0920The first thing we noticed on arrival was that the traffic drives on the right (as we do in the States), but the vehicles, 99% of them, are right-hand drive (only a few ancient trucks and a couple of NGO vehicles with left-hand steering).  You can imagine how hard this is for traffic that has a propensity for passing when the driver has to lean to the left or ask the passenger if it is clear to pass.  I think they IMG_0922compensate for this handicap by honking.  Stanna tells me that they still don’t honk as much as India, but most of the horns are anemic from overuse.  We tried to deduce where the vehicles came from, saw some from India and they share a common border, but we were told there is no legal land crossing so they must arrive by ship, as do vehicles from Japan.

The second most noticeable change from Thailand was that both the men and women of Myanmar wear their traditional clothing, albeit the men wear a Western dress shirt with the longyi skirt.  It was easy to be noticed as a foreigner not just because of our white faces but because of IMG_0929our shorts & capris when everyone else was wearing long skirts.  This is probably a good place for a brief rant on the average Western millennial traveler wearing their beach-appropriate and sloppy clothing reminiscent of the viral Walmart photos on the internet.  “Being yourself” at the beach or at a recreation area is probably acceptable but it makes us feel conservative when we see these folks in the airport or walking around the central city.  And we should mention that, other than at our hotel, we only saw about a dozen foreign tourists walking around in Yangon, while our second stop at Inle Lake was Tourist Central.

IMG_0970We chose to walk around Yangon, a city of 5 million (which didn’t feel like that many people), just so we could see how people live, peer into shops, and see the basic culture without having a windshield or glass between us and the locals.  We noted right away the prevalence of pedestals with several water jugs just along the streets.  After a lot of guessing Stanna finally lifted the lid to learn that they were water stops for people who need to quench their thirst along their walk.  Lots of street vendors & small shaded alley markets with what seemed to be a lot more colorful vegetables and flowers (and we later leaned the flowers are imported from China).

IMG_0909TG got busted for wearing long shorts halfway into the most famous shrine in Yangon, Shwedagon Pagoda, known for having 27 metric tons of gold leaf in its upper chedi dome (our Thai friends say it is the gold stolen from Thailand), along with thousands of diamonds and other jewels at the pinnacle 325′ up. Yangon as well as the entire Burmese country is well known for its temples, chedi and higher percentage of the population who are monks and nuns.  Although we were quickly reminded that after a while all the glitter begins to look the same to us.  So rather than go to the famous plain of pagodas at Bagan in the dry country, we went to see Inle Lake, which will be our next post.

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Fascinating how thing are done in countries where labor is so cheap. They hand dig trenches and use bricks 5 courses thick to make storm sewers.  And a wood carver was crafting ornate window shutters with only one chisel and mallet on the city side walk. Or farmers hand watering a field with matching watering cans.
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