Three times now, I’ve been part of the Pot-top presentation to the Haui Yot Hospital about 25 miles north of Trang.  The Trang Cycling Club collects pop-tops over time, off their own beverage consumption, from roadside trash, and who knows where. Maybe once a year (I’ve been three different years) they cycle as a group to present the aluminum to the doctor director of the hospital in typical Thai fashion: a speech from both parties and hundreds of photo shots.  On this occasion 25-plus cyclists pedaled the 45-km ride with their saddle bags and handlebars loaded with pop-tops. (The club and their various factions and splinter groups is said to be more than 350 and growing rapidly.)  So we don’t know just how many locals collect pop-tops, but it’s a dedicated group, in any case, to aggregate more than 30 pounds of those little clips.

As the blog title says, these pop-tops go to helping amputees.  This quality of aluminum is evidently best for forming prosthetic limbs and the Haui Yot Hospital works directly with converting this resource into helping the disabled.  Our presentation day was timed to coincide with a “eat and be healthy fair” in the hospital parking lot.  So we were pressed forward to the ever-present popup bandstand, with its rock concert speaker setup, and greeted at full volume, to the curious crowd sampling 6 kinds of blended fruit and vegetable smoothies, health remedies and fitness promotions.  (The four blends I sampled must have been responsible for the faster pace I experience on the homeward ride.)

Of course Thai ceremonies, fairs and festivals always include entertainment, hence the bandstands (which BTW you see daily traveling the highways, speakers bulging off the back of pickups).  We missed these dancers’ performance, but they were being interviewed as we arrived. It isn’t polite to comment on their “style”.  Surely a historic tradition of a bygone time.

For those of us wanting a little longer ride, culture or tour, half of us ventured farther north to a Karst limestone cave whose many chambers and caverns proffered its Buddhist statuary and tributes.

Just another weekend club ride. Next week we’re going further north to the island Koh LIbong for their festival.

[Here is a link to the Malaspina University Geology website with a graphic that explains how Karst’s are formed]

We’re back in Trang and it feels like our second home. Our room is changed (down three doors), the layout is the mirror image and they’ve added a table and chairs out back with the recliner we appropriated last year.  Our red plastic storage box was already in our room so we only had to unpack our meager household items (dishes and containers, utensils, hangers, exercise ball and yoga mat) to feel settled in. We brought almost the exact same clothes as last year (thanks to our lists and photos) so outside of provisioning we’re at home again.

We no sooner unpacked clothes and jumped in the shower after 48 hours of door-to-door travel (including 6 hours’ sleep in an airport hotel in Bangkok – we avoid going into downtown Bangkok at all cost) when TigerSong and Chalong pulled up with news about a 300-person ride with the governor of Trang the next morning. All I needed was my bike from SunSern and to change out pedals and saddle.  That involved contacting SunSern, a quick trip to town, faster equipment change and a 7-km ride back to our digs.

I made it.  Best way to postpone jet lag. I got one of the two places of honor riding on the right of the Govenor for four hours.  Slowest I’ve ever pedaled uphill (you couldn’t get a wheel ahead to embarrass him).  We rode to Ban Samran on the coast where there was a very large festival in progress. Ride home was much faster on my own, but at the end of 118 km I was toast.

More like Zonked.  Stanna stayed in Trang provisioning on our motor scooter.

Yet another bicycle parade and this one was flanked by vintage motorcycles, restored volkswagens and the town’s Tuk-tuks.  Most of southern Thailand’s economy is founded on harvesting rubber from it’s rubber tree plantations, not to mention rice and palm oil, but rubber trees grow best in this region of Thailand primarily due to it’s latitude and associated climate.  There doesn’t appear to be Agri-Business managing and producing all these tens of thousands of hectares of patch-work, mostly small family-owned groves of trees planted on old flat rice fields as well as on the hilly inclines.

In 1899 a provincial governor who had travelled “abroad” brought the first rubber trees back to stimulate Thai agriculture, and planted them just down the road from Trang in Kantang.  This parade and celebration was for Rubber Tree Day and constituted the biggest parade we’ve seen, or been a part of, since visiting Thailand.  All the various parading constituents met at different locales around town and coalesced at Trang’s largest stadium fairgrounds, where gigantic gymnasium-sized tents covered agricultural displays, food stands and fair attractions.

One massive display on the fairgrounds we only saw the end of, as we cycled in thru the center of the grounds, was an elephant pulling a giant stone roller that was used to build the roads over the mountain passed between the peninsula’s coastal regions.  Sorry no photos, as the elephant was discharged while all 250 bicycles were herded to the forefront of a concert stage.  SunSern explained that before the use of dynamite they would “fire” (heat) the boulders in the way of a roadbed and then pour water on them to crack the rock. Then the labors would “cut and fill” and the elephants would “roll” these Flintstone-sized rollers (almost the size of those VW bugs in the parade) to smooth out the roadbed.

Besides the transport-mode participants in the parade, there were quite a number of flatbed truck-mounted floats depicting the various stages of Rubber Tree development including taping the rubber water and pressing the liquid into the door-mat-sized product we see drying adjacent the plantation’s family mangle-looking presses throughout this region. Now-a-days, the rubber water is more often collected daily from plastic 20-liter containers into 50-gallon drums and then later in the day pumped into pick-up-mounted 300 gallon tanks and finally taken to a wholesaler who fills a 20-wheeled tanker truck. Mat production only occurs in areas where access to daily trucking is limited, like the islands and deep in the hill country.

Mat rubber is used for the heavy rubber production of items like tires, whereas the liquid rubber can be used to form “finer” items like gloves and gaskets.  Thailand ranks 1st in world natural rubber production, however synthetic rubber production has outgrown the demand for natural rubber.  Between synthetic rubber and competition in neighboring countries the price of rubber has just recently dropped from 180 Baht a kilo to 30 Baht.

This was the second time in three days that we were filmed by a drone-mounted GoPro.  I guess this is the norm for ariel photography and works well with parades and large gatherings.

We didn’t stay for the food fair provided to the participants.  SunSern and his wife took us to a favorite Thail restaurant where we gorged on delicious dishes, some familiar and other new, like the pounded catfish that explodes into a light puffy bird’s nest of taste when poured into a wok of palm oil.  It’s topped at the table with grated mango in fish sauce.  A Roi.

Everyone 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.

Another 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.

Surprisingly, 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.

Lee 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.

With the coconut milk boiling she added the simple ingredients: sugar, fish sauce, Panang curry, chili paste, kaffir lime leaves, 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.

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.

We 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.

Thai 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 round 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.

Her 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.

Her 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.  And 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.

Not 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”.)

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.

I 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.

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.

The 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.

After 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)

At 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.

They 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.

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.