We’ve met a British couple, Haydn and Sian, (and 5 year old daughter Hanna) who’ve come to Trang from China where they worked 8 years.  They settled in Trang about 8 months ago and Hadyn is planning to promote day cycling trips here thru all the internet avenues – social media and a web site.  He’s savvy on all the promotion and web based set-up, but lacking in suitable routes since all the Tourist info features direct routes on major highways.

Haydn would like to route his tours exclusively on backroads, which are virtually empty in southern Thailand. My maps of cycling routes around Trang (available beneath this site’s Header banner) use only major highways, so I’m helping him find and record backroad access to Trang’s favorite sites.  The added advantage of backroads travel, besides being slower and allowing cycling two abreast (not to mention safer), is that you can see how the people live, work and play.

Next project is to learn how to place those gpx files on the blog so that they can be downloadable. I’m using the GAIA GPS app on my iPhone to collect the tracks.  We’ve been using GAIA GPS for several years to track almost all of our hikes because the free, easily downloadable, topo maps give use USGS quality contours.  Open Hiking Maps, a subgroup of Open Source Maps (OSM), has world wide too maps for free download.  We used this source on our Switzerland hikes, downloading the gpx tracks before we left home.

While endeavoring to insure my iPhone didn’t get wet when wading in the waterfall cascades this weekend, I dropped the phone into an 18″ pool of clear fresh water. I could still see the home screen lit up underwater.  It took about 10-12 seconds to rescue the phone, but about 45 seconds to get it turned off.  (My Gaia GPS was still tracking and I didn’t want it operating when it was wet.)

I vigorously shook the iPhone trying to sling out any water from the bottom phone orifices and inadvertantely turned it on again. Since I was an hour away from any rice options, I let it sit in the direct sun for an hour, and then once I managed to buy raw rice from a restaurant I packaged it up in a spare ziplock bag.

There won’t be any photos from this weekend’s ride at this point. It was a leisurely 85-km ride checking out the backroad routes to Trang’s favorite sights. I’ll be happy to use it again as a camera if the intensive-care bag trick works. It’s been 24 hours at this point and I’m patiently waiting another 24 with the bag in the sun.

Update: iPhone is working just fine after 48 hours in the rice bag and cooking in the direct sunlight.

Real happy to say the least.  Read that I should have taken the SIM card out as well but I’d be worried that rice would have gotten inside that slot.

All’s well again.

Jumbo Shrimp Tempora

We haven’t featured much “food porn” this year, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t still taking photos of most of our meals.

Glass Noodle Salad

Noodle Salad

We often tell the story of when we were trying to decide where to travel after Paradox and our stent of house-sitting. We generally asked folks who’d been traveling just where they liked, and would recommend we visit next. Thailand always came up on everyone’s list. And the only thing they could quickly bring to mind was “You’ll love the food”, or “the food… the food.”

A few of the more than 100 crabs served to 20 people at one of our island bicycle overnights

Now on our fifth trip we are still raving about “The Food”. And, not just the cost or value of Thai food, but the quality and tastes. Just a couple days ago we finally remembered we hadn’t even had Pad Thai this year: a basic staple that costs 20-25 Baht (80 cents) and is available everywhere. “A-roi”: the Thai word for Excellent. I ordered Pad Thai in Durango several years ago and paid $8.95 at a simple Thai restaurant.

We learned an expression when we first arrived in the Rio Dulce, Guatemala on Paracas.  One of the cruisers announced the minute she tied up at Mario’s Marina, “The Galley is closed.”  While in Thailand we are doing what that Texas lady in the Rio did and incidentally what we believe most Thai families do: bring food home or eat out.

Chicken Red Curry

Duck & Rice

We do have a small concession to eating “every meal” out, in that we’d discovered German Muesli in 1-kilo bags that we eat for breakfast most mornings with yogurt.

Cashew Chicken

Sweet & Sour Chicken

We are very partial to one restaurant that serves “the best” Panang Curry and even though it’s way on the far side of town, 12 km from our home, we scooter over there at least once a week.  Stanna even had a lesson in that restaurant kitchen last year, but just can’t quite duplicate the cook’s heavenly taste when she tries it at home.

Our three favorites at Mai Mueang

We have at least four restaurants we like to hit each week, each has a different menu and we’ve actually rated them by quality, quantity, and value.  Depending on our lunch schedule we’ll choose one over the other.  Most of our evening meals are take-home foods we gather on the way home from shopping or we just zip over to the University food stalls or the large outdoor market minutes from our home.

Yam Mu Ya with seafood

Occasionally we’re treated to a meal or dish prepared by one of the Thai tenants in our complex or given a meal by one of our friends in town.  Never knowing what we’ve been given is always exciting, so we ask our owner-host at Ban Wassana how to serve it and what we’re enjoying, oftentimes sharing the large meal with her family.

Penang Sea Bass

BBQ’d Baby Squid – So much better than Calamari

Here’s the Mai Mueang Menu with English translations, in case you’re curious.  This is regarded by our Thai friends as “pricey,” however you should note that 100 baht is $2.80

When the average meal is 40 Baht or $1.15, this restaurant is a splurge, but we’re managing,

Omelete

Snack

Shrimp Fried Rice

Camping food

Magnum

Coconut Snack

Spicey Seafood Salad

Chicken Fried Rice

Known as “baby wind” [mills], the LukLom competition adjacent to Trang, was full blown when we visited this last week.  Located along the rice field roads just before the wind funnels down into a Venturi created by two towering karsts, the Lukloms color and fill the skies with their palm tails, ribbons, dangling cones and spinning cups. Since last year’s competition they’ve constructed an elephant-flanked head-gate to the Khao Chang Hai Cave (a place we’ve visited numerous times with it’s legend of the lost elephant) which is part of the northern-most limestone karst rising out of the rice fields. I asked a couple I’d met if they could give me a reference and their answers should be quoted verbatim, so I’ve included it below.

These baby wind mills are a relic of ancient times when these colorful and noisy contraptions were placed in the middle of the rice fields to ward off birds who fancy eating the newly planted rice shoots. Perhaps there aren’t as many avian marauders or the current technology of putting those errant flapping plastic grocery bags on posts in the newly planted paddies works just as effectively at half/no cost or labor. Now you only see the authentic crop saviors at the end of the harvesting seasons during the height of the Spring winds high along the roadside to be judged for their individual sounds, motion and frightfulness.

There is a never-ending opportunity to pose  in front of one of the local attractions.  The Andaman Gateway is an elaborate rest stop half-way between the two coasts along the narrow peninsula between Trang and Phattalung. The pass over the mountains is only 750′ with a easterly ascent of about 5 kilometers, but it offers a challenge to cyclists and over-loaded trucks, who jockey for positions all the way to the summit. (In case you’ve not figured it out from the photo: Thais used elephants pulling giant stone rollers to compact those original roads – we saw a live demonstration of an elephant pulling a massive stone roller at an agricultural exposition last year.)

This attraction has been under construction for several years and recently opened in our absence over the North American summer.  We watched them last year erecting wire mesh elephant forms  and then in following weeks painstakingly placing cement to give the forms a solid shape as we cycled past.

They’ve done a remarkable job on this 10-acre hollow along the highway and we look forward to coming back and reading the history of how and when the original road was built.  (It was raining when we stopped.)  However, according to our host, the ancient King ordered the road built for trade between the coasts since the two rice growing seasons are opposite each other.  The 10 3’x 6′ bronze shields should give us the full story since they’ve taken the trouble to cast the history in English as well as Thai.

Our outing this week was accompanying TigerSong’s son to his embarkation station in Songkla, where he is picked up by an oil rig helicopter and transported to one of the rigs in the northern Gulf of Thailand.  He is a new materials engineer supervising cement blow-out caps for the daily underwater drilling operations.

The contrasting cultural experience was visiting Hat Yai’s Central Shopping Mall, a dizzying 6-floor mega-mall with a central interior courtyard, escalators, international brand-name shops (we seldom see – even in the States) along with it’s indoor ice rink, I-Max theater and convention center.  Hat Yai is 3 hours over the central mountain range from Trang, on the East coast with 800,000 Thais in it’s metro area.  Quite a revelation for us as we’ve been in southern Thailand for 5 years now and never knew such a large city loomed over the mountain and south toward Malaysia.  We like our side with it’s urban population of 56,000 and hardly any tourists.

Fortunately on the way home, TigerSong took us up the coast an hour where we visited a newly constructed market at Thale Noi, where they channelled off a lagoon of the famous water lilly lake and built a perimeter of rambling elevated walkways of traditional Thai merchants selling traditional foods and handicrafts.  The stormy day didn’t offer many wonderful photographic opportunities.

Almost forgot to include a photo of the swimming herd of water buffalo we saw crossing the channel between their wetland habitat and the Thale Noi lake.  I’m eager to show anyone the video of them swimming and then rising up on a submerged bank.

Long day, but we’ve now seen new territory and some more of Thailand’s changing times.

Luk loms from Jum and Ken’s knowledge: A better translation may be “child of the wind” or “son of the wind”. Originally they were a type of “pest control” to keep birds and insects out of the rice fields around harvest time. Over time people began to try to out do each other and build the best luk lom and it became kind of a competition. Although no longer used for pest control, they tradition has remained and become what it is today, a local festival. According to Jum, this was once  widely done throughout the south, but had slowly died out, along with knowledge of its origins. But, again thanks to Jum and her curiosity for such cultural things, I can tell you what I learned when we first moved here.

 Like many other things in SE Asian Buddhist cultures it traces its roots back to the Hindu Brahman traditions and the Vedas. It is based on a legend where Vayu, the Hindi god of the wind, was busy with preparing for harvesting his rice crops and taking care of his other “divine” duties. Vayu had to leave for some reason (I cannot recall why, some sort of “divine mission”) and told his son to watch the rice crops and keep the birds from stealing it until he could return to harvest the rice. His son, who did not want to kill the birds (after all they were only trying to eat), realized he could not protect all of the fields at once and that if he used his power to control the wind to blow the birds from the fields that he would also destroy the crops. Being rather inventive, he designed the bamboo windmill which in Thai is known as “luk lom” to make noises and movements that would scare the birds (and insects / locusts) away from the fields. He could then place the windmills around the rice fields and use the ability to control the wind (he was the son of the wind god, after all) to blow the windmills, which would spin and make the “singing noise” from the hollow bamboo flutes on the ends of the blades, and the motion and noise would keep the rice field safe.

When Vayu returned he was very impressed and showed his son’s handy work to the other Vedas (? guardians?)  who were also impressed and told him to share this with the humans so that they could also protect their crops from the birds. And thus the origin of the tradition. 

Apparently, the origin myth associated with the luk lom is no longer as well known as it once was, just like building them. Another casualty of modernization and loss of cultural heritage due to the loss of knowledge and traditions no longer being transferred from generation to generation as people now keep their heads stuck in their smartphones rather than engaging in such personal interactions.

Just like when we were cruising, folks ask what we do all day just anchored in one cove/town, one place, and in this case one room. ADL’s was the answer we gave so frequently when we were on the boat. Activities of Daily Living: those same goals they require in nursing homes for the institutionalized so they don’t develop lividity.

Time goes so quickly you have to remember to do “one chore a day for the boat,” and for us in Thailand, besides our ablutions and feeding (which is no less than sumptuous even when we eat at our room), that amounts to cleaning our digs, washing clothes (major room cleaning and linens provided weekly), catching up on local home news, national and international happenings (digitally, of course with websites [Durango Herald, Huff Post, CNN, Aljazeera, FiveThirtyEight], subscriptions [Economist, New Yorker and Atlantic], and podcasts [New York Times, Science Friday, Wait Wait… and Planet Money].

Then, tg’s studying Thai (vocabulary flash cards, audio alphabet and phrases, plus translations of menus and signs photographed with later interpretation using Google Translate) Stanna working occasionally with Chalong on her ESL professional papers and presentations, to challenges us. Oh, and keeping up with friends with Chats, Messages (text) and FaceTime, not to mention a blog.

And additionally on the home front, we get to read books (Kindle app for Stanna on the iPhone and iPad – Audible on the iPhone for tg), watch videos of recent movies, provided by the local residents (most of the 2015 new releases) on USB flash drives, and now we can use our Netflix subscription (albeit with limited content availability) to stream movies and TV serials like Narco, Jessica Jones and Making a Murderer. Entertaining podcasts such as Serial, Undisclosed, Hidden Brain, This American Life, and Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me fill in when you feel like veggin’ out, or the latest word is “chillin’”.

We have a number of venues to relax, read and chat in. Lounging by the ponds, out at our back yard table and chairs, the front porch, our Belgian friends’ porch and we can use the social eating and gathering sala if we choose. Much like Paradox we’ve got a “big yard” and plenty of room to hang out.

This belabored dialog is simply to encourage those of you retired folks in cold, inclement and closed-in climes to consider all the advantages of coming to Thailand where the weather is warm, the people are friendly and the conveniences are plenty.

Is it worth reminding you that this arrangement costs us $150 a month for our apartment (Stanna reminds me another $ 9-10 for electricity), $45 a month for a scooter with $1.40 for gas each week. Our most expensive and best dinner-sized meal costs us $6.25 for two, if Stanna doesn’t have a beer, and normally lunch costs about $1.20 each.

Our regular blogs should explain what we do when we leave our residence, which we have to do almost every day to forage for Thai food, whether we eat out (at least once a day), or bring it home as a take-home delight from the carts, markets and carry-out restaurants all over Trang. Or when visiting with our Thai friends and cycle touring.

We would never say this is better than cruising on Paradox, but it’s a very similar and far less expensive alternative. And there is no guilt for not shoveling your neighbor’s walk.

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]