A Taste of Thailand :o)

I think Thailand was the country I was most looking forward to going to in terms of the food and it didn't disappoint!!! The curries and stir fries were amazing, the banana fritters were divine, it was the first place I had a lime and mint freeze yum and the Chang/Leo Beers weren't bad!! The country can be summed up in three quick sentences:

- Fabulous Food
- Amazing Massages
- Temples Temples and more Temples!!!!

Our first port of call was Phuket (or F**kit as Tierna pronounced it!!). It was pretty disappointing, full of tourists, tacky souvenir shops, people pestering you to buy things as soon as you walk out the door!! We stayed in a nice hotel with a pool as a wee treat in Asia...great to be able to afford nice accommodation here at less than the cost of a 10 bed dorm in Sydney!!! So the hotel was nice and chilling by the pool in the sun was perfect and we did one good tour to Khao Phing Kan Island which is where the James Bond Film - the Man with the Golden Gun was filmed. The tour included a trip to a cashew nut factory, a huge Gem shop - no money to buy any though :o(, a floating fishing village for lunch and obviously the obligatory temple!!

After the disappoint of Phuket we flew to Chiang Mai and the difference was amazing...having finished South East Asia now (yes we are waaaaaayyyyyyyyyy behind in the blog!!!) we would put Chiang Mai up there in our top 3 places to go to in South East Asia. The town was chilled and there was loads to do. We could have spent 2 weeks there having numerous cheap massages, maybe even taking a course, eating nice food, learning to cook Thai Style and just wandering up and down the nice little streets of the old town. Unfortunately we only had 5 days there but here are the 5 must do's if you ever make it Chiang Mai :o)

5 Must Do’s in Chiang Mai!!

1) Have a massage at Green Bamboo - really nice and professional massage. A first for both of us and it was perfect!!! Tom had a nourishing rice oil massage and I had a peppermint oil massage. The girls there were really lovely and made you feel calm and relaxed. We only wish we had been staying in Chang Mai for a bit longer to go back for a second one or they run courses to learn the art of thai massaging!! www.green-bamboo-massage.com

2) Eat at Dash - lovely Thai restaurant owned by a Thai woman that lived in America and married an American guy. Her husband died last year and she moved back to Thailand and opened a restaurant, guest house and runs cookery lessons. Really good food, good mojitos and honestly the best brownie I have ever had the pleasure of eating!! Noi entertained us during our meal with her stories and local info on Chang Mai - a really nice woman. www.dashchangmai.com
3) Chat to the monks at the Monk Chat Yard at Chedi Luang Buddhist Temple. They are really friendly and approachable and will tell you anything you want to know about Buddhism in between their prayer times. They are also really interested in knowing about you and your religion. Really interesting conversations. The temple is also beautiful and one of the oldest in Chang Mai. It has huge elephants surrounding the top layer of the ruins of the original temple.

4) Do a cookery lesson with Thai Organic Farm. They took us to the local market and on a tour of their own vegetable gardens to collect our ingredients. The cookery school is outside the city and away from all the noise and chaos. We cooked and ate our way through 7 courses of gorgeous Thai food. The instructions were excellent, the food tasted great (if we do say so ourselves!!) and they give you a recipe book with all of the things that you cooked to take home - they even wrote in some alternative ingredients for things you might find difficult to get at home! www.thaifarmcooking.net

5) And last but definitely not least go and meet the elephants at the Elephant Nature Park. This trip is a little bit more expensive than the other elephant trekking tours but the money goes straight to the foundation which, having been there seems to be doing excellent work. The foundation was set up by a superwoman called Sangduan Chailert (or as they call her at the reserve ’Lek’ which is Thai for small) who started it off by rescuing four abused elephants. She then bumped into a rich American guy who thought she was doing great work and donated enough money for her to buy 50 acres of Thai jungle just outside Chang Mai. She now has 150 acres, 40 rescued elephants, about 55 rescued dogs, one three legged pony, a black bear and a herd of buffalo!!! She seems like an amazing woman and is doing great work!! At the sanctuary you are not allowed to ride the elephants and they don’t put on any shows but that’s what we liked about it! You could just see the elephants moseying around their land, we fed them at lunch time when they moseyed in for food and we could help bath them when they came to cool down in the river. Great day and the elephant is a very cool animal!! We took way too many pics but heres a few!!
www.elephantnaturefoundation.org

The TONNES of bananas and melons the elephants ate every day!!!

After Chiang Mai we headed to Laos on a slow boat from Chiang Khong in Thailand across the border to Luang Prabang in Laos. So the next post is Laos. But we do come back to Thailand (Nong Khai) for a couple of weeks and of course to Bangkok before we flew to Japan but we are going to put that in a separate post as this one is long enough already!!!!

Malaysia - The Cities, The Highlands and the Islands!!!

The City

From Singapore we took the train to Kuala Lumpur and once we left the suburbs of Singapore the scenery was pretty much palm trees as far as the eye could see. But that changed when we approached KL. There were lots of similarities to Singapore but much less developed. It had a forest of high-rises in the business district (Twin towers with its sky bridge the most striking of them), a little India, a Chinatown, hawker centres but substantially more mosques and not so many bars as the major religion is Muslim. If you did find a bar beers were very expensive so no major sessions had there!!!! The food more than made up for it, the Laksa dishes were amazing equalling Liz’s & that’s saying something!! They drink what they call white coffee’s like it was going out of fashion. It is coffee with condensed milk, it was far too sweet for me!!!

On the second day there we took a tour to the Batu Cave which is a Hindu shrine just outside the city and has the highest Murga statue protecting it. It took 11 men 7 years to build the statue!! There were 272 steps up to the top of the cave - Michaela’s legs felt every one of them especially on the way down after her 6km run that morning!! After the cave we went to a small shop where we got to see some Batik painters in action. They use hot wax on textiles in order to draw their designs and then add colour in between the wax lines. I think we might have done some Batik art back in the day at Assumption!! Our final stop was a world famous Pewter factory, Royal Selangor. The crafts people were really skilful to watch, no automation in this factory. They made animals such as crocodiles and money trees which were used as a form of currency in the past by breaking of parts of the body or the money of the tree!! Maybe it’s where the saying money grows on trees comes from?!! They had a handprint of everybody who had ever worked in the factory (the guy had a broken finger in the photo below).

The Highlands

We took a bus onwards and upwards to the Cameron Highlands (it was a long and windy bus journey!!) and based in a little hillside town called Tanah Rata. It was a beautiful setting and the best thing was the drop in temperature from the humidity of Kuala Lumpur. It was a beautiful place to relax. We went to visit some tea plantations which were just rolling hills of green as far as the eye could see. After a morning of picking tea it was time to visit the Boh Tea estate to sample a cup. I had the Gold blend and I must say it was better than a cup of Barrys…..I know sacrilege!! We strolled through a mossy forest and saw some insect eating flowers and visited an insect and butterfly farm. After the farm we headed to Michaela’s favourite part of our time in the highlands, the strawberry farm. We shared a strawberry chocolate fondue and it was so so yummy!!

The Islands

Island life was next to be sampled and we took a bus trip to Penang. The island is connected to the mainland by a 13.5km bridge which is the largest bridge in Malaysia. We used Georgetown as our base for the 3 days and we hired a motorbike to tour around the island. On our journey around the island we came across a beautiful floating mosque, beachfront cafes with idyllic views, tiny fishing villages, temples & a tropical fruit farm where I had an acerola juice as the last time I was able to have one was in Brazil in 2003 and it was worth the wait!! The bike gave us a great freedom to go where we wanted to but the crazy tropical weather did try to halt our progress a few times. Got saturated at one stage and had to stop for shelter until it calmed down. These local cyclists had the same idea and even offered us some of their bananas to help keep our spirits up.

Overall, we found Malaysian people to be very happy, really helpful and always wanting to engage in conversation. And did I mention the spicy cuisine was amazing. It is certainly on the list for a re-visit.

 

The bike abondoned whilst we took cover!!!