Saturday, December 25, 2010

Nice lunch

We found nice lunch yesterday, after I took a walk on Patak road, the main highway and realised that although it was busy as hell and took several minutes to cross, you can walk along there without being offered a tuk tuk, a suit or a massage, and then I started to notice that there were several little shacks with Thai writing on the outside and Thai people eating on the inside.

The one we chose for lunch had no English menu or pictures, but a canteen style counter where you could point at your food. We couldn't see rice so asked for "khao" and the lady looked very surprised that we had asked for it in Thai and she had understood us! We each pointed at some tasty looking dishes to be piled on top of our steamed white rice. Dgym's included some kind of spicy minced pork that was hot enough to leave him wanting copious amounts of cold dairy produce afterwards, and mine included some weird little chewy dried fish. Very tasty, with nice cold jugs of water at the table, and cost us 70 baht in total. We felt suitably pleased at having fed the two of us for less than the cost of a fruit shake down the road, and finding a little piece of genuine Thailand again.

Dino golf In the evening we decided to fully embrace the touristiness and go for a round of dinosaur-themed mini golf, after all it's not every day you see that, and what holiday is complete without mini golf? Quite expensive - 240 baht per adult, i.e. double the cost of a round of mini golf on Brighton seafront, but it turned out to be a lot of fun putting our way through glowing caves, past waterfalls, dinosaur statues and dinosaur poo statues, and we did get a full 18 holes for our money.

We were in danger of being cut short at just seventeen holes when Dgym knocked his ball into a murky pool which was deeper than his arms are long and his chopstick-style attempts to retrieve it with two clubs were fruitless. I finished hole 17 and lent him my ball, which he also knocked into the water. We eventually managed to fish one of them out and finish the game. I won, by the way. After all that, I think I would have won even if my score had been higher.

After dino-golf we walked up the road a bit to Karon Noi beach. It was dark by then but we had a little walk around on the squeaky sand. If you close your eyes you can imagine you're walking on snow.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Merry Christmas! We are loving your stories, especially the food ones. Brings back so many memories, Pete sitting on the rocks while I swam in the waterfalls and jumping a mile when they bit me. The water's all cloudy so you can't see them coming... It's a big fishy conspiracy to have a laugh at the expense of the tourists. Great here you are having so much fun, wish we were with you. Love Rachael

dgym said...

Merry Christmas, and getting on for a Happy New Year too!

We have left Thailand now, so if you want to head over for a bit it is unoccupied. Or you could just come and join us in Cambodia, do you think Laila would like a fried squid on a stick for her belated birthday present?