Cooking

Rice & Friends is a new cooking school set up by a lovely young lady named Luxi. She speaks perfect English and has set up her cooking school in the court yard of the house she lives

Jasper and Senne from Denmark were the other two aspiring cooks and we were taught how to make a tofu salad that dispelled my long held belief that tofu is tasteless and should be generally avoided. Then we did an eggplant and garlic dish that was something I will definitely have to add to my repertoire back home. To finish it off we cooked a stirfry chicken dish with chilly and a sesame oil sauce.



I will post some photos as soon as I can persuade my computer to talk to the Internet again. This message is send from my telephone.
Edit 22/07/2011 Fixed

Travel costs in Thailand

I kept notes of all my expenses during the Thailand portion of the trip and averaged out spending 1200 Thai Baht or NZ $48 per day, this includes the cost of my visas for China and Vietnam which were 2600 Baht each.

The average cost for some of the major daily items is below.

Accommodation 495 Baht/Day

Food 305 Baht/Day

Transport 70 Baht/Day

Entry Fees 45 Baht/Day

Accommodation: I stayed mainly in air conditioned rooms some of them quite nice. If you stay in fan cooled rooms or bargain better then I do you can probably do it for half this price.

Food: Three meals a day and plenty of coffee but no alcohol. I normally ate in restaurants but you can save yourself a lot of money by eating in the food markets. Any alcoholic drinks will add significantly to the cost.

Transport: This is largely intercity transport as I tend to walk a great deal when I am at my destination. Preferring an hours walk over a five minute taxi ride.

Entry Fees: Depends really on the speed with which you visit museums, temples don't charge an entry fee but might ask for a donation.

Miscellaneous: I spend some money on Internet access, toiletries and a few post cards. The major expense were the two visas which I had arranged via a travel agent. You can get them a lot cheaper by going to the embassy and doing it yourself, but who wants to deal with embassy officials more than he has too?

Chiang Mai

After lots of thought, and changing my mind about five times, I finally decided to keep on heading North, rather then go East, as I had initially planned.
So this morning I got on the bus to Chiang Mai and after a pleasant ride got here around half past three in the afternoon.
Not sure yet what I am going to do in the next few days but trying to get a visa for Vietnam and doing some cooking is on the agenda.

The Train to Phitsanulok

I spend most of the day on or near the train the ride from Lopburi to Phitsnulok is scheduled for just over four hours but when I got to the station it was already delayed by 45 minutes.

Never mind we got our luggage stowed,

waved goodbye to Lopburi,

and settled down enjoying the scenery.

The trip got longer as we frequently stopped on passing loops waiting for other trains to pass. It is one of those things that once your train gets delayed for more then a few minutes it makes more sense for the railway to keep on delaying the one train and keep the others running on time rather then delay every one else so you can make up time.
I do enjoy train travel there is always plenty to see and new and interesting things to eat.

This lady sells egg noodles and pork slices,

that in spite of the look on the child's face were actually rather nice.

Eventually we arrived in Phitsanulok around two hour behind schedule. I didn't see a single other tourist all day and doubt I'll see any here either.

Breakfast

Lopburi doesn't get anywhere the number of tourists Ayutthaia does and the ones that do come here tend to be Thai rather the European. S what to do if your request for toast and jam gets blank looks.? Obviously eat what the locals have. I must say the sight of tentacles on my plate did put me off a bit but hey these things happen.