Ton Sai

Blogger’s Guilt is tormenting me. It has been far too long since a regular blog occurred on this page. To punish myself, I promise to take myself out of my room and down to the beach, and to seat myself at the bamboo tables of the beach restaurant. I will contemplate the sand and the lapping waves for a short while and think about how bad I have been. I will then order a coconut shake and drink it. To show myself how serious I am, I will refuse the decorative purple flower that comes with the shake. (Maybe. Unless it would hurt the waiter’s feelings.) Once I have forced the shake down, I will further reprimand myself by eating a Thai green curry with chicken. If, by the end of the meal, I feel that I have not yet learned my lesson, I will have to play hard-ball and get a pancake with honey. If that doesn’t work then clearly I’ll have to do it all again tomorrow.

I have decreed Ton Sai to be the food capital of the world. I have fallen madly in love with Thai food. The green curries, the tom yum soup, the seafood, the chicken with oyster sauce, the ginger, the chili, the spicy plum sauce on steamed fish, the sticky rice with mango. The list goes on and on. And I am drooling. My only problem with Thai food so far, is the intensity of spiciness. My tongue spontaneously combusts somewhere around the level where the average Thai starts to warm up. Most of the time it’s ok, because you can ask for “little spice.” There was one occasion where the language barrier triumphed - I got no spice at all and the seafood soup ended up a bit bland. And sometimes the Thai concept of what a “little” spice is and my concept do not entirely match up. This means that I end up sweating, sneezing and sniffling my way through the meal. But damn – it’s pretty fine torture.

To my immense dismay, N eats the same thing almost every meal. He eats a chicken pad thai. It appalls me to see a thrilling menu spread out before him like a culinary adventure and every night it’s “Chicken pad thai, please.” I may have mentioned before that N is not exactly a reckless diner. I have to guinea pig everything first.
I am congratulating myself wildly because I have recently engineered a foray into tom yum territory. I had tom yum seafood soup. I did not tell him it was seafood. I gave him a spoonful with no tentacles, eyes or wavy feeler bits hiding in it. I bullied him into eating the spoonful of soup and he admitted he liked it. His repertoire of chicken pad thai and chicken with cashew nuts has now been expanded to include tom yum chicken soup.

Tom yum is spicy, hot and sour soup. It comes with veggies and (in my case) seafood. You can also have it with noodles. It is absolutely delicious. It is head explodingly spicy. Every time we order it we pester the waiter to ensure that there is only a LITLE bit of spice, please! And it still sometimes borders on blistering the tongue. Last night the waiter thought it was terribly funny to bring the tom yum and set it down with a cheerful “Tom yum soup – extra spicy!” And then he cackled all the way back to the kitchen at our faces. Ha ha! Very funny…

I have booked myself onto a half day cooking course. I am terribly excited about it. To my great surprise, N has agreed to come with me. I am sure it is only because I mentioned that one of the dishes you can choose to learn is pad thai noodles. It looks like it is going to be great fun. First we will learn about the main spices and ingredients that go into Thai foods (ginger, chili, lemongrass, oyster sauce, fish sauce and so on) and how to blend them. The course includes at trip to the local market where we will get to hunt the spices in their native territory. Then we rush back to the cookery school (Smart Cook Thai Cookery School) like maniacs, clutching our spices and rubbing our hands in glee and we learn to cook mouth-watering Thai food. And another quite fun thing is that they take photos of us and post them on their website (www.smartcookthailand.com) on the gallery. We will be cooking on Wednesday 02 December, once we leave Ton Sai.

It’s hard to believe we’ve been here a full month already. (Which reminds me exactly how long I’ve been a slack blogger.) Most of that time has been spent in Ton Sai. Ton Sai and Railay are two tiny areas in the Krabi province of Thailand. They are like little beach towns, only the word “town” is an overstatement. Railay is more developed, with some hotels and upmarket restaurants and a lovely beach. Ton Sai is a short walk away. To get from Railay to Ton Sai you wait for low tide and walk across the rocks or else you scramble up the jungle path, over the hill and down the path on the other side.
In this photo of Railay West Beach at low tide, you can see the patch of jungle between the sea and the tall cliff, wherein the jungle path lies. It’s steeper than it looks in the picture.


When you get to Ton Sai, it is just a couple of dirt roads lined with restaurants, laid back bars and some resorts. There’s a climbing school and a minimart or two. And that’s about it. You cannot access the area by road, only by boat, because of the limestone crags that rise up behind them. There are to be two bakkies and a couple of motorcycles that live on Ton Sai. It must have been an exciting trip getting them here. Railay has a couple of tractors to manage the transport of the baggage of the well heeled tourists from the boats to the shore. Ton Sai is definitely the more budget side of the area. We’re staying in Ton Sai. Obviously.

View of Ton Sai Beach and Railay West Beach in the far background:



We have a room in a small concrete block called the Garden View Resort. It’s nowhere near as charming looking as the other places in Ton Sai but we like it for other reasons.
One of the Garden View cats:


We have managed to fully mosquito-proof it. That is no small feat. The mosquitoes here are horrific. They are everywhere. They don’t stop biting me. We have sticky-taped up every hole in the ceiling and the insect coverings over the windows. We also have a fan that works and so our room is cool all day long. Our toilet flushes and we have a working shower. But best of all, we have almost 24 hour electricity. Our electricity goes off somewhere in the wee hours of the morning and usually returns some time before 9. Electricity here is dependant on generators. Power blips are frequent. Sometimes our fan turns languidly and sometimes it sounds like an aeroplane propeller. The lights dim and brighten like we are in the middle of a haunting. It’s very atmospheric. Many places only have electricity during the night. So sorry for you if you paid extra for a fan room. Guess you won’t be using in during the heat of the day. We have two large beds in our room. I guess they must be three quarter size. Either that or else they are Thai size double beds and we are just large Westerners. Our shower is cold and that makes my life a bit miserable. But it would be the same at any of the other resorts. Note – when I booked our hotel in Bali I booked a slightly more expensive room to get hot water. N scoffed and said that no one in Asia pays for hot water because it is always so hot here and you don’t need warm showers. Well, let me tell you that little piece of homespun wisdom only applies to men with short hair! Anyone who has had to stand naked under a stream of cold water for the time it takes to wet, lather and rinse long hair once for shampoo and once for conditioner will tell you that warm water is nice, even in the tropics. I am thoroughly delighted that I pooh poohed his "advice" and insisted on the warm water room for Bali.

Ton Sai Beach at sunset:


I find myself with much to say (unsurprising, given the month of slacking off) and not enough time to say it. I’m dropping off to sleep and so I will leave the rest of it for another post. I leave you with one of my favourite photos. It was taken at sunset as we walked across the rocks at low tide to get back to Ton Sai after swimming at Railay. I think that there are dragons in the rocks in Ton Sai…

SA to Thailand Installment 2

The hotel I stayed at in Malaysia was the Concorde Inn, cunningly described as “strategically located, only three minutes away from the Kuala Lumpur International Airport.” What this means is that you need a shuttle bus to get there.
Fortunately the shuttle bus was free and this fact had played a large part in my calculations as to where to stay. I only had to wait 20 minutes before the bus arrived and then I was whisked off to the hotel. We passed a couple of road blocks manned by police with bloody great guns. “Ah,” I sighed contentedly “I feel right at home” while the American tourists looked apprehensive.
I checked in and went to my room, fending off a pack of overeager porter types, who were all desperate to carry my backpack for me. I declined this service, since I have carried the dratted thing all by myself for five months through Europe and this is the lightest it has been for a long while, thanks to AirAsia’s stingy 15 kg luggage allowance. Also, I did not have a single Malaysian Ringgit on me for tipping or any other purpose. My brilliant plan was to not spend any money in Malaysia at all. (Apart from the hotel fee, but that was paid for by credit card.) Complimentary transfers from and back to the main terminal at the airport and a complimentary breakfast, meant that the only hole in my plan was getting from the main terminal to the low cost carrier terminal (LCCT) the next morning.

I got to my room and it was functional but unexciting. “Each room”, the Concorde website had gushed, “comes with an unobstructed view of our lush gardens.” This meant that I could pull back the curtain (singular curtain, since the window was about 1 metre wide) and look past a solitary palm tree, 5 metres of plain grass, over a hedge and into the car park. Admittedly the car park was lush with cars but I can’t help thinking they must have been confused when they wrote the description.
I dropped my pack and turned on the light. “Let there be light!”
But there wasn’t.
Nor was there plug power or aircon (Kuala Lumpur is stinking hot and humid, in case you were wondering.) I looked outside. Other lights were on. Not a power failure then. Back inside. Nothing. I hunted the room to look for clues but didn’t find any. The trip switch was untripped. What the???
I eventually resorted to calling the reception for help. The lady was very keen to help but her English was fair (I’m being generous) and my Malaysian non-existent. She told me to put my door card “in the black box behind the door.” There was a black box behind the door. It contained the trip switch and there was nowhere to insert any card. After much confusion the receptionist said she would send someone to help me. After she hung up I figured out that what she had meant was the white box next to the door. You slide the door card into this white box and magically the electricity works. Let there be light! And there was! Great excitement!
The maintenance man arrived at my door and I sent him away with an apology for dragging him out unnecessarily. I plugged my computer in and logged onto the free wifi (another consideration in my choice of hotels.) I connected to the network but my internet refused to work despite much fiddling. I resorted to the receptionist again. She gave me the password. “Um yes, thank you for that, but it is not even asking me for a password.” Confusion reigned. She sent the maintenance guy out. She hung up. I returned to my computer and refreshed for the umpteenth time. Suddenly and inexplicably (don't you love IT?) it worked and asked me for the password and I logged on successfully. I had to send the maintenance man away for a second time with an apology for dragging him out.

In my great thriftiness I decided to have a cup of tea, since this meant I did not have to spend any of my non-existent ringgits. I boiled the kettle. In my attempts to juggle the kettle plug and my laptop plug I knocked a glass off the tray and it smashed on the tiled floor. Ah, crap. I decided against calling out the maintenance man to clean it up in case he attacked me out of annoyance. I swept it up as best I could and left it in an out of the way corner. (I fessed up when I left and they said no worries.)
After a session of internet admin, I got to bed late and still utterly exhausted. This travelling thing really takes it out of one.

In the morning the hotel redeemed every one of its (mild) imperfections with the best breakfast spread I have ever seen in my life. Numerous cereals, acres of fresh fruit, yoghurt, muffins, cookies, bacon, sausage, toast, hash browns, French toast, porridge with sambals and chives, three kinds of fruit juice (I had starfruit juice – tastier than the fruit but leaves a less tasty aftertaste), tea, coffee and a host of other Asian breakfast thingies things I could not identify.
I stuffed myself. All my cares dissolved. I ate and ate. Breakfast ended with a race between the last piece (number three) of French toast and the check-out deadline. The French toast won. All of my cares returned with a vengeance when I tried to get up and I realized with horror that I had put on about 7 kilograms over the course of breakfast. I waddled off to my room to fetch my pack and waddled swiftly to the complimentary shuttle bus, fending off porters emboldened by my new weakness. Leaning slightly towards the side I was sitting on, the bus trundled us the “three” (ten) minutes to the airport. I found myself in the international terminal needing just 2 ringgits to catch the shuttle bus to the LCCT. It was so frustrating! 2 ringgits is about R4. Gah!
Due to time considerations (drat that last piece of French toast and the maple syrup it swam in) I had to abandon all of my wild plans to procure 2 paltry ringgits. These plans (some courtesy of friends) included selling my copy of my South African Men’s Health to a passer by; lurking in a shop and paying someone’s bill with my credit card in return for the cash and swapping the magazine for a bus ride. I drew the line at begging. In the end I rushed over to the money changer and exchanged 5 measly USD for 16.50 ringgits. Smarting from the injustice of the world and the failure of my brilliant no-money-in-Malaysia plan, I found the shuttle bus to the LCCT, all the while repelling evil private bus sales people who tried to sell me tickets on their busses for 30 ringgits.

The shuttle bus took us past the requisite armed road blocks to the LCCT. This is where AirAsia flies from. AirAsia is Asia’s Kulula/EasyJet/Ryanair. The LCCT is great. It swarms with people but is easy to navigate and the whole machinery moves swiftly and slickly. Sadly, AirAsia is not great. They are cheap. But they are crap. They are the fly in the ointment of the LCCT. N flew the same route as I did (LCCT to Krabi) the day before me. His flight was delayed by 2 hours. His plane arrived an hour late. Once they had boarded they were delayed by another 40 minutes as the AirAsia staff ran around in panic and tried to figure out which of the passengers/terrorists had snuck aboard without a ticket. Consternation reigned until these rocket scientists eventually figured out that they had simply counted incorrectly. Oops.
My flight was also late. I was delayed by about an hour. This does not bode well for the next three AirAsia flights that we have booked.
As luck would have it, I had three empty seats to myself. I laid my weary head down and slept. Unfortunately the flight was short and so was my nap. When the flight landed, I charged off the plane as if the AirAsia staff had bitten me and flew to the passport control area as quickly as I could. This was because N had warned me that he ended up at the back of the queue and waited for over an hour to get his passport stamped. Due to this knowledge and my subsequent sprint, I only spent 15 minutes in the queue. I got my pack quickly and after changing money and buying a bus ticket to Ao Nang, I trotted out into the smogshine (Asia is full of cloud and smog and haze.) I was in Thailand!

When I bought the bus ticket, the ticket ladies had told me that the bus was leaving in five minutes. Full of alarm at potentially missing the bus and waiting another hour, I continued my mad dash until I located the bus and flung myself on board. I settled into the seat and congratulated myself on having caught the bus by the skin of my teeth. And then we waited. And waited. Turns out that five minutes is a relative thing in Asia. Kind of like “now now” or “just now” in SA. Turns out that busses here wait until they have enough people before they depart. And so we waited until we were just about full. Then the driver came to each of us and asked where we wanted to go.
Now here’s the thing. N was in Krabi. He suggested that instead of me going to Krabi, I go to Ao Nang and he meet me there because the boat ride to Ton Sai is cheaper. He told me to meet him “in Ao Nang where the boats leave to go to Ton Sai.” So I said to the bus driver that I wanted to go to the place in Ao Nang where the boats leave to go to Ton Sai. “Ah! The Pier!” he said and wrote down “Pier’ on his piece of paper. That sounded very logical to me.
And off we set. We drove out of the car park, onto the road and back into the car park and back to where we had left from. We picked up another two puffing passengers and left the car park for the second time. Guess I needn’t have panicked about missing the bus. Guess I would have had time for a loo trip after all…
The countryside in Thailand often reminds me of Kwazulu Natal. Ok, apart from the craggy limestone cliffs that rise out of nothing. We drove through pseudo Natal and I felt more and more relaxed and at home. We had a slight glitch when an older couple alighted from the bus at their accommodation point only to find out, when the man checked his wallet, that he had paid for the bus ticket with three 1000 baht notes instead of three 100 baht notes. He was furious and was adamant that the ticket ladies would have known instantly of his mistake and that they just took the money and played dumb. (I think he was probably right, too. The ATM at the airport only dishes out 1000 baht notes.) Thus began a long saga where he demanded that the bus driver phone the ticket office and make the ticket women return his money. The driver phoned. Whoever would have imagined that the ticket ladies vehemently denied the whole thing? This led to an impasse, where the old man refused to get off the bus and declared he was going nowhere until the driver phoned the tourist police and summoned them to the scene. Since he was half in the bus and half out the bus at the time, this posed a problem for the driver. I settled down for a long wait. Eventually it was agreed that the driver would take the couple back to the airport and they could fight with the ticket people and the tourist police in person. The journey resumed. We drove through Ao Nang and the driver told me to get out on the curve of the road and said that I would catch a boat from that spot. I think he was in cahoots with the restaurant owners in that spot. I settled down to wait for N. And I waited and waited and waited. I walked up and down in case I had missed him. And I waited. After an hour and a half of waiting, I managed to elicit some vital information from the devious restaurant owners who had been trying to entice me inside to wait there and eat their food. When it was plain that I was not coming in to eat, it suddenly occurred to them that “Oh wait!” the boats also leave from another spot just down the road!
Gnashing my teeth in fury and exhaustion and frustration and unhappiness at having to carry my luggage all the way back down the road I had just traveled in a bus, I set off. It was after 3:30pm now and breakfast was but a fond (oh so fond) memory. I had to stop on the way at a roadside food vendor and I indulged myself in my first ever authentic piece of Thai food. I had a Thai pancake with mango. They take a piece of dough about the size of a matchbox and mash it flat. (As flat as a pancake, in fact… hahahaha!) Then they toss this paper thin thing into a wok and fry it. They add slices of mango to the middle of the pancake and they fold the edges over, flip the pancake and cook the other side. They take it out of the pan, cut it into squares and drizzle it with sweetmilk (runny condensed milk.) You end up with a crispy pancake covered mango, sticky, taste bomb. Delicious!

Fortified, I rounded the corner and found a long beach. At the close end was a spot selling tickets to go to Ton Sai. I hunted for N. No N. I looked up the loooooong beach and there were boats everywhere. Turns out the boats leave from all over the place. I was disheartened and weary and tired of walking up and down with my pack in my hot jeans (I travel on the planes in jeans) and I just wanted to collapse in a little heap and whimper for a long time.

To cut short a long tale of misery, N eventually found an internet shop and Skyped me on my cell phone (so much for his contention that it is stupid and useless for me to have brought my phone with me…..) and then proceeded to yell into the phone a bunch of stuff that I could not hear because of the noise of the boat engines. By dint of smses and screamed phone calls I found him at the far end of the long beach. He had bought tickets already and we got to the boat about three seconds before it was due to leave. What he had neglected to tell me was that when you travel by long tail boat you have to wade out to the boat. My jeans and I were both less than impressed with the lateness of this news. If I had had any idea, I would have had a pair of shorts handy. The jeans and I waded grumpily onto the boat and then sat sadly at the back, wet, sticky and so exhausted we felt like falling overboard and not coming up.

Long tail boats moored off Ton Sai:


The ride to Ton Sai from Ao Nang is very quick and we pulled up to the beach in the most magical setting I have seen for ages. I will wax lyrical about it in another post because this one is already far too long. For now, I will simply say that “a little slice of paradise” might well be a cliché, but it is apt.

Ton Sai beach at sunset - view of the right hand side of the bay:


Ton Sai beach at sunset - view of the left hand side of the bay:

SA To Thailand Travel Summary

The night before I flew I got to bed late. Shopping, admin and packing took me to 2am. Even so, I just didn’t get to everything. Being sick set me back hugely in terms of available time in SA, since I spent quite a few days recuperating.
I woke up on Thurs 29 Oct after just four hours sleep, and began to deal with copious amounts of admin. My car insurance is now back in my name. My credit card is sorted. It appears (after MUCH calling around) that I will not need a visa for my transit through Australia en route to New Zealand. Despite trying at intervals for a few hours, I could not reach the Vietnamese embassy to enquire about visa procedures. They just didn’t answer the phone. Their website is pretty crappy too.

Kevin arrived to fetch me at 10:00 and very kindly dropped me off at Jhb airport after nearly killing me a few times in the traffic. I spent a few boring hours strolling about the duty free area. Isn’t it great that you don’t pay tax when you buy from the duty free? And the only trade off is that things cost four times what they do in the high street shops. Bargain!!!! My only distraction during the dreadful duty free hours was a call from Bron J. Thanks Bron, it was great to chat!

My flight departed at 14:00. Since I flew Emirates, I had a mammoth travelling session. First I endured a 9.5 hour flight to Dubai airport. I watched Ratatouille – totally cute. I do love that rat! I tried to sleep after Ratatouille, but the combination of the crying child and the surfeit of good movies proved lethal. I gave up and watched The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - a nice movie but not a patch on how I imagined it when I read the book. I watched a couple of episodes of Dexter and that brought us to Dubai. The air hostess collected the headphone sets three minutes before the end of episode two of Dexter, leaving me champing in a fury of suspense.
Dubai airport is slick and efficient but it’s still not my first choice of where to spend three hours. One thing about the airport that made me very happy was the abundance of charging stations. This is where one can plug in one’s laptop and use the free airport wifi. Each charging station is fitted with a bank of universal plug sockets, so even my bizarre Italian plug fitted. (Bizarre Italian plug because I had to replace my laptop transformer in Italy after my original one got lost in Mallorca.) I didn’t get to sleep in the airport. I cannot fall asleep when I know that someone might scarper with my luggage, no matter how remote that chance might be.
My second flight was from Dubai to Kuala Lumpur. It was 03:00 when I staggered onto the plane, wide eyed and staring from exhaustion. The drinks trolley and then the snack trolley chased away any lurking possibility of sleep. (Dexter was not on offer on the flight and so to this day my suspense remains unassuaged.) Eventually I put a Moby cd on repeat and slept for a whole two hours. I could have cried when I was woken up by the breakfast bustle. Having flown into the rising sun (well no, not literally or else I wouldn’t be typing this) we gained a few hours and it was just about lunch time when we landed at Kuala Lumpur.

Kuala Lumpur is rather scary, as airports go. The thing is, you have to fill in this arrival card thingy. The arrival card quizzes you on all the stuff you are bringing into the country. Anything derived from plants, animals or fish is a big no no. Anyone who has been to Africa recently must report to Health Control. Ditto anyone who has coughed, sniffed, sweated, had a headache/fever/sore throat/shortness of breath etc etc etc within the past six days. Anyone importing any form of dodgy drug will be the lucky recipient of a beheading. (Or however it is that they implement their capital punishment in Malaysia.)
Trying to forget my recent bout of flu and the resultant headaches, fevers, sore throat, breathlessness, coughs and sniffles, I made my way to passport control. Ignoring the fact that I had come straight from Africa, I deliberately didn’t see where the Health Control people lurked. Reminding myself that if I started to sweat they would probably start off at the very least by quarantining me for swine flu, I pretended I didn’t have about 40 kinds of tablets in my luggage. I mean, yes they were all legitimate (antibiotics, cortisone, pain killers, anti-inflammatories, sinus medication – I am a walking pharmacy right now) but who wants to explain that to a surly looking border official while they tap on their desk with their menacing rubber gloved finger? Particularly when you’re a rock climber who is also carrying a massive stash of finely cut powder chalk. “What do you mean it looks like cocaine???” Putting my pot of Redroe fish paste out of my mind I sauntered nonchalantly past the customs blockade. Once past them, I managed to stop myself from breaking into a run by imagining a pack of ravening Alsations bringing me down in the middle of a crowd of screaming, pointing onlookers. I reminded myself that dogs can smell fear. It appears, though, that they can’t smell fish paste, Pro-nutro, milk powder, Aero or chocolate spread. Unless they’d already eaten.

Flushed with the success of my narrow escape from the border guards of death, I made short work of organizing the bus ride to the hotel, checking in and fending off the porters who queued up to help me carry my luggage to my room. I didn’t have a single ringgit on me for tipping and anyway, I’ve carried this pack for five months now, I’m damned if I am going to pay someone else to carry it from the bus to the hotel room.

Since N is whimpering at me pathetically from the other side of the room about how we need to watch a dvd on his computer now before we retire for the evening, I will cut my story short here. Stay tuned for the next riveting installment of Bronwyn’s travels from SA to Thailand!