Sorry, no photos because haven’t transferred to the computer yet and too lazy to do right now.

Off to Baeng Saen beach, which I’ve probably mis-spelled. It’s a long stretch of beach with a walkway lined with vendors selling food, toys and souvenirs. Behind the vendors there is row after row of umbrella covered loungers with tables for you to eat whatever you’ve just bought. Then there is the beach, lined with guys renting jet skis, small motor boats and banana boat rides. Posters every three meters declare that this beach is part of “Unseen Thailand.”

While the food looked quite tasty – emphasis on crabs and prawns, grilled and fried – T said “maybe not fresh” so all we bought was a bag of durian chips. All, well maybe some of the taste of durian with none of the god awful smell.

At the northern end of the beach, past a couple of resort hotels, we dined at an open air BBQ seafood place built out over the water. A bowl of mussels was average, a dish of baby clams fried with chili was almost too spicy for me, but the soft shell crabs fried with garlic was just perfection. I think there were four crabs in this dish, which cost about US$5 and after we finished the crabs I started spooning some of that fried garlic. Small side bowls of fish sauce and Sri Racha sauce proved to be the perfect condiments.

Then a short drive took us up to the top of a hill with a commanding view of the area. It was also filled with lots of fat monkeys and vendors waiting to sell us fruits to feed the monkeys. Everyone was buying fruit and feeding them, hence the huge monkey bellies scraping the tarmac. One psychotic monkey reminded me of several people I know, or perhaps one of my dogs. If you went to give a banana to a different monkey, he’d run over and try to push the others out of the way. When he had half a banana in his hand, if you went to give him another one he’d throw away the perfectly good half he had in favor of the new one.

Following that, a stop at a new Chinese temple still under construction in the area. I really will have to post some pictures of this, one of the most ornate Taoist temples I’ve run across, clearly a lot of money went into this, gold everywhere.

Then a two hour massage. But it was not a good one. The woman massaging me was really fat and I kept worrying that she might try to walk on me or even just sit on me, so I could not relax and enjoy. The best thing about it was the US$6 price. I’ve had much better.

In the evening, what amounted to my first home-cooked meal in 10 years of traveling to Thailand. We went to the house of one of T’s cousins, apparently known as the best cook in the family. She has three kids and a Japanese husband – her next door neighbor also has a Japanese husband. Apparently guys who came down from Japan to work the factories there and discovered their little patch of nirvana. They had this sort of little wooden gazebo – benches surrounding a table on a raised platform with a wooden roof – sitting outside by the corner of their house and we sat out there to eat and drink.

The food really was delicious, even though it was simple. There was a kind of dry crabmeat curry. Tofu fried with shredded pork and chili. Soup with tofu and pork and aromatic herbs. And a western style salad with lettuce, tomato, onion, cucumber and hard boiled eggs.

T was worried in advance that I wouldn’t like the food and had said that afterwards we could go someplace else if I was still hungry. But I took three servings of everything and was contemplating going back for fourths when our host broke out a bottle of Chivas Regal.

We made plans for a big group to hit one of the discos on New Years Eve and then for a big multi-family outing to some town near Pattaya for New Years Day.

With my wireless router working perfectly, used Skype installed on my Dopod to make some calls to the US for free. Geek heaven.

Aside from the crappy massage, absolutely nothing to complain about today.

Hongkie Town
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