It's All About the Local Flavour (Part 2)

Lao is not a country known for its cuisine. There is a pretty good reason that you don’t find too many Lao food restaurants in this part of the world. Its not that the food is bad, it just lacks the kind of style that makes trendy ethnic food cultures trendy. Perhaps the Lao lost there culinary skills during the 11 year American bombing campaign…cooking in caves can be tricky…it’s hard to see.

One interesting feature about Lao food is that 95% of it is cooked on open wood fires. Even restaurants in comparatively large towns use outdoor/indoor wood fires to cook your food.

Lao cuisine is usually served with a basket of the ubiquitous sticky rice. The basket has a lid, and it is bad luck to forget to put the lid back on when you are done. Sticky rice is eaten with the hands (no chopsticks in Lao: no forks either, just spoons) and is used as a utensil to convey the non-rice part of the meal into the mouth. As a side note here, I recently ate at a Thai food place in Powell River, and got some strange looks from the cliental when I started shovelling my food in with my hands…but remember…this is proper etiquette for sticky rice.

Typically you get very small portions of food…but hey, its not like your paying much for them.

The Lao have a few traditional dishes that are worth mentioning:

The first is Laap, which is a meat or fish salad, served cold or warm. A meat salad sounds unappealing at first, but is really just shredded meat with chopped up onions, green beans, mint leaves, and chillies. It comes in Beef (which is sometimes actually water buffalo), Pork, Duck, Chicken, or Fish. It can be cooked or raw, spicy or bland. Laap, although the national specialty is rarely consistent and ranges from the best thing you’ve ever eaten (almost) to down right yucky.

The most common dish is foe, which are noodles (bland noodles) and is eaten for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Foe is usually pretty boring (mainly because of the trend to now use cheap Chinese instant style noodles), but watch out for the bits of mystery meat…the whole animal goes into the soup. Foe is spiced up with chilli paste, by the consumer… the Lao like it spicy.

Another good dish is Luk Luk, which is a beef or buffalo stew type dish. Anything with fresh veggies is coveted after a few weeks.

But man can not live on food alone when roaming the world, and quite fortuitously, Lao is blessed with two of the best alcoholic beverages in the region. The first, and most important, is Beer Lao…the national (and only) brew. Beer Lao is not only good by Asian standards (typically regional beers suck) but is actually a good solid lager. It was created by the French, and is unavailable in neighbouring Thailand due to the fact that it would collapse the Thai brewing industry (Thai beers are a rather foul chemical tasting concoction that fortunately have high levels of alcohol in them).

The other beverage that one must try is the local rice whisky called Lao Lao. This is hootch to be sure, but over ice with honey and lime juice it is almost devine. Moderation is a must, as the uncontrolled fermentation process produces quite a punch. Lao Lao is made with fermented rice, and distilled in large fuel drums throughout the country. Ducks are commonly found trying to eat the fermenting rice.

No matter what you eat or drink, or where you have it, remember to say Khawp Jai Lai Lai when you leave. Not only does this mean thank you very much, but its real fun to say.

Its All About the Local Flavour (Part 1)

One thing I really love about travelling is the availability of cheap local yummies on the street. I absolutely love sampling the local fare...the old point and taste trip. This is a shot of some street vendors on Bangkok's Ko San Road, probably the only place in Thailand that you can find english (or even roman script) telling you what you're buying. You can get pretty good Pad Thai for 20 Bhat (about us$.50), but as the day gets hotter, the unrefridgerated shrimp get less appealling. And lets face it, as soon as the party crowd on Ko San wakes up (a little past noon) the area is just not enjoyable.

A little more Thai, and a little less farang (gringo in Thai) is the street food scene in bustling, yet quaint city of Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand. Now Chiang Mai gets more than its fair share of farang comming through (its all the rage to go on a trek and smoke opium with the hill tribes), but the citizens of Chiang Mai have not gone so far as to put every sign in english. The food here is different than in the south, and sticky rice (not even close to being like sushi rice) is the staple. It's what you get to go with the rice that makes eating in Chiang Mai so much fun. They gots eats.
These photos were taken on market Sunday. Now there is a huge street market everday, but Sunday is the best, as vendors from all over the region come in to sell their wares. Sunday is, in fact, the day that vendors come to sell to other vendors, who later (Monday through Saturday) sell these things to farang.
Great deals on multiple quantities of stuff can be found, and some vendors dub it the "wholesale market". This translates to even more yummy street food than normal as all those vendors from out of town require food. And most of these goodies cater not to farang, but to the Thai themselves....cuisine authentico.
Most of the snacks are a variation of meat on a stick, but some things are really tasty. The drinks are really sweet, and should be avoided by anyone with even a miniscule history of diabeties in their family.




For a sit down meal, there is a wide variety of reasonably inexpensive (read: really F@#$%^&& cheap) international fare type resturants, but the one must have meal in Chiang Mai is this local specialty curry cooked up in the citys' muslim quarter. In a dingy reasturant across from a mosque, advertised only in arabic and thai, there is a nameless restuarant that serves up a fabulous curry dish. And the experience of eating among so many traditionally dressed muslims in a predominantly buhddist country is a truely foriegn experience. And the problem of not speaking or reading arabic or thai?? Just show your white ass up, they know what you came for.

Meat on Street

This is a little travel tradition I like to call "Meat on the Street". This is an ongoing instalment of often disturbing images of questionably stored flesh intended for human consumption.
Pictured here are some sausages drying on a pole suspended between two chairs on a sidewalk outside a monastery in Luang Prabang (Lao PDR). This is one of the least graphic, as no recognizable parts of the animal are visible. These vsuages sat on this sidewalk for the duration of my stay (3 days) which seems odd, considering the number of resident dogs at this ,and all, monasteries in South East Asia. As a side point to consider, and most likely answering the burning question - why do monks need so many sausages?, monks only eat two meals a day (one at 6 am, and one at 11 am), and fast for the duration of the day. If you only ate two meals a day, and both could be considered reakfast, you would probably go through a lot of sausages too.
I have some real horror show images of a slaughter wagon in Mexico, and some good street butchering and market hanging pictures from all my travels in Latin America.
I will have to borrow my sisters scanner and unleash a torrent of street meat upon you good viewers.
It's noteworthy to mention that I have consumed a wide selection of meat products so exclusively from little vending carts in all places I've been, but the only food poisioning I can conclusively link to street food was a shredded carrot and cabbage toastado I bought in Quetzaltenengo (Xela) Guatemala. Kira was made seriously ill by a snack of Bolivian death Jello (green flavour) with a very attractive whipped topping. I warned her not to do it.
The principle at work here is that if the food is popular with the locals, it probably won't kill you. I've had much worse from restaurants, as who really knows what’s going on with the food behind the scenes. I had a bad run with East Indian food when in Lao, although at least one instance (out of three) was probably psychosomatic.
Strong local alcohol is also a proven prophylactic against tummy troubles, although the really cheap rum of Honduran origin should be avoided.
Again, I promise you more slaughter at a future date.

Travel Blogging Runs in My Family

My sister suggested that I start a travel orientated, photo rich blog of my travels. So here it is. Seeing as how she will be the only one reading it, I'm going to break convention and not do the I went here, I did this format, but rather present it by subject, or group of images that I can loosely loop into a subject based purely on whimsy.

Today’s subject is local transport oddities...those motorized conveyors of people and goods (but most importantly people) that are completely (or relatively) unique to a country or region.

The top image is from Thailand (Bangkok's Ko San Road to be precise). This flashy hybrid motorcycle taxi is called a "tuk-tuk". That’s onomatopoeia...it makes a tuk...tuking noise. They are also used in Lao, but have less power and a different pitch to the motor. The name is the same, but pronounced differently to reflect the difference in motor noise. I love literal languages. The strange looking machine in the middle is the rural equivalent of a tuk-tuk, and is essentially a rota-tiller tractor attached to a cart. Top speed: 5mph (downhill with a strong tailwind). Name: Dok-dok. Reason for name: see above.

This last beauty is from the Battambang rail line of North-western Cambodia. It is a bamboo train powered by a small motor, and is easily assembled by three Cambodians in less than two minutes. The come apart even easier, which is good, because they have to be taken of the track if other rail traffic is coming. The rules of the road are that the heavier vehicle has the right of way. The go faster than the actual Khmer trains, which if you seen the condition of the tracks, is not surprising, as it is time consuming to re-rail a de-railed train.