Mr. Miagi

On our second day in Chaing Mai, we had an early start at the Chilli Club Cookery School. Conveniently located in our guest house, we had all of about 15 metres to walk to get there! Our class was of 5 for the day, Eoin and I and 3 Germans, Jochem, Nicole and Christina.

Some introductions and we were straight into the work. We each had to select 5 dishes to cook for the day. Between us we chose Tom Yum Gung (Hot and Sour Soup), Spicy Coconut and Chicken Soup, Green Curry, Red Curry, Pad Thai, Stir Fry chicken and basil, Spicy Papaya Salad, Spicy Glass noodle salad and finally Bananas in Coconut milk and Mango and sticky rice. Although each one of us cooked only 5 dishes, we were working together, so hopefully we

Our teacher for the day was a Thai man, a trained chef who for some reason, reminded me of Mr. Miagi! Once our dishes were selected, we set off, armed with wicker baskets, to the local market. Walking through it, you can't help but regret that we no longer trade like this. Everything was absolutely fresh – fruit and veg just picked, meat just slaughtered and seafood – well most of that was still alive. There were stalls for fruit, stalls for vegetables, stalls for shellfish, stalls for noodles and rice, stalls for spices, stalls for meat, stalls for eggs, stalls for coconuts (which like in Sri Lanka are a little industry unto themselves). Its trading old style, the market opens from sunrise to sunset, every day. People shop as they need, no weekly trolley load shopping here. The smells are overpowering, that bizarre combination of spice, soil, meat, fish and hard human labour. It hangs in your nostrils long after you've left, which we eventually have to do – there's some serious cooking to be done.

Returning to the Chilli Club, we spent the next half hour chopping and peeling, slicing and dicing, grating and crushing. Mr. Miagi (honestly, it was uncanny), showed us his karate style methods of dealing with garlic and chilli (ingenious) and then helped us to separate out the ingredients for each dish, and then the real cooking began.

The morning session saw us prepare our soups, Eoin did a Tom Yum Gung and I did a spicy chicken and coconut soup. We followed these up with green and red curries and finished before lunch with Pad Thai and stir fried chicken with basil. After completing each dish, we sat down and tasted the fruits of our labour. With Mr. Miagi supervising our preparation, there was no call for modesty, it was all delicious! My mouth is watering now just thinking about it!

We took a badly needed break for lunch. Not that we had been working particularly hard, but we had eaten so much, we needed to move around a bit. So Schmo and I retired to a little coffee shop down the road and passed the time digesting! Shortly after the rest of the city began considering lunch, we returned, rested but no less stuffed to prepare the remainder of the dishes.


The afternoon session was going to introduce us to some salads and desserts and a little bit of decoration! We commenced with preparing the sticky rice for the mango and stick rice dessert, which I have to say is among the nicest things I have ever tasted!!!

Mr. Miagi strenuously emphasised to us, – its not how long you COOOOK the sticky rice, it is how long you SOAAAAK the sticky rice (try to imagine the original Mr. Miagi saying this and you are some way to seeing what our Mr. Miagi was like!)

While our sticky rice SOAAAAAKED, we moved on with the salads - one of the big triumphs of the day. Delicious, light, flavoursome, healthy salads. Schmo prepared a spicy papaya salad and I did a spicy glass noodle salad. They were quick, easy to make and absolutely scrumptious – I can see frequent trips to the asian food market and spicy salads for lunch in work when we get back!

Made an attempt at some garnishes – a rose made from tomato! Messy, tedious, far more time and effort than I would probably bother to expend at home, but it was fun!

Finally dessert – yum! After correctly SOAAK-ing our sticky rice and completing the cooking part, we got down to the real business, eating it! Mango and sticky rice is just a little bit of heaven on a plate! I also got to taste the bananas cooked in coconut milk and we finished off by pinching some of Jochem's spring rolls – also delicious.

The good news is, we each got a little recipe book to take home with us, so we can (hopefully) make a stab at recreating these dishes when we get back! Can't promise it will taste like a Mr. Miagi supervised dish, but we'll give it a bash!

Please sir? Can I have some more?

Chiang Mai Mountain Biking

Its 11 am on Sunday morning (March 29^th - I wrote this a while ago ... shameful) I can't wait to get online – yesterday was a big sporting day. I want to find out if Ireland beat Bulgaria, and who won the Australian Grand Prix, but most importantly, I need to find out how Old Alex 2^nd XI fared in the semi finals of the Irish Junior Cup against perennial rivals Hermes.


However, I just can't seem to drag myself out of bed. My body feels like it was put through the crazy G force of Formula One, fell victim to some crunching Football World Cup qualifier tackles, and it definitely feels like there were one or two tough Hermes shoulders in there too. The reason being, yesterday we took to the hills of Chiang Mai for some Mountain Biking.


We started the day full of bravado. By 3pm, I was certainly feeling a little less confident and a little more delicate. We began with a safety briefing and got the usual warnings and waiver forms out of the way and loaded into the jeep with our guides and two other novice bikers, Rebecca from Canada and Louise from Ireland. (Its funny, we seem to meet Irish people on every organised trip we do!).


After a slow, winding drive up the mountain, we dismounted and our bikes were unloaded from the roof-rack, while we were kitted out with helmets, knee and shin guards, elbow and forearm guards and back and chest protectors. I nearly laughed at them, we were beginners, how likely was it really that we would be hitting terrain so rough that falling off the bike would be a possibility. Its been a long time since I've come off a bike, it might have been the Raleigh apple in Wesley Heights – I loved that bike! Now, I'm not only glad I didn't laugh, but I am incredibly happy I had each and every piece of that safety equipment.


We familiarised ourselves with the bikes; gears, brakes,when to sit, when to stand, never to lean forward and had a little ride around a flat off road path. Perfect! I thought a few hours of this, would do the job nicely. Something a bit different, and a few hours of some good, long overdue exercise!


We were split into two groups, Rebecca and Louise in one and Schmo and I in another. With our guide Daniel (sporting a nasty graze half the length of his lower leg!), we headed off first down the tarmac path. It was a nice ride, downhill, fairly windy, fast but fun. All of a sudden he disappeared off the path ahead of me, followed by Schmo – here we go, the real stuff begins! What I expected to find for the remainder of the ride was flat, slightly dusty, off road trails – forest trails. Not so much. Within an hour, we had hit a path, just about wide enough for a car, which had a solid mud path down the centre and a network of little gulleys on the sides. The gulleys were invariably filled with leaves and pine needles and therefore at first, not too easy to see.


We continued on, at a quick enough pace – cue Fall # 1. As I rounded a corner, I was a substantial distance behind the others. I had very quickly learned that the absence of brake lights on a mountain bike, make it difficult to read when those ahead are braking so space between cyclists is essential. It's also important to be watching the ground ahead of you for rocks and gulleys and various other obstacles. Trying to keep all this in mind, I rounded a corner and disobeyed rule number one – keep your tyres flat. It was as if someone pulled a carpet out from underneath me and I just tipped over to the right. Thankfully, the same leaves and pine needles that aided the fall, also broke it. Dusty, leafy and with my pride slightly wounded, I fixed the chain, hopped back on, and sped on down to the other two, who were waiting at the next bend.


As we progressed, I realised my confidence had taken a bit of a knock. I was more cautious than before, something which I don't think, in retrospect, is particularly helpful when mountain biking. We hit some more mud paths, with gulleys, this time, deeper, with a narrower mud path between. This was to be the site of my second, more spectacular fall, and my excuses for staying in bed this morning! I was flying along the path, enjoying the speed, the rush of air, the bone shaking bumps. As I slowed down, trying to be careful of the gulley, my front wheel slipped in, followed by my back. If I were smart, I would have just kept the bike in the path of the gulley, reached its end and exited.


However, I have learned, I am at times, not that smart.


I tried to steer the bike out of the gulley, which was too deep for me to manage, lost my balance, tried to brake to slow down, hit something, instinctively grabbed at the brakes, fell forward onto the cross bar (ouch), went straight over the handle bars, bringing the bike with me and ultimately landing in a heap (ouch to the power of 2). I wasn't hurt that badly, some nice bruises and grazes, which would have been much worse without the safety gear, mainly wounded pride to be honest. But with that fall, I had well and truly lost my mojo! The remainder of the ride, I was the insolent kid at the back of the class whining that this was too hard. I tried a few more gulley sections, but a handful of near misses later, I hung my head in shame and walked down one section – I hate to be beaten!


As we pushed on, I gradually got a little confidence back, mainly on the easier path. We cycled on towards the lake and lunch, and as we did I gradually felt better on the bike, more like we were getting to know eachother than becoming the arch enemies it seemed so intent on making us earlier in the afternoon. The stubborn streak in me has surfaced now however, so I'm going to have to give mountain biking another go. It may knock me around a bit, but I have to give myself at least one more opportunity to return the beating!

All Banged Up

So after spending a decadent day in Singapore feasting on Sushi and washing it down with Champagne it was back to the backpacker reality of keeping within the budget (not that we were allowed put our hands in our pockets in Singapore). Luckily for us Bangkok was there to help out in every way it could. Street vendors selling fantastically tasty and cheap things like all sort of meat on sticks. - ;meat on sticks (a firm favourite and a most suitable walking snack) from pork, chicken, cuttle fish (complete with eyes and quite possibly brains and innards – the poor little fellahs impaled on wooden skewers); the backpacker staple of Pad Thai – with egg, without egg, extra chicken; green or red curry; fresh tropical fruit – mangoes, pineapple, papaya, watermelon; and all for criminally low prices. You could eat a three course meal, washed down with the local brew Chang, for about 100 baht, the princely sum of about 2 Euro 10 cent. The most impressive part of this, is that this food, from the street vendors – it's not rubbish, its not greasy spoon outside lansdowne road or croker bottom of the barrel fare – it's seriously tasty. The only problem with it is that there was only room enough for one course, or sometimes two.

After a couple of days in Bangkok, which were spent largely “recovering” from our Singapore detour, mainly from the lack of sleep and over indulgence, we decided that we really should play the role of the tourist for at least a short time. We resolved to hit the River taxis and journey down to the Grand Palace and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. The river taxi is actually a great way to travel in Bangkok – escaping from the sticky heat and oppressive fumes of the streets, it was refreshing to have a bit of a breeze as we took in the view of the city from a safe distance. As it turned out, we could have walked to the Palace, but where would the fun have been in that.

On arrival at the taxi station beside the palace, we had an experience which made us realise just how different Thailand is to some of the other destinations we have visited. Almost immediately on setting foot on dry land, we were approached by a bubbly, chirpy Thai lady who gave us a detailed warning about ignoring the various scam artists around the palace – so armed with knowledge and a realisation that Thailand was not going to be quite as challenging a place as India, we headed for our destination.

The first thing we had to do on arrival at the palace was change! Although we had tried to dress conservatively, armed with the guidebook warnings, we still had to cover up. Short sleeves were acceptable for the men, not short legs, so Schmo donned a stunning pair of cotton trousers, while I had the pleasure of an ankle length wrap around skirt – which I must say went stunningly well with my old, grey t-shirt! Suitable attired – we marched on.

Entering the palace, it was hard not to find yourself in awe of the place. Most buildings were ornately decorated with mosaic tiles of gold, mirror and coloured glass and though it was quite a dull day, the whole site seemed to gleam. Our tour began in the enclosure where the temple of the emerald Buddha was located – which also housed some smaller temples, a scale model of Angkor Wat, a gold tiled stupa, assorted other buildings of religious or political significance – (we could have waited an hour for a tour in English, but the heat was fairly oppressive, especially in long sleeves and legs, so we pottered on alone, admiring – with very little info!).

The Temple of the Emerald Buddha is itself a sight to behold. Photography is prohibited inside the building, so I am afraid we have nothing to show, however, i can say it is probably one of the most ornate places of worship I have ever visited. It gleams with gold leaf and golden, be-jewelled artifacts. The Emerald Buddha (which is fact is made of jade, not emerald), is housed in a glass case and sports an ornate silver, gold and gemstone clad outfit, which is changed thrice yearly to mark the changing of the season; winter, dry season and the wet season.

Its a stunning complex, with bold ancient and new buildings, but unlike many of the places we have so far visited – there has clearly been significant time, effort and resources committed to its maintenance and restoration. By and large it looks “as new” and aside from the fact that you can view only the exterior of most of the buildings, it is a particularly impressive and awe inspiring sight. Unfortunately, as with so many days previously, the weather conspired against us and just as we left the museum the heavens opened. We decided to make a hasty departure and head back towards the river taxi and contemplate our next move!

So we decided to continue our cultural tour of Bangkok's sights and also use the handy river taxi again. Getting off at the next station and realising once again we were never more than 100 metres from next temple on foot. Wat Pho is the home of a very large sleeping Buddha statue. 46 Metres long and gilded to within an inch of its snoozing life. For all its grandeur it was a bit of a disappointment. Half of the temple's attractions were being renovated and to be honest at this stage we were feeling fairly templed out so we decided that the only solution was to get ourselves more meat on a stick.

It is virtually impossible to visit Bangkok as a backpacker and not spend a significant portion of your time on the Khao San Road. It houses the cheapest, busiest bars, the daily market sells anything a backpacker could need on arrival in Thailand from clothing, cds, dvds, souveniers and of course, there are the street vendors. But difficult and all as it would be to avoid the Khao San Road (not that we had any particular desire to do so), it was something we were never going to succeed in, given that we arrived the day before Paddy's Day.

We had already resolved to try and find an Irish bar in which we could at least mark the occasion. It took all of about ten minutes to do so and to Mulligan's we headed! Greeted shortly before the door by a green clad Thai girl (Note from Schmo: it was a very short green dress) offering us free Heineken (that great Irish beverage?!), we headed in to redeem our vouchers and receive our green pints. Mulligan's although a nice setting, with great promise of being a lively, bustling Paddy's day venue, left us slightly confused. The music supplied by two Thai men and their guitars, featured such Irish classics as The Eagles and The Beatles. The other entertainment included a magician, who, in his white and red striped dungarees would not have been out of place in TGI Friday's and a fashion show featuring what appeared to be the contestants of Thailand's next top model. After a lot of sitting around, with me whining about wanting a bit of Irish atmosphere, we eventually moved on (much to Schmo's regret as the fashion show was just about to start).

We stumbled upon another Irish bar, the Shamrock, and had a drink there – it was probably a bit more typical of the Khao San backpacker scene and reminded me of The Lodge, in Limerick – but open air. That said, it did the job and we passed a bit more time there, before the jet lag caught up on us again and we headed back for some more badly needed sleep.

(Most of this was written by Fiona but I would like to take 100% credit)