Som Roi Yod Beach Bar-B-Cue

 

This is a meal – a trio of simple recipes, comprising a spicy salad, some meat kebabs and sticky rice, with a sauce for garnish.

Pig sticking

After many trials and errors, it is as close as I can get to the food served by the beach grill restaurant, on the beach opposite the Krua Chom Thale resort, Dolphin bay in Som Roi Yod, southern Thailand. The restaurant has no name, and no menu, no address. I was unable to communicate effectively with the chef to the level of cooking methods and ingredients, despite the willingness of both parties.

Here is a meal that won’t break the bank or the belt, but which breaks the taste barrier with a thunderous explosion.

 

Calories and Costs

Salad only, no peanuts: calories 150, cost £0.93

Lean Chicken + Salad with no peanuts, no sauce: calories  375 cost £2.31

Full meal, with Pork: calories 1100, cost £3.10

Priced in pound sterling 7/6/2014

 

Calories courtesy of http://www.nutracheck.co.uk

Costs courtesy of http://www.tesco.com (and others)

 

“Papaya” Salad. (Alias Linda’s Thai Courgette Salad)

Preparation time, including dressing: 15 minutes

Papayas were disappointing. Especially the unripe ones used in this salad were often watery and tasteless, eminently replaceable with a light vegetable with a bit of crunch and a subtle, agreeable flavour. With the spices involved here, courgettes fit the bill superbly.

Ingredients for One Person:

• One medium courgette just-picked (c 150g)
• Carrots (c 150g)- as sweet and crunchy as possible – e.g. chantonnay
• Handful of Peanuts – omit to reduce calories. I just use ordinary, cheap salted ones.
• Handful of Fresh Coriander, chopped
• Portion of Thai Salad Dressing. See below

I don’t bother peeling the veg. Just wash, dry and grate the courgette and carrots together in a bowl and roughly mix them. I coarse-grate them by hand along the grain; mechanical graters can’t seem to do this, producing pieces that tend to be too short with a tendency to disintegrate when mixing. The salad should be crunchy and light not soggy and flaccid.

Place the peanuts in a transparent, clean plastic bag. Crush them with a rolling pin or end of a chopping board, until there are no whole ones left.

(Just before serving) pour over the Thai Salad Dressing and toss thoroughly.

Sprinkle first the crushed peanuts over, then the coriander.

Serve.

 

Thai Salad Dressing

Keeps in fridge for at least 24 hours.

For 1 person:

• 1 dessert spoon of Soy Sauce. I use Healthy Boy brand Dark Thick Soy Sauce. Avoid the ones that contain molasses unless you are fond of that flavour – it is very strong.
• 1 dessert spoon of Fish Sauce. I use Squid Brand
• 1 dessert spoon of fresh squeezed lime juice. You can substitute wine vinegar if you are on war rations
• 1 medium garlic clove, crushed
• 1 heaped teaspoon of soft brown sugar. Use more than this if you wish, not less
• 1 red Thai chilli, including seeds. Remove seeds first and chop the chilli as finely as possible. Use both seeds and chopped chilli. Fresh is best, but I have been using thawed ones from frozen– I can’t tell the difference once finely chopped.

Combine all the ingredients except the chilli and stir well to mix.

Taste test (easier without the chilli), and potentially add more sugar or lime juice.

Add the chilli and its seeds and stir well to mix.

 

Som Roi Yod Kebab Marinade

Exactly the same as Thai Salad Dressing, but use wine vinegar instead of lime juice which can produce bitterness when heated.

 

Som Roi Yod Kebabs

The beach grill served pork or chicken “satays”.

The pork was belly meat, 50-50 fat to meat. It was sliced to about 3mm. Not floppy; thick enough for a 2.5 cm long piece to remain roughly horizontal when held at one end.

Buy some good quality stuff; something Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall would use.

150g is generous for a single serving.

Remove the rind. Cut the meat into 2.5cm pieces. Mix well with the Som Roi Yod Kebab Marinade. Leave covered in refrigerator for at least a day. For a Saturday bar-b do this Thursday or Friday night.

For chicken use skinless breast fillets, cut across the grain 4-5 mm thick. One breast per serving (150g). Marinade in the same way.

At least 2 hours before grilling, soak some bamboo or wooden skewers in water. This keeps the meat juicy and makes it easy to remove from the skewer.

Thread the meat onto the skewers. Should be about 3 skewers per serving. Don’t overload – these are going to grill quickly.

Grill close to glowing hot coals for probably not more than a minute each side. Timing is not an exact science – a good bar-b master will know. The kebabs should be lightly caramelised each side.

Serve with sticky rice, “Papaya” Salad and “Nam P’to” sauce

 

Sticky Rice.

Staple feculant with grills in Thailand, this is “Glutinous Rice” or “Sticky Rice” (Oryza sativa var. glutinosa)

Paddy Pot – Sticky rice in tuperware container

It needs to be soaked before cooking, for as long as possible. Fill a large tupperware pot or jam jar about ¾ full of the rice grains. Fill it to the top with water. The grains expand and soak up the water. Check the next day and top up if necessary. Leave for at least a day; Preferably 2. If you are planning this bar-b-cue, prepare the rice on the same evening as the kebab meat and marinade.

I keep pot of soaking sticky rice permanently in the fridge, ready for whenever I need it.

Like me you may not have a rice steamer.

Carb-O… rice arrange in a ring to allow steam to percolate around…

Find a fine mesh metal strainer and a saucepan into which it fits snugly. Hopefully the lid will fit over the ensemble and create a good seal. The better the seal, the quicker the rice will cook. With a good home-made solution, the rice needs about 60 minutes. Put about 2 cm of water in the pot and bring it to a rolling simmer. When loading the strainer, concentrate the rice in “clumps” leaving gaps. This facilitates the circulation of steam and also makings turning easier. Place the strainer with the soaked rice clumps over the simmering water and cover.

Turn the rice over half way through, as the rice below will cook quicker that the rice above. Once half cooked the rice is easy to manipulate.

When the rice is cooked it becomes translucent, so loses the milk white colour it starts with and becomes slightly grey. It can be rolled easily into tight balls without sticking to fingers. It is chewy between the teeth. If there is still a floury or grainy “bite” to it, steam it for another 15 minutes.

Leave it to rest (without removing it or uncovering your steamer) for 30 minutes before serving.

Thai restaurants serve this rice at room temperature.

 

 

“Nam P’to” Sauce

This is my best rendition in Latin script of the sauce we were served with this meal as pronounced by the chef. I can’t find it anywhere on the internet.

Exactly the same as Thai Salad Dressing, with the lime juice, but with the addition of plenty of chopped coriander. Important to taste test this and get it right.

 

Om

Inside Wat Appalava, Chiang Mai

I sense my love is here. Speak beloved and do not find me strange… for though our bodies be close, my mind has journeyed to a distant place.

Kevin, I do think it’s time for you to come back to the hotel now. You must be starving…

Sweet one, I  have transcended time, desire, hunger and all other appetites. I have drifted to a place of serene tranquility where timid, beautiful creatures come out of the thick forest to sip at the  mirror-calm pool that is my mind.

But Kevin, you’ve been here since yesterday lunchtime. Even the monks are grinning at each other when they look at you. You must be needing the toilet by now!

…….. er…….  actually, I ………… I think I may have soiled my loincloth…

Sam Roi Yod

 

Sam Roi Yod Beach shack

There is no Paradise on Earth, as folk are fond of saying.

And even in Sam Roi Yod, there are things to complain about. In the first beach shack we settle down in, the owner bemoans the villa that is being constructed across the track from him, right on the beach itself. It is true, that part of his view between the palm trees across beach and the glittering Bay of Thailand beyond, is now obscured by a pile of breeze blocks and girders. We sip Chang and knit our brows in sympathy.

Across the way, massage ladies are waving to my companion. “Madame you want Thai massage?”. Tourists, especially European females, are often seen lain on the beach massage tables receiving the treatment as they stare across the blue bay.

Mai, kap khun ka. Lazer-beam Thai grins… “Maybe tomorrow?”… “Yea maybe” Who knows?

Who knows what will happen tomorrow in Sam Roi Yod?

Sam Roi Yod Beach: Coconut palms

Actually everyone here can tell you that with considerable certainty and confidence.

Tomorrow in Sam Roi Yod there will be 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night-time. The daytime temperature will reach around 35oC. Twice, the waveless tide, looking like a trillion tonnes of blue hair gel, will advance up the magnolia coloured sand towards the coconut trees, whose tousled fronds the breeze will ruffle. It will then recede, exposing the scent of seaweed, salt and catworms to the whispering air. On the white pickets that surround some of the villas, bee-eaters the colours of the maddest of circus clowns will catch wasps and hornets. But the beach diners’ lunch will pack just as sharp a sting.

Bee-eaters

At 11:30 in one of the best restaurants on Earth – nameless, menu-less, palm-roofed, sand-floored and free of electricity and mains drainage – brown fingers will flick a cigarette lighter at the bottom of a half-oildrum. Thirty minutes later the first marinated pork-belly satay will be slammed onto the grill as lip-licking clients begin to occupy the bizarre furniture strewn on the uneven, shaded ground. As the odours of grilled meat waft across the beach, ownerless, sandy-coloured beach dogs with sand-filled pelts will raise their noses to the breeze and peer at the expectant diners out of deep camouflage. Freezing cold beer will change hands. Tepid sticky rice in individual plastic bag servings will be dumped on tables. Ferociously spicy papaya salad topped with crushed peanut, squeezed lime and chopped coriander will be doled out… lunch will be served. No bank, no tycoon, hedgefund nor oligarch could ever buy that view… just for lunchtime, it is all theirs.

Sam Roi Yod Beach: Beach Restaurant

That’s what will happen tomorrow on Sam Roi Yod beach… and like Paradise, it is practically impossible to get to… but well worth the effort.

Next post, how to recreate a Som Roi Yod barbecue.

Sam Roi Yod Beach. Pork belly satay…

 

 

 

Ha Long Bay

It is quite unlikely none of them exist; these men – for men they will be.

They are medium to high IQ male adults with low emotional quotient. They may be engineers, quants, analysts; … degree educated, perhaps, but not people people – not salesmen or HR professionals. Women like their men confident, sharply dressed and generous; these awkward, slobby niggards are consequently single…. and they tour the world on Google Street View.

They might be called “Googlenauts” or “Street View Cruisers”. In the gardens of Japan and from Bombay to Yucatan they have got to know cities by walking the streets virtually. They have the knowledge of world towns they have visited and traversed without ever leaving the comfort (or safety) of their own lodgings.

It makes such excellent financial sense: no flight tickets, no bus, train or taxi fares to shell out for, eat your own food made in your own kitchen and at night, your own familiar bed already paid for. No mess, no fuss, no Delhi belly, no confusing foreign currencies or languages to deal with, and your own non-squat toilet always on hand and furnished with toilet paper. The world at your feet for the cost of highspeed broadband and an HD screen.

But they’re missing something, are they not, these “Mac Packers”?

Those who have made the real, physical and geographical journey to Yosemite will recall this. Before visiting this Californian valley, travelers mostly know what they are going to see. They peer at Ansell Adams’ photos, and a thousand others taken by those on a quest to capture the place on a 2-dimensional image. Colleagues and friends tell them: “Nothing prepares you for actually seeing it when you are there”; like so many tired old cliches, this one too is true.

The sheer heart-stopping, breath-catching majesty of a vertical mile square of sheer rock doesn’t really fit in a Jpeg, nor on the glossy page of a coffee table book. No-one finds their hand involuntarily rising to cover their gaping mouth as they regard a landscape in a computer image. Apart from the diminished visual element, our “Web Walkers” as they click from El Kapitan to Half Dome, won’t get the scent of snow and pine on the icy downdraft that bespeaks a completely different climate up there within reach of your eyes, or the sound of water that spends 30 seconds in free-fall echoing off a flat perpendicular granite face the size of a large town on the other side of the valley. The formic humility of being a tiny human in such a place simply doesn’t come across vicariously.

For the Yosemite experience you have to go there. You always will do. Words fail us, and technology will never be up to the job either.

Dragon’s teeth. Jungle capped limestone outcrops

All this applies with Ha Long Bay as well.

If you have seen the films, and the travel programs and the pictures of this place then you have still seen very little. “Nothing prepares you for being there”. Vertical granite abounds, again and plays its role in the ambiance, but with 2,000 islets absorbing its energy the South China Sea is as calm as a turtle pond. Each island has its own cap of tropical jungle, once joined up, presumably, but now a separate micro environment every one. It reminds a traveler of Snoopy and the Coffee Pot, the red rocks of Arizona, but at their base, not scarlet sand but turquoise water…

Heartless and unimaginitive would be the folk who lived in such a place without inventing a suitable mythology for its origin, and the tale of the dragon’s landing and his scattered teeth is fittingly wild and violent.

Feral children at large in rowing boats selling “interesting shells” to deep pocketed holiday makers

Visiting out of season in grey weather, we were upgraded to an almost empty luxury cruiser to make our journey between the draconian molars and canines. We joined a flotilla of shabby white craft threading their way between the spectacular outcrops like a line of floss.

The Vietnamese chef on board produced a series of meals during our 2 day cruise, each one an exhibition of the sophistication and refinement of his country’s cuisine. This can be rare to find in a country where Pho Bo (noodle soup with beef slices) at £1 a go is the staple lunch for most folk, cash-strapped as this country still is.

Some arrangement. Carved veggie flowers, part of on-board cuisine

Junk Food: Squid salad

Watch out for a revival in interest in Vietnamese cooking – it is ancient and complex and packed with tropical flavours – much more than spring rolls and noodle soup.

Put Ha Long Bay on your must see list if you haven’t been there. You know you have to go there to see it properly, and you Googlenauts, get out of the house a little more often.

Melucca

Nyonya cooking, Melucca

A walk across the bridge on the way to Melucca’s busy China town; on the left looking down river out to sea is the old fort. Originally Portguese, then Dutch, then English, this hump commanded the harbour.

Water monitor, malaka river

In the river, reptile heads are held above the surface. Too short and blunt for crocodiles, and the flicking toungue gives away its owner; a water monitor hunting rats and water birds. Orioles fluting in tamarind trees, pester-power tuk-tuks pink-painted and sparkly to catch the eyes of 2-year old princesses tinkle with toddler pleasing music, tour ferries chug up the river with cargos of sightseers. Melucca has an “up-and-coming” feel to it. It is probably a very good place to buy real estate.

We finally discover a nyonya restaurant that is not closed for the holidays. This is a shabby back room with access to the river. We settle on wobbly furniture on the tow-path, feet from the malaka river’s thick brown liquid and read the laminated plastic menu sipping cold Tiger beer.

We go for squid in dark soy, and a slow-cooked curry. This cuisine rivals Thai food. It has the same flavour “architecture” with the salt, sweet, sour and chilli base. Then it has extras such as lime leaf, coriander, galangal etc. Both dishes are utterly delicious and are polished off in short order.

Botanical Gardens

Penang Botanical Gardens: Forest trail

A short bus ride out of Penang, where terra-cotta roof tiles continue to fire in perpendicular sun, the Penang Botanical Gardens offer a break from urban noise and heat as they have done for 150 years.

Cut into the island’s hills by a small river, this v-shaped valley was dedicated to plant science by British Victorians in the mid 19th century. Fifty odd years after Joseph Banks fathered exploratory botany, British colonial botanists, inspired by curiosity as well as profit, invested in tropical botanical gardens in the Malay Straights – this is the third after Singapore and Melucca.

This is a Kew hothouse minus the glass… and there are some additions.

Mynah birds flit around, investigating waste bins, cruising cafe terasses and staking out picnics. There seem to be no starlings; this einstein-bright tropical mimic fills the same niche.

In the lofty understory of the surrounding rainforest, bright yellow orioles call. Like the European relative, the Black-naped Oriole sounds like a child experimenting with a christmas whistle. The flutey timbre echos through the tropical canopy…

Butterflies bigger than small birds settle on mosses that grow on the small waterfalls.

A large turtle suns himself on a boulder in the river.

… and at any point in the park visitors may see the long-tailed macaques, large grey and rather elegant monkeys roaming in a family troop.

Long Tailed Macaques at Penang Botanics

We watched them from the shade of an Indian cafe near the park entrance. A mother had her infant pinned to the grass with a black leathery foot. With the baby spreadeagled and with a look of blissful resignation, his mother was riffling slowly backwards through his fur with her right hand as one might thumb the pages of a book, while with the left she was picking out specks and popping them into her mouth. The look of close concentration on her face I have seen on humans as they focus on a computer game or a mobile phone.

Kew with extras.

Penang’s Drains

It hasn’t rained here for 3 weeks, the locals tell us. Penang’s streets are dry as tinder. Tropical storms which frequently deliver 20cm of rain in a day, are bypassing the region to the north. Hoses are out in gardens. Hanging baskets drip-dry on balconies after a careful watering. Tropical leaves, fat and thick, orientate to the zenith. Penang’s numerous UNESCO-protected broad greens (ancient polo and cricket playgrounds for British Officers) are now a dusty khaki. The air shimmers like oil in a hot wok.

To cope with the next rains when they finally come, every street has a copious storm drain, usually on both sides. These are U-shaped concrete trenches 2 to 3 feet deep and about a foot wide.

In London these unannounced concrete street ha-ha’s would break so many legs and ankles at pub-closing time they would be quickly covered over. In this muslim state, where a single beer costs as much as a delicious, hearty meal, folk are steady on their pins all day, and pick their way across these obstacles as part of daily life.

It is possible to live life outside the stifling, protective maternal embrace of British Health and Safety Legislation, and it is insightful that what the British have opted to ban is danger, not beer.

I observe that there is no tax revenue from danger.

What happens when the immovable wall of British Alcohol Consumption is hit by the unstoppable force of British Health and Safety Legislation? Surely beer-drinking is at least as dangerous as playing conkers?

With little throughput, Penang’s storm drains begin to fill with an insalubrious mix of rubbish, discarded meals, the micturations of ancient gentlemen caught short on their way back from the tea house, piles of fruit too overripe for sale, the cadavers of feral cats and dogs and with just enough runoff from pavement washing, and the perfect steady 35oC temperature this grisly melange begins to produce what one could call, the Penang pong.

The rains are awaited with increasing impatience.

Rice

A bag of rice

To take a guess, at least 10% of the customers in this down town Penang supermarket have never tasted either bread or butter in their lives.

Noodles and rice are their staple feculants and it is this latter we seek, as we have brought doggie bags of sumptuous nyonya curry back from Pearly Kee’s cookery course and need some rice to eat it with.

This ought to be easy. Malaysian families live on rice, and the supermarket is full of the Neapolitan ice-cream of Malay skin tones. They will stock rice; most Malaysians are multi-lingual and will know what the word “rice” means. What could possibly go wrong here?

I make the prediction that there will be a whole aisle dedicated to the stuff, and there will be pallets piled with 15kg sacks of it. We can’t miss it, I foretell.

We do miss it. This oddly shaped shop is disorientating and full of secret caverns. A store manager is here though, let’s ask and get this done – Hello, we are looking for rice?

‘lice??

Ask a UK Tesco store manager which aisle for the live badgers and he will look no more perplexed than this monoglot Malay shop assistant. His face is contorted with the effort of concentration and comprehension.

Posed this unexpected linguistic problem, I reflect that rice is a pretty international word and there seems little point in the circumstances, in going through all the very similar sounding list of eurolanguage versions. I go for Portugese “ahhoz” which does sound different in the hope of raising a spark of recognition, and then, scraping the barrel since noone will admit to any knowledge of Japanese here, I try “gohan“. Now it’s like I’m asking, not for a bag of every day starchy cereal, but for a live female, yearling badger on a lead with a diamond encrusted collar. At this stage my interlocutor’s face now looks like he is in great pain. The agony of international communication seems to be overwhelming him. He is calling security – no wait – a friendly-looking polyglot colleague advances with a smile to save the day. All is not lost. Working together pooling our collective ingenuity and resource, we may still meet the colossal challenge of finding a small bag of rice in a Malaysian supermarket.

What you want? I just want Rice… AAAaaaaahhhh! Yes!! Lice!!

At last the sun of comprehension ascends over the horizon. A brief exchange in malay with Mr. Monoglot. Much mirth on both sides. I am quite delighted to see how much amusement I have brought into the lives of these two gentlemen today.

Is easy! You go out here, is lestaulant, there is lice. You buy you eat.

It’s fair enough – I am, quite visibly and audibly, a man so abandoned by god as to be anglo-saxon and consequently some sort of semi-sentient neanderthal from the frozen north. An idiot, capable of who-knows-what sort of spectacular acts of brainless tomfoolery. Manifestly he thinks I have knuckled past and refused the wares of the scrum of high pressure, rice-pushing restaurateurs that hunt clients on the pavement just in front of the shop entrance and then that I’ve lumbered in, hungry as a horse and begun to pester his long-suffering supermarket staff with fatuous requests for them to prepare me steaming bowls of cooked rice so that I can (presumably) sit cross-legged on the floor of aisle 12 and eat it with my fingers. Now this has all been cleared up, all that is required it to coax the cretinous snowman (he may never have seen a supermarket before) back out to the rice hawkers in the hope that he will this time have the common sense to purchase what he wants.

The desire to sigh petulantly, roll my eyes, or close them in ironic prayer to the god of calmness and restraint begins to well up within me like an inexorable tide.

Canute-like I set my jaw against such sentiments and explain calmly, politely and meticulously that I would like to purchase a small bag of rice that I can cook for myself at home. Would they perchance have such a thing in their shop?

Light dawns again and we set off at last for the supermarket’s rice cavern. There after all are the 15kg bags piled high on pallets, as prophesied and a whole aisle dedicated to the cereal with all types and pack sizes. I take a deep breath and thank my multi-lingual guide.

The Malay word for rice is Beras.

Pearly Kee

Roots: Pearly Kee in her favourite place on her favourite topic.

Pearly Kee is the granddaughter of a Victorian Sugar tycoon. She is the daughter of his 6th. son. She has a stormy life story to tell; loss of her mother at an early age, brought up by “strict aunts”, having to pay her way from age 6, health issues and dead-end jobs have marked her life. But this Penang, Malaysia native is bright, happy and superbly knowledgeable about cooking, dietary medicine and culinary botany. She reminds me a little of that other Malaysian Chinese prodigy, James Wong. And like James, Pearly too is an evangelist. A day in Pearly’s cooking school is a breathless whirlwind of experience, information, trial, error and success.

Taxied from their quarters, her cookery school students’ day starts at the Penang wet market where Pearly starts a whistle stop tour of her favourite stalls. Taste this, notice this, look at the way she is doing this, the market is the ultimate visual aid for entry-level nyonya cookery students, who leave this first stage of the day course with a mouth full of flavour and head full of information. Tapioca root contains vitamin B18, helpful for cancer patients; Chinese market stalls are arranged in terms of how the veg is grown, not how it’s cooked. Listen up and don’t get lost – Pearly’s pearls of wisdom are coming thick and fast. We sampled steamed rice noodles flavoured with pandanus, peanut muffin, ripe small banana and sipped iced coffee.

The key phrase mentioned early in the day which smashed any expectations of a cosy, unchallenging curry cooking course was “the Chinese eat holistically”. This was a blunt declaration backed up with overwhelming evidence, one example after another, that the Chinese, for thousands of years and still now, see no difference whatsoever between medicine and cookery.

In 2012 the BBC rated the British National Health Service as the 5th. largest employer in the world with its 1.7 million staff. At 26 million employees (factoring up health staff per capita), an equivalent Chinese Health Service would dwarf the world’s top 20 biggest employees summed up together. A bureaucratic organisation bigger than most countries would probably be very hard to run and may never exist. By necessity, then, China’s people take ownership of their own well-being as they have always done. So the Chinese are not going to stop cooking their “medical cuisine”. Maybe the British should start doing so?

All this considered, Pearly’s Njonya cooking class was never going to be limited to recipe-following. This would be a journey into complex medicinal studies, the biochemistry of plants, meticulous food hygiene, diet science, and just for an encore, a trio of restaurant-grade nyonya dishes cooked by the students in Pearly’s delightful tropical herb garden using wet-market produce nibbled and sampled the same morning. Her customers never realised they were such excellent cooks. I am going to cook differently as a result of this course. I will:

– wash vegetables in a bowl of water with crushed galangal – mix coconut milk/cream with water or stock – use more cooking fat in the curry than I have done (“3 elephants” – 3 Tbsp per portion) – be a lot more generous with the garlic – cook more meat on the bone and avoid chicken breast, for example – Take advantage of cheaper meat cuts and slow cook them – see pork in dark soy. – Consider the well-being of my family when selecting what to cook. A big subject, but a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step.A truly outstanding day of learning, recommended to all health-conscious curry fans.

Snakes and Silk

At Bangkok’s snake farm, visitors learn about the diversity of snake species in the country. The farm is associated with the adjoining hospital which treats snake bites and cases of rabies.

Britain has 4 species of snake of which one has a poisonous bite. Thailand has 150 species of which 20 have a toxic payload. Intended primarily to incapacitate its prey (sometimes suprisingly large) as well as for defence and deterrent, snake venoms vary with species. Some attack the blood, and stop the prey by preventing oxygen from getting to muscles and brain. Others prevent the nervous system from functioning, leading initially to paralysis, making the meal easier and then to respiratory failure. Myotoxins disable muscles, cardiotoxins the heart.

There are up to 9,000 snake envenomation cases in Thailand per year and 94 deaths in a bad one. Thai population levels are similar to the uk.

So this hospital is kept busy and the attached farm and visitor centre seem to have a twofold purpose: incidence reduction through education, and treatment through the development of antivenoms.

It seems that by treating a horse or a sheep with non fatal levels of a snake’s venom, the animal’s metabolism naturally develops a defence. The principal seems to be similar to vaccination, though no doubt this is complicated biology. Blood is drawn from the treated ungulate and the serum extracted for use as medicine.

So Bangkok’s snake farm creates a stock of antivenom for each of the country’s 20 nastiest serpants; great news for the 24 people a day who are going to call on its services. If ever public funds were well spent, it is here.

This is not a game. King Cobras (powerfully neurotoxic, and the world’s longest venemous snake reported over 5 meters long) are common within the bounds of Bangkok itself – so cheek by fang with 6.3 million people.

It is not hard to imagine conscientious and doting Thai parents making sure they bring their little ones here to the “snake zoo”. Outside of swimming pools, rarely is fun so well combined with

Tight handling: aggressive Thai snake held by expert keeper.

useful education and sensible risk managment. Plenty of snakes on view, many showed off live (in thai and english) to a cautious and somewhat reticent audience, many 5-year-olds amongst them (“who would like to come down and touch this beautiful animal? …. What noone?”)

Entrance fee is derisory and pointlessly tiny. Go there and support this excellent institution – superb.

A little way across town is Jim Thompson’s “House on the Krong”. Across the canal from a muslim neighbourhood, Jim Thompson, American WWII soldier, secret agent and entrepreneur set up his centre for the revival of the Thai silk industry after the war ended. He’d been active in the expulsion of the Japanese from the country, and stayed on there after hostilities ceased.

Carp Pond, Jim Thompson’s house

On his inspiration and request, his neighbours across the canal began to produce world class quality cloth including the naturally coloured “Golden Thai Silk” not available anywhere else. As mastermind and part-owner of a prosperous export company Jim became a man of means and spent some of his cash transporting some typical wooden thai village houses to his plot in central Bangkok. In the city’s bustling midst he created a small Buddhist-inspired haven, with carp and turtle ponds and a curiously diverse collection of chinese and buddhist ceramics.

The jewel is definitely in the lotus in this delightful museum.