Exploring Vietnam: Post SIT Travels: Bangkok, Thailand

After seeing the magnificent sunset at Angkor we finished the night by shopping at the night market and having Chinese food for dinner. The next morning we took a bus from Siem Reap to Bangkok for $15. Now my uncle had warned me about the buses from Cambodia to Thailand saying to be really prepared for the bad roads and bad service. Looking back, I should have listened to his advice.

The first part of the trip went okay. We started out at 6:20 a.m., twenty minutes later than planned, and an eighties karaoke video was playing for the first half hour (luckily the video player soon broke). After we arrived at the border everyone on the bus was given a small red sticker. We had given them our tickets so that was all we had to prove we were on the bus. People started unloading our bags and I grabbed mine right away. Some boys were putting bags onto a trolley and when my friend tried to take hers off they said something in Cambodian, shaking their heads. "But that's my bag!" she said and took it off anyway looking confused at them. I do not know where her bag would have ended up if she had not taken it. Everyone on the bus lined up at the customs office leaving Cambodia. We were all fingerprinted again to make sure our arrival and departure prints matched. Once we made it out of Cambodia we still had to walk about 300 meters along a road where there was a casino before we arrived at the customs office in Thailand. Entering customs in Thailand there was a huge sign written in English and Thai that said "Transportation of Drugs Punished by Death".

We filled out immigration cards and obtained our free 15 day tourist visas. (If you arrive by air, you get a free 30 day tourist visa.) After exiting the building my friends and I were told by a woman, "You have red sticker? Keep walking". About 100 meters further along the road, where trucks filled with goods were driving by, we arrived at a pickup truck with seats in the truck bed. They luckily saw our red sticker and instructed us to get in the truck while we waited for the rest of our group. Once the truck was full we were driven to a small rest stop area where we thought we would meet up with our coach bus. We were very wrong. After 45 minutes of waiting, we were told to go into a very small van, that we somehow fit fifteen people into. "Okay 4 hours to Bangkok", the driver said and everyone squished in the hot van looked shocked since it was already close to the time that we should have been arriving. Maybe it could theoretically take four hours, but every hour we had to stop at a gas station and wait in a long line of cars to refuel. Finally, we made it to Bangkok, much later in the afternoon than we had anticipated. Moral of the story, you can't buy time so maybe consider flying if you only have a few days to travel.

We went directly to our hostel, Lub D, which was an amazing place. It was very clean and had a very artsy/modern feel to it. We were lucky because the dorm rooms we had booked were filled so we got two double rooms for the night for no extra charge. Since we were in Thailand, we went to find pad thai for dinner and it did not disappoint!

First pad thai in Bangkok. Thanks again to Anna for letting me use her photos.

We explored the night market in Bangkok and went on a hunt for mango sticky rice. For those of you who have never tried mango sticky rice, let me explain. First, sticky rice is a different type of rice than say jasmine rice. Sticky rice has to be soaked for several hours then drained and steamed to obtain the perfect texture. Each grain of rice should still hold it's shape so it should not be mushy, but when properly made the grains still stick together. After the rice is steamed, coconut milk is poured over and it's left to soak in. To serve, you put a mound of the coconut sticky rice on a plate, slice a ripe mango, place it over the rice, and top it with more coconut milk and crispy mung beans. It's one of my top favorite desserts (it might even beat Magnolia's banana pudding and that's saying something!). After asking over ten people in English and broken Thai we finally found a street vendor who sold it. It was well worth the hunt!

Mango Sticky Rice

Since we had spent most of the previous day on a small, hot bus, we decided to spend the day in Bangkok and fly to Chiang Mai, a city in Northern Thailand, later in the evening. Previously, we were going to take a train, but we could not bear the thought of being on a train for ten hours instead of an hour and a half flight. We had almost the entire day in Bangkok until our flight left so we decided to sleep in and explore Chinatown.

Bangkok is a huge city so we had a taxi drop us off on a street in the heart of Chinatown. Chinatown was mobbed with people selling steaming food and bright juice, bartering in cramped stores, cooking on the street, and buying everything imaginable. We found a dim sum restaurant and ordered a large assortment that included pork and shrimp dumplings. The restaurant we ate at, and many others in the area, also sold shark fin soup and birds nest soup, which are controversial dishes in the U.S.

Dim sum

We also had black bean steamed buns, bbq pork steamed buns, and (my absolute favorite) egg custard steamed buns. In Vietnam, banh bao, a steamed bun filled with different meat, vegetables, or eggs, was one of my favorite snacks. After eating we walked through an indoor market and the surrounding streets. I could have spent all day going through the spices, identifying the vegetables, and trying the fruits. Instantly I fell in love with all the foreign smells, the bustling people, and all of the food. I am convinced you could buy any ingredient imaginable there. They even sold sea cucumbers!

Hanging pork belly and crispy duck.

Grilled and fried bananas.

A big dried fish.

Spices, flowers for tea, dried berries.

Sea cucumbers

Chinese lanterns.

While walking around, we came across this woman who was making what appeared to be mini taco-like treats. She spread a thin layer of batter in an oval shape over a heated griddle. Then she put a dollop of what appeared to be creme fraiche. Half were topped with a stringy yellow substance that I recognized as a version of fios de ovos that is used in Portuguese desserts. It kind of looks like cooked spaghetti squash and is made with egg yolks and sugar. I found another food blog that discusses how it's made and the countries it's made in, Thailand included! You can read that here, http://www.oohmummy.com/2010/04/i-wanna-eat-keiran-somen.html. The other half of the ovals were topped with a sticky orange substance. Both varieties were piled into a small plastic bag and sprinkled with sesame seeds and green onions. The "tacos" were bite sized and packed a punch. We think the orange substance was made of dried fish or shrimp, but it was still surprisingly sweet and had a kick of chili at the end. It actually paired really well with the green onions creating a perfect bite of food.