… and other stories from the bush

We have been having a blast on the trip, and part of the fun has been taking a few days to attempt to get a feel for the local culture before hurrying off to the next location.  This has been somewhat challenging, as we are not locals, and we are staying in hotels with other tourists.

Australia is different, as we were almost guaranteed we would be getting some local culture, cuisine, and even company.  Hrm.. well, really we were the company, as we were staying with The Melbourne Hunters.

Janine and I were having a lot of fun together, but we missed being able to share our experience friends and family.  From the moment we pulled in to River View Farms (yeah, we made that up, but lots of the houses out there have names, and theirs needed one.. so there is that), things were different.  Joel, Peri, Lyndsay, Jess, Remy, and the chickens were all great hosts.

After a few minutes of settling in, Joel and Perry asked:  Are you ready to go see the Roos?  Heck yeah.  And thanks to their house being right next to a state park, we saw them hopping along less than five minutes later.  In fact, after a little while we even saw a mob – of kangaroos of course.  It’s like a compound of Kennedys.

There were plenty of other interesting animals to be found as well.  Lots of them are birds – and an amazing variety of those were visible right from the Hunters’ back deck.  There were cockatoos of various colorings – all huge.  And Parrots.  And black and white Magpies that make computer generated sounds.. or at least that is what Janine and I decided.  And then, there are the Kookaburra.. which we never saw, but we heard every morning and evening.  Oddly enough, Australian law says their song is still copyrighted (http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/men-at-works-down-under-ripped-off-kookaburra/story-e6freuy9-1225739827841).

Enough of the animals, let’s talk culture:  We headed downtown to check out the city.  First stop:  Queen Victoria Market.  Janine and I are very familiar with farmers markets.  Not long ago our home town market was voted the best in the entire USA.  But honestly, it does not hold a candle to the QE Market.  There is a fish market, all kinds of food, specialty shops, clothing, and just about anything else you could want.  It is somewhere between a flea market, a mall, and a food court.  And it is huge.. something like four football fields in size.  That’s Australian for market, mate.

We have the advantage of great tour guides.  But not everyone visiting Melbourne will have that advantage.. or would they?  Melbourne has a free trolley that runs through the entire city – and it serves as a guided tour.  Want to spend more time at a location?  No problem.  Hop off.  You can catch the next one in just a few minutes.

Another Australian specialty is wine.  So we had to have a tiny bit whilst we were there.  Let’s see, there was the neighborhood party where one of the guests was a local winemaker.  He educated us on the finer points of the Stelvin cap.  Then there was the lovely afternoon we spent wine tasting.  And of course wine tasting is never complete without the ever popular wine buying.  There were a few choice bottles of wine when we visited Rock Pool.  The food was pretty great too.  But the wine highlight was probably the lovely bottle of Penfold’s Grange that Joel pulled out for a gourmet dinner at the Hunter Household.  That wine was nearly as good as the company.

Which brings me to the moral of the story:  If you are going to Australia, make time to visit Melbourne.  And if you go to Melbourne do your best to get an invite to visit with the Hunters.  They really make you feel at home.

Thai people apparently think foreigners are incapable of pronouncing many of their names.  As a result, those who interact in the tourism industry often choose alternate names.  Occasionally they are their actual nicknames – shortened version versions of their given names.  Examples might be Ka, Ko, or Ya.

Without a short nickname, they resort to easily pronounceable and familiar English words.  And for some reason, they are almost exclusively foods.  For example, Beer, Toast, Apple.  Can’t make this stuff up.

Then there was one of our waiters in Chiang Mai.  He was very pleasant and knowledgeable.  He was also small enough to make me look like a giant.  His name?  Big.

Our third stop on our honeymoon is a hotel in the village of Tanggayuda, near a tourist/artist community known as Ubud:  the Komaneka at Tanggayuda.  Chiang Mai is a big city.  Kata Noi (on Phuket) was the beach, and now we were clearly in the jungle.

This was made clear a few ways.  One was obvious.  The view just off our plunge pool is a lush jungle with distant rice terraces.  Another was the sounds.  In most ways, the Tanggayuda was much quieter than the prior hotels, as the designers were smart to put in ultra-quiet air conditioning units.  But the hotel was alive with the sounds of the jungle, particularly at night.  Both Janine and I enjoy falling asleep to the sound of waves crashing on the beach.  But it turns out we actual prefer the sounds of the jungle creatures.

There are some negative side effects though.  We are really worried about what our baby is learning.  We understand he now hears us and begins learning things.  We are concerned about his preschool days.  Picture the classroom.. “the horse goes?”  baby Smith says “Naaaaay”  “and the pig goes” “oink” says baby Jones.  “And the frog says..” baby Dillman responds: “Quack”  Blasphemy!  He may as well have run with scissors.

But those are the noises of the jungle here.  Quack goes the frog (the local ducks also say quack).  Both the house lizard and the geckos compete with the birds.  Clearly they know who is who though, as our quacking frogs in our bathroom frog bog only responded to their particular quacks (as opposed to the quacks of the frogs we did not get to see).

We will leave you with some photos of the beautiful facilities.  But we will have to leave the quacking, chirping, peeping, and hoot of the jungle to your imagination.  That is, of course, until you make the time to visit and experience it yourself.

(and woman too)

Martin Yan is a Davis resident, so this post title seemed appropriate.  If you don’t know who he is, the title won’t make sense anyways.  Google it 🙂

While visiting Chiang Mai we did a few of the touristy things you would expect, visiting the Night Bazzar, touring the city and temples, and Thai massage (owie).  We also decided to take a Thai Cooking Class together.

The class started with a short walk to one of Chiang Mai’s bustling markets.  There our hostess Apple was filling us in on all of the ins and outs of picking the right bits and pieces to make a good Thai dish.  It was like drinking from a fire hose, but great information.  She gave us a few minutes to walk around the market after the lesson was complete.  And thankfully, we did not have to try to buy anything on our own.  That would have kept us there all night.

Market in Chiang Mai

Upon our return we broke into groups according to the dishes we had chosen to make.  We were all given a large cleaver and a block of wood (aka: cut board).  The teacher then walked us through the misen plas for our first dish – in my case Pad Thai.  After a little slicing and dicing it was time to put the coals to it (so to speak).

It took our teacher about three and a half minutes to cook the meal.  She poured it on a plate and said.. “and then you eat it” – and proceeded to do so.  So we all started to cook.  And it went quite well.

In about two and a half minutes (I used tofu, so no waiting for the chicken to cook) I had Pad Thai.  And it was good.  And it was easy.  Almost too easy.

Moments later Janine appeared with a dish of food.  Hers was good too.  We inhaled both dishes and began to wonder… were we paying way too much for Thai Food?

We each made another dish, this time a soup.  A bit harder, but nothing that would qualify as difficult.  And yet again, it was really quite good.  And personalized to our preference of spice types and level.  I vacuumed mine up.  Janine was starting to hit the wall.  Our boy was taking up precious stomach space.  Oh well, more for me!

But as the evening progressed, so did the complexity if the dishes.  While I have 100% confidence I could pull off Pad Thai unaided, the confidence level starts to fall with each dish.  Another factor was the quantity of food.  In addition to “snacks” and drinks, we cooked and ate four courses.  By the end we had both eaten so much we could not see straight, let alone cook.

So we took our cookbooks and walked off into the night (Night Bazaar actually) to try to walk off the impending food coma.  The experience was pretty satisfying, and we both felt like we learned something.  We might even try something like that again.

And so we did.  At our third stop of the trip, we were staying at the Komeneka at Tanggayuda – which is the home of the Komeneka cooking school.  So we signed up to cook again… this time Balinese cuisine.  The experience was not much like learning to cook Thai cuisine, but it was similar in that it was a lot of fun.

We won’t bore you with the details, but we will include a few differences.  We were up at 0-dark-30 in order to make it to the market by 7am.  Despite it being an “off day” the market was multiple times larger than the one in Chiang Mai.  And this time our personal guide, one of the staff cooks, helped us buy a few of the items we would actually be cooking with (although no one had quail eggs 🙂 ).

It turns out we were the only two people in the Balinese cooking class.  And it was being led by the Head Chef.  That meant a lot of personal attention.  And this time we got smart.

We told Putu straight out that there was no way we could finish all that food after having their delicious breakfast (a true story), and insisted that we set a third plate for him.  It worked out pretty well.  We rolled out of there full, but no food was wasted.  This turned out to be particularly critical, as we both decided that the desert course – Balinese Crepes – was the big hit.

Would we take another cooking class?  It turns out we would.  We took one just a few days later in Jimbaran.  While it was not as much fun as the prior classes, we again learned a few things, and we had a nice meal.  And this time it was free.

It remains to be seen whether or not we will be able to apply any of our new-found cooking skills.  But our eating skills were really coming in to their own.  By the end of the first two weeks we were shoveling down food like nobody’s business.  Even the monkeys would have been impressed.

Primates are plentiful in the tropical areas we are visiting.  I think they may even outnumber the tourist traps… although not by much.  So it should come as no surprise that the monkeys have integrated into the tourist business.  But what is surprising is that the humans are not taking advantage of the monkeys… rather it is the other way around.

Our first experience was on a visit to Monkey Beach in the Phuket area of Thailand.  The beach belongs to the monkeys, and they make that clear.  The humans bring them snacks.  The humans clean their beach.  And in return the humans get to take pictures with friendly monkeys.  We honestly did not expect to enjoy the experience all that much, but it turned out to be one of the highlights of our visit to Phuket.

So when we heard of the Monkey Forest Temple in Ubud, we made a point of dropping by.  Where the beach was a fairly small area for monkeys to gather and interact (read: take advantage of) with humans, the temple area was huge, comprising of multiple temples, bridges, streams, and paths.  And the monkeys were everywhere.  The humans brought bananas and other treats, but we learned from the beach, that their favorite treats were drinks – so we went armed with bottles of water.  Again, the monkeys got the better end of the deal, grimacing for the camera, and getting drinks and treats along the way.  Clearly they were prospering thanks to the care of the tourists and related industry.

Our favorite monkey story is probably from the beach.  One ugly human (ugly being a reference to both her personality and her looks) was trying to get one over on the monkeys.  She wanted to pull their tails and tease them with food and water.  The monkeys would have none of that.  They ganged up on her, and while one distracted her, the other pulled down her bathing suit.  She got the point and behaved more appropriately after that.

Those monkeys really gave her the business.

Where you will thank us for flying you.

I am sitting on an Air Asia flight with Janine, bound for Bali (IATA: DPS).  And I am reminded why flying is sometimes annoying.  You see, the woman behind me has horrible body odor.  She looks fine, but her stink is keeping me awake.  Elsewhere on the plane is a screaming child.  And finally, there is someone with an incessant cough.  Yep, we’ve hit the trifecta.

There ought to be a better way.  We don’t stink (or at least we don’t think so), we aren’t sick, and we refrain from screaming.  Airlines that serve preferences aren’t unheard of.  For example, there is an airline that runs smoking only flights to Europe.  And they do pretty well.  So let me introduce Pleasant Airlines.

Here at Pleasant Airlines there are two classes of service:  Pleasant and Economy.  As you board our aircraft, an array of sensors in the jetway will indicate your class of service.  Stinky today?  You will be in Economy.  Running a fever?  Economy.  Screaming child… well you get the idea.

On board the aircraft, the Flight Attendants will have an additional task.  “Excuse me sir, I have arranged a seat for you in economy, your cough is against Pleasant Class policy.”  I figure about a third of any given aircraft would be Economy Class.  A couple layers of thick linen draped between the two classes keep the noise down in Pleasant Class.  And some small modifications to the air circulation system minimize contamination.

Advance seat selection is available only for frequent flyers who consistently fly in the Pleasant Class.  Decisions of the flight crew are final.  Your mileage may vary.

What do you think?  I figure it will be a hit with frequent flyers everywhere.  Even those who get cast off to Economy [when they deserve it] would probably appreciate the process.  I know I would.  Investors sign up now!  If we build it, they will fly.