Tag: #folksytravel

This morning the owner of the resort recommended I go to the Sunday morning market to see what they have. So I got on my motorcycle and went to see what was available. When I got there the place was flooded with people. Parking a car would’ve meant walking a little distance to the market since there were so many people there but having a motorcycle makes it much easier to find a tiny place to park.

As you can see in the photo I wound up buying bananas, a couple cucumbers, couple limes, some mustard leaf pickles and one of my favorites, grilled pork on a stick with sticky rice and very spicy sauce. All of this was 100 Baht (32 Baht=US$1). 

Yesterday I posted comments about my finances now in Thailand during the COVID-19 crisis. After I posted I gave it some thought and decided it would be helpful to compare current crisis\low season prices to high season prices. So here they are.

Below is the Calc sheet I did for my current expenses. You can probably tell I did not include Laundry. The owner of this resort is doing laundry for me at no charge and that’s why there is no line item.

Total Monthly	THB 31,440
Transportation	THB 140
Hotel	THB 16,800
Food	THB 7,500
Massage	THB 4,000
Incidentals	THB 3,000
$US MONTHLY	$983

Below you will notice the difference in current prices and high season prices. Laundry and motorcycle chargers are added in.  If you want a general idea what it would cost to have a second large meal during the day probably at a restaurant then a good idea would be to add about 200 baht per day extra.

Total Monthly	THB 49,640
Transportation	THB 6,140
Hotel	THB 27,000
Food	THB 7,500
Massage	THB 4,000
Incidentals	THB 3,000
Laundry	THB 2,000
$US MONTHLY	$1,551

I’ve been procrastinating on this topic mostly since there’s so much potential detail and so little space on the Internet to explain everything. But I’ll do the best I can and getting to the crux of the matter. (As a treat there is a monthly budget at the end.  Gotta learn inserting Numbers data with WordPress.)

In terms of per day expenses The really big ones with traveling tend to be in getting there and back.  Most of us know during the COVID-19 crisis traveling expenses to and from places can be horrendously expensive and I won’t go into those.  But domestic travel is definitely a very important part of getting from one area to another especially if you don’t wanna spend too much time in one place.  In Thailand the domestic flights are not really overpriced and are becoming much more frequent as is less expensive bus travel and other local forms of transportation as the country continues to “open up“.  Air travel is really not too expensive in Thailand, bus travel is extremely reasonable but that depends upon the type of bus you travel in. You can get anything from the luxury bus or what they call the VIP bus for long-distance trips which make stops when necessary for food and rest, to what I call the chicken buses. Those buses are mostly for domestic local travelers who need to put their chicken cages on top of the bus. The cages of course don’t carry their children, they carry chickens.  Maybe the chickens are going to market, maybe they’re going as a gift to someone else but you can be 100% assured chickens carried on buses in Thailand are not comfort pets (those things Americans take on planes with them because they’re afraid of people or some other issue). You can see from my comments I think these emotionally retained pets on planes are really bad idea. 

It used to be possible to get private cars which would load up with as many people as they could accommodate uncomfortably that would take you from city to city in 1 to 3 hour trips. I don’t know if those are still available and after a few experiences I’m not really interested. They tend to put three people in the back of a very small car. And it wasn’t seemingly forbidden for the driver to drink while driving.

Taxis are much more expensive but you can get cheaper prices if you negotiate and can take them on one hour trips if you find it financially the way to go.  I had to do that when escaping from Sratthani when they closed all the hotels. It cost me about 2,000 baht to get where I needed to go in a one and a half hour ride. (32 Baht=US$1). BUS and motorcycles are the best way to get around town if the destinations are too far to walk.  If you’re taking a motorcycle it’s best to see the drivers have a jacket with a number on it indicating they are an approved public transport motorcycle driver.

As for my transportation around Khanom the explanation fits in the general expense discussion. I’m using a small 100 cc motorcycle provided by the hotel owner without charge since I was the only customer.  they wanted to make sure I was happy so I would stay a long time, which i’m doing currently, more than two months now. I think it’s interesting here to note the typical motorcycle in Thailand Has a 100 cc engine which is good enough to go pretty much anywhere you want. It is basically what they sell in the US and Japan as a 50 cc motorcycle. They put a larger engine in those frames in Thailand because they tend to be the family car. Families Put up to 6 members on the small frame depending upon the size of the kids. Very often you see a two-year-old kid in a position that looks like they are the driver.  While the motorcycle is free and normal charge per day for rent would be about 150 to 200 baht.  I pay for gasoline of course which is about 35 baht per week and that will take me about 80 km (multiply by 0.6 to get the equivalence in miles). So I get about 115 miles per gallon.

The hotel room itself is normally about 900 baht per day but since I was the only customer in a smaller room and I needed more space the owner agreed to let me use the large suite room with a private patio for 600 baht per day.  Again, divide by 32 to get the US dollar equivalent. It’s about US$18 per day. 

As for food, I spend an average of about 250 baht per day but that might partly be because I am on a fairly strict diet of one meal per day. That’s just over 8 US dollars per day.  I buy food from the local food carts and sometimes from restaurants. I bring the food back here an hour or two before I eat and then heat up in the microwave just before eating.  My daily consumption is coffee in the morning with some yogurt or fresh fruit and then a fairly significant dinner in the evening with snacks afterwards and maybe an alcoholic drink, one glass a day.  But when I say a significant dinner I really mean something in a medium-size bowl whether it’s mostly liquid or not. So probably a couple scoops of rice (ice cream scoops) and a little bit of meat and vegetables in small quantities. If you go to my Photos page you can see some of the meals I’ve had here. What I eat is more than sufficient for my energy usage and age.  As for going out to eat in a restaurant, which is still a little bit of a problem here due to the COVID-19 crisis, you might expect paying a little bit more. If you want to eat extravagant food, maybe some German or Italian food which is fairly prevalent in many parts of Thailand, expect to pay much more.  As for myself, if I want German food I go to Germany if I want Italian food I go to Italy or to my Sicilian friends’ restaurant in Gila Bend Arizona. You’ll see a link to the restaurant in my “recommended“ page on this website. It’s under the “about“ main menu item.  If you visit, ask for Nino or Antonella and tell them “Bill from Japan“ sent you. But if I said something rude to them the day before they might kick you out.  Joking aside, it is really excellent Italian food. And their fresh bread and gourmet pizza are about the best you could find even in Italy. That speaking from one months traveling experience in Italy.

OK, back to finances. Necessities. You don’t really need that much. Make sure you have some suntan lotion, some after sun skin aloe gel and whatever else you think you need. 

If you want to get a cell phone Sim card or data sim they are very inexpensive, anywhere between 60 and 600 baht per month. That all depends upon the plan you decide to purchase. You can reload them online or download an app to do that. You can also go into one of the very many mobile phone shops and let them manage it for you.  You can set up those domestic phone numbers to call internationally as well but I have never done that. I use the data part to use one of the telecommunication apps on my iPhone or iPad. You can get Internet to landline or mobile phone plans on applications like Skype for about three dollars per month, an unlimited plan.

You don’t need much in the way of clothes in this warm climate so if you don’t bring very much don’t worry, go out and buy what you need, clothes here are not very expensive. 

If you need any medical treatment it’s not expensive here so I wouldn’t worry too much about it. There are pharmacies everywhere with inexpensive medications of all kinds, also not expensive. 

Before I conclude this I want to add …. my website is for retirees and budget travelers. If you want more luxurious accommodations or travel you can spend as much money as you want to spend.  I will say I live in very good comfort, Wi-Fi and everything else I need every day. 

Oh, I forgot one thing. I didn’t mention massage. There’s a blog post on massage so you might want to go look at that if you’re interested. Expect to spend about 150 to 400 baht per hour depending upon the type of massage, relax massage or medical massage.

Massage in Thailand

Most tourists are going to go to tourist sites and some of them will charge something to get in. I don’t go to tourist sites anymore since I’ve seen most of Thailand having spent a month driving around the whole place and visiting what I hadn’t seen before so I’m not really into the traveling tourist things. Also, I lived here for seven years and I find the most interesting part of Thailand is being able to go to the beach every day, good Thai food and relaxation; and of course work on this website.

Oh, I should probably also mention getting money. You can use credit cards here and many larger companies don’t charge the 3% credit card fee anymore but some might. The ATM machines have a 220 baht ATM fee and I think I want to have a separate blog about that issue as well as something about credit cards.  MasterCard and Visa and a few others are accepted pretty much everywhere. You can also take cash advances from your credit card in the ATM machines. ATM machines are literally everywhere. Not in the ocean of course. And they don’t yet put them on the tops of coconut trees. But besides those two places you can find them wherever you need them.

Total Monthly	THB 31,440
Transportation	THB 140
Hotel	THB 16,800
Food	THB 7,500
Massage	THB 4,000
Incidentals	THB 3,000
$US MONTHLY	$983

There are many unfortunate situations and many sad stories now.  By telling my stories I by no means hope it will diminish the pain and suffering other people have been going through for the past six months.

As you know from my other blogs I am staying in a place in Southern Thailand called Khanom in the province of Nakhon Si Thammarat. It’s on the east coast directly opposite Phuket (west coast). Here you can see a map of Thailand with Khanom marked with the Google maps blue (I am here) dot, next to the heart.

I got to this place by accident. I was kicked out of Surathani province when they closed all the hotels. a taxi brought me here to this resort. At that time I was the only customer and through at least half the days of the week I am still the only customer. But since the country is beginning to relax regulations there are more days when there are customers staying here and also when the place is fully booked, almost all Thai tourists here for one night.  

 Recently I’ve been waking up between 5:30 and 6:30 which is a perfect time to get to the beach for a swim before the sun comes up. I’m doing the best I can to keep up 2 swims a day to lose weight. When I got to Thailand in March I weighed 84 kg and now I weigh 77 so the exercise and the diet, mostly not eating very much, is serving me well. (1 kg equals 2.2 pounds)

Since I don’t have a swimsuit I use a very tight bikini underwear which wasn’t really made for swimming but which is perfectly acceptable in Thailand. Many people can’t afford swimsuits so they just swim in their underwear if they go into any water deeper than their hips.  I had three swimsuits but they all have seen better days and had problems that made them unusable.  

After the 15 minutes to half hour swim I come back to the bungalow, wash the sand off my feet and sandals, take a shower and get ready for the events of the day.  

Almost all the morning I spend on my private outside patio drinking coffee, reading email, Facebook and messenger communications and the news from a variety of countries and different new sources.  Once I become thoroughly disgusted with all of the news I go on to manage other things before noon which could be finances, certain issues in the states or Japan or work on various projects such as the family digital museum. Many of the small family heirlooms were passed down to me since I am the oldest (excepting a older brother who pretty much said he divorced the family).  So after giving everything to the next generation I decided to take all of those photos of photos and documents and PDFs of letters and books and share with everyone in the family. 

One or more of those projects is normally finished before three or four so if it’s not raining it’s time to go shopping for dinner. If it is raining I might decide to go in the ocean for my second swim of the day. There is something unusually refreshing about swimming in the ocean with the cool raindrops falling on your head while in the warmer ocean waters feeling almost like a bathtub.

Normally I’ll buy food and then go for my second swim between 5:15 and 6pm when the sun is behind the palm trees and ready to go down. That keeps me from getting sunburned. By the way, a little bit of sun every day is good for the body but over time it’s all so bad for the skin. 

Either way, before 6 I wind up having finished my second dive and having purchased food for dinner. Normally I go to the little food carts in the little city main street and buy things to be slightly heated in the microwave and get ready to eat. An important part of food in Thailand is the sauces. You can buy various kinds of sauces but the food vendors create these really exquisite sauces you can use as dips for what you buy.  very often I buy rice with the meal, either sticky Rice if I’m going to eat little things that I dip in sauce or regular steamed rice if I’m going to put some curry or some soup or something else on top of the rice. Very often I add coconut milk to the rice and the curry to tone down the spices and create a more rounded flavor.  This all melds together in the microwave. Are use the microwave since the food can cool slightly on the way back or from having been purchased earlier in the day.

While having dinner I watch some entertainment I made available to myself through some method or another. I can’t tell you what I watch or my sources. If I did I’d have to silence you.

After a couple hours of some kind of screen entertainment I go to sleep and wake up and start the next day.

The order of doing things during the day depends upon the weather and trying to stay away from the jellyfish, more prevalent after about 6 PM. And I’m not talking about land jellyfish. Those can be exceptionally disturbing, though not as powerful and are inspiring as the flying spaghetti monster.

In another blog I’ll talk about my finances during the day which will be very interesting to those on budget travel requirements.  If you’re interested in this blog you can enter your email address on a blog page so a notification of the new blogs will appear in your email. I won’t use the email addresses for anything; I don’t even see them. And they are conglomerated by a open source program I added to my webpage. I don’t think anyone else would have access to that information.

In closing this writing today I feel lucky to be able to say my situation is a lot more fortunate then many other people.  I wish everyone well and I hope you’re able to travel to interesting places safely as soon as possible.

When many people think of “monsoon” they think of a time of year when constant heavy rains downpour all day. And that may be true in some places in the world but from my experiences in Thailand it’s a little bit of a misnomer. In fact I recommend traveling in Thailand during the monsoon season which can extend anywhere from March until October.  Below is the etymology of the word.

From Arabic موسم (mausim, “season”), from وسم (wásama, “to mark, to brand”), through Portuguese monção and Dutch moesson

I don’t think the word monsoon really fits what happens in Thailand six months out of the year. It is true the origin of the word really refers to a season and not the amount of rain pouring down. The more appropriate term is “rainy season“.

In Japan there are a few months out of the year where they do have extensive rain almost every day. In Japanese is called TSUYU (梅雨) (literally “plum rain“) and it is most often translated into English as “the rainy season”.  But the rainy season in Japan is very different from Thailand. There are a large percentage of days where you get very light misty rain, almost like something you get from misters which, if you’ve ever been to Arizona in the summer, you have experienced.  Even though you can get heavy rains during the rainy season in Japan most of the time it’s just a lot of light rain. But then there is a season for typhoons where Japan does get quite a bit of rain but it comes all at one time so I can do quite a bit of damage As well.

Here in Thailand the rainy season consists of an hour or two of rain almost every day. It’s very hot during the season so the rain Cools everything down and creates a very pleasant time to relax, read a book, get off the motorcycle and just talk to people you’ve never met before. But in some places in Thailand, especially the West Coast where Phuket and many famous tourist beaches are, the wind comes from the west and creates waves that create quite a ride on a boat. About 60% to 70% of scuba diving guests get sea sick in the rainy season and that’s why many boats don’t go out. On top of that it can be somewhat more dangerous to dive since the boat has to drop people off the dive platform and then pick them up. When the boat is he heaving up and down that can cause injuries and extreme stress and discomfort.  That’s why most of the diving off the West Coast of Thailand is done during November to late January  when the wind is from the east.  

So from this description you can surmise the change in winds six months out of the year bring in the rains.  In the northern part of Thailand April and May can be extremely hot and humid. You can be walking around every day as though you’re inside the bathtub with clothes just waiting to be wrung out all during the day.  But in the south it’s actually very comfortable with an hour or two of rain every day and then maybe some nice cloud cover so you can go to the beach without worry of extreme sunburn. But watch out for that very light cloud cover since the sun rays magnify through light fog and light clouds and can cause a worse sunburn than a sunny time. 

Suan Ta San Yesterday I planed to take a motorcycle ride to the Cho waterfall since the sun was covered in clouds, preventing some kind of severe sunburn from the long half hour motorcycle ride. When I got to the fork in the road about 25 km later I couldn’t see a sign for the waterfall so I decided to go towards the cliff Straight ahead since waterfalls tend to fall, and falling often happens from higher places to lower places.  

I kept going up there Hillside Road until, on the left, I saw this big huge pillar sticking out of a series of surrounding what looked like sulfur Spring pools. I drove up a little further and a small sign said in English 10 Baht to enter. I have been to sulfur Springs before in northern Thailand and they tend to be places where family go to, if they’re not too hot, put their feet in the hot sulfur water. If they are too hot they have eggs you can dip in the sulfur water to get hot spring eggs Boiled right in front of you.  But my goal was to go to the waterfall so I headed up the hill.

On the right there were a series of signs and what looked like a fairly substantial dirt road entrance, obviously a tourist attraction. So I drove in the dirt road and came to a parking area with quite a few motorcycles and cars parked. This was definitely a tourist attraction. After getting off my motorcycle I walked up towards the entrance and was instructed to sign in which was obviously part of the COVID-19 contact tracing program and then I paid the 20 Baht entrance fee.

I was expecting to see a waterfall since I asked the person if there was a waterfall there and he said if you go down to the left you can see it. Well I went down to the left and there was no waterfall. But there were a lot of platforms placed out on stanchions into the shallow stream. People sat down on the platforms and had their feet in the water. So I took off my sandals, stepped on the platform and went to a place where I could sit down and dangle my feet in the water which was very cool and refreshing.

I was thinking the object of the platforms was to enable dangling feet in the water and that was it. So I was moving my feet in the water and several people were looking at me and smiling. This made me wonder if they were smiling because I was a foreigner, or because they wanted to talk to me and we’re a little bit shy, or if I had some blood on my shirt from the mass murder the night before.  sorry, that’s my dark humor side coming out.  A couple of times I felt something touching my feet and I thought it was maybe some sticks or some thing moving in the water as I was swishing my feet back-and-forth. But then the touching increased in different areas on the feet and I looked down and I found fish nibbling at my feet.

I know fish eats parasites on larger fish but I wasn’t really thinking everybody dangling feet had this many parasites that fish would want to dine out so consistently.  As I kept my feet from moving, more and more fish came and were nibbling on my feet which was very ticklish. They might’ve been eating the dead skin, bacteria or just decided this was a potential food source. I don’t know. I have to check into that.  If you find some thing on fish nibbling on human skin let me know.

This place is called Suan Ta San. I highly recommend going there for the experience. A lot of families and couples go there and just seem to enjoy.

On the 30 minute motorcycle ride back to my bungalow it started to rain so I stopped to buy a Coke and wait for the rain to come down like cats and dogs and then subside.  The owner of the shop was trying to carry on a conversation with me.  I asked Where are the waterfall was and he explain that what they called a waterfall is religious now water running and not falling. So I did make it to the waterfall. He then asked me where I was from, which is always the first question when you’re traveling, and how long I have been in this area. The question about how long you have been in the area is very typical now with COVID-19. If you have been there for more then a couple weeks he develops a trust that you probably don’t have the virus. If you have been there a month you are obviously “clean“. Ever since 1985 when I visited Paris, my answer to the question, “where are you from?“ Is always “Japan“.  There are a few reasons for this. The first one is simple. I have spent more years in Japan than any country and my home was most often in Japan. And I most recently came from Japan. The second reason is it’s a good way to strike up a conversation. They look at your face and they invariably say, “Funny, you don’t look Japanese“. That starts up a conversation. And I love conversations.  It’s the best way to get to know people. As for the quote on what they say, I embellished it slightly, influence from a Jewish joke I love.  The third reason I respond I am from Japan is particular to Paris. As a good friend from France tells me they have two countries; Paris and France. In Paris saying you are from the US or asking if they speak English will get you very often the kind of response you don’t want. After two frustrating days of feeling rejected I found by saying I am from Japan sparks interest and gets a conversation or process going. So always remember, be interesting!  

When many people think “massage in Thailand“ their mind wanders in a certain direction that I will attempt to correct. 

The well-known center for what we call Thai massage is at Wat Po in Bangkok. Their whole focus is maintaining, preserving and developing traditional massage methods.  When you meet some professional Thai masseuse, and also some non-Thai, you will often hear them mention studying at Wat Po. 

While there are different techniques for massage I will boil it down into the two basic groups, relaxing massage and medical massage. When you come to Thailand as a tourist you will definitely see here and there shops and places on the beach where people have a table and advertise massage for 150 to 300 baht an hour (31 Baht=US$1]. That is relaxing massage.  Very often you can ask them to concentrate on a certain part of the body that concerns you while some places focus only on foot massage.  I often recommend people just get a general full body massage and then find places causing tension or pain and  concentrate on those areas on the next visit. 

The second kind is medical massage. These people do things Western medicine practitioners often pass off to these people.  Most Western medicine focuses on knives and pills.  Of course that’s a gross exaggeration since everyone knows many hospitals have rehabilitation centers that work on different things so in some sense I almost feel like I want to contradict myself but not really. Those hospitals focus on the two things I mentioned and then derivatives that came from either a simulation from other countries and customs and traditions or some evolution from knives and pills. 

What traditional medical massage in Thailand does is focus on medical problems.   Most people have heard of the ancient Chinese practice of acupuncture and many explanations associated with meridians and esoteric connections in the body and life and nature. But we all know the answer to everything is 42.  If you don’t know that you haven’t read “the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy“.

I have had some extensive experience with medical massage and acupuncture to fix things but I don’t really want to go too much into acupuncture right now. I will try to sideswipe it by suggesting some commonalities between the two.  And for a more extensive explanation the two cannot be separated.  The basic, simple concepts are that nerves and tendons and muscles and bones interact.  That’s basically it. If you hear more esoteric explanations then that’s fine. But if you just take this simple concept you will find it is more than sufficient to explain why the results of medical Thai massage is so effective.

Very often the pain or discomfort comes from nerve, muscle or tendon issues. Those actually can be fairly easily treated with medical massage.  Small and big problems can occur when tendons work their way out of place. When you move they are stretched too far and cause pulling on the nerves and cause pain. The same thing can be said for muscles. And the same thing can be said for nerves. If a nerve happens to wind up in the wrong part of the body or the wrong part of the muscle, somewhere it can pinch or be stretched too far, it will cause pain.  

What medical massage does is try to find what is out of whack with one of these three things and try to get it back in a place where it’s not causing strain and pain.  So the key is to find someone who can identify the problem and then fix it.  That sounds pretty simple but it’s difficult to find those people.  I have two experiences with people who focus on the medical aspects of massage. The first one comes from a nerve in my back, probably the sciatic nerve, being kicked out of place from sleeping on a moving boat overnight without a mattress.  I know that’s the problem because I met someone else who was also a scuba diving instructor, did the same thing and had the same problem. The nerve then connects with other nerves that go down the leg, some thing winds up getting out of place and the nerve gets pulled or sometimes gets pinched so feeling disappears or is reduced. It can also cause tendon and muscle pain that can be so excruciating you would never be able to sleep.  The problem caused my leg to feel like it disappeared sometimes and I would just fall down because there’s no more feeling in my leg; no control. Then it morphed into severe pain so I couldn’t sleep. And for about five or six years, maybe seven, I was not really able to run. It caused some disruption in my back muscles that didn’t allow my legs to work quickly 

A friend in Phuket (Thailand) introduced me to a well-known local massage family, three generations. I went there before the rush of people, found a lot of old hotel gowns around a fairly unclean massage area. People explain that hospitals have patients there who could not be treated with Western medicine.  The third generation fellow came out and without asking me where the problem was he just started in and it was the most painful one hour I have ever had in my life. He went deep into the muscles and into the tendons massaging the nerves the muscles and tendons themselves.  If this happened in the  United States my US masseuse friend explained it would’ve wound up as a lawsuit.  Torture is also illegal (unless…. OK this is not a political diatribe).  throughout the massage I was not crying but I was definitely wincing and making noises indicating how painful it was. There were several people around me waiting for their turn and they were giggling every time my voice created a sign of pain.  Part of this is due to cultural reactions but I find also Thai people do not complain as much about pain or scream as much about it as people in the states.  When my half hour was finished my whole body was in total pain.  The fee was “up to youl”.  It was what you wanted to pay or what you could afford.  I made it back to my place went to sleep and woke up early the next morning.  But the next day there was absolutely no pain anywhere in my body and the general discomfort in my back and leg was very much gone.  I went back three days later for another treatment, just as painful, and that cured the problem.   But while I say “Cure“ I meant took care of the constant leg pain problem. I still have the nerve problem in my back so if I stand in one place too long my back pain starts in. And when I’m standing up on a moving train or bus the pain starts in and just keeps getting worse so I have to sit down. But I take care of that myself when I can by going in a pool or in the ocean and using my legs to kick like hell and exercise those back muscles to keep the nerve pretty much where it should be. Anyway that is what I think I am doing and what I think is happening as a result of the exercise even though I can’t see inside and I have not had somebody tell me that’s exactly what’s going on but it works so I do it.

The second experience I have with medical massage in Thailand is what I’m going through now. I spent about six months when I was in Japan reaching for something while watching TV with my hand going sideways to a table that was lower than the chair. I think what happened is the tendon got stretched out of place and when I move my arm in a certain direction the tendon was pulled too tight and pain kept me from extensive use of my arm.  The girl who is working on that now graduated, of course, from Wat Po and while it hasn’t been completely fixed it is getting better.  I have had about 10 treatments on it so far but that area is very complicated. Those nerves, muscles and tendons connect all the way from the fingers through the arm up into the shoulder into the neck and back. Well the shoulder is the connecting point and tends to receive most of the pain.   The neck and back and arms need to be worked on to get those muscles and tendons into the right places and working together the way they should, not pulling on each other.

OK, so this is a very simple explanation of the two types of massage in Thailand. I highly recommend staying away from pain pills if you can and finding somebody to figure out what is causing the pain and be very accurate about it. If that can’t be done how are you going to know whether it’s something that can be worked on through massage or some thing that needs to be taken care of another way? From experience and getting various problems fixed, some explained here, and others including whiplash, I have found very often non-intrusive procedures such as massage can take care of problems when you really don’t need a machine to pull your neck apart or someone to pull out the knife or pills. Most doctors you go to will recommend curing problems through their specialty. Good doctors will recommend what they think will be the best treatment. Make sure you get a proper diagnosis first.

Here is an interesting BBC article. http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20200707-the-birthplace-of-traditional-thai-massage?referer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2F

Now quite a few restaurants are open and so the need to scrounge around for various interesting sources of food is not that necessary. But even until two weeks ago I was learning where to go to buy things that were not junk food and could be either eaten the way they are or mixed together to create something different and delicious.

I am not a cook by any means but I learned to do many of the basics mostly to be able to eat the flavors I like when I want and also as medicine. This short blurb will just focus on what I made last night. I’m working on a overall perspective of food in Thailand, not too long, and should have it finished in a week or so. I think that blog will be very helpful all around the world, not just in Thailand.

In the photo you will see what I bought and created.  Half the rice from the night before was left over since I try not to eat that much every day due to my fairly strict diet.  I might mention here that in general Thai food is not fattening compared to some other foods but it’s pretty easy not to gain weight or to lose weight if you eat the way other people eat here. In the last three months I lost 7 kg (15.5 lbs). That is due to my diet, eating just a yogurt in the morning and then one meal in the evening and also an unusual amount of exercise, swimming in the ocean twice a day, and the healthfulness of Thai food. 

On the right you will see the grilled pork sticks which are grilled in slightly sweet seasoning and below the pork you see the spring rolls made of vegetables and noodles. Those were just purchased and reheated in the microwave.  The sauce for the grilled pork sticks is right above the bowl. It is a very spicy sauce something that would be considered mildly spicy here but which most non-spicy people might find difficult to eat without somehow diluting.  The sauce for the spring rolls is directly above the plate with the spring rolls, the typical sweet pepper sauce you find in the grocery stores. I find that the over sweetening in that sauce needs to be balanced with some pepper sauce like sriracha which I added to give it more of the spicy taste which I like.

Anybody who uses a microwave knows that most microwave cooking will leave food damp and not crispy. That’s because all it does is heat the water molecules. It doesn’t dry out contents like an oven does.  But I haven’t found it a big enough problem to try and figure out a way to work around that with no access to an oven.  So the spring rolls wind up a little bit mushy but maintain their taste very well so I don’t think too much about it.  And it’s easier to cut the spring rolls so they don’t fall apart when they’re mushy instead of very crispy. When they’re crispy and then cut into pieces improperly they tend to just completely fall apart.

Now I get to the main stuff in the bowl. I had some rice left over from the night before and bought some coconut milk which is a good additive especially when adding spices in Thai food.  Then I chopped up and threw in some rice/raw pork fermented sour sausage (NAEM). I like that because it has a sour taste and they often put peppers in them so it adds some spice.  But that’s not enough spice for me so I added some chili sauce which is very much like a Sriracha base but it has a slight tinge of sugar.  That’s it.  I enjoyed the combination of little things reheated and leftovers made into something with the tastes I like.

Listen to this but get ready to plug your ears. I don’t know what kind of bug or animal created this sound but this morning in Khanom it decided to really BUG me, almost had to plug my ears it was so irritating!