FLOATING MARKET: One visit and you'll be hooked

On the last day of the Grandparents visit we headed down to the Floating market, about 80 kilometers southeast of Bangkok in Samut Songkhram. On they way we passed several vendors selling salt by the side of the road. The Chao-Phrya river delta has extensive salt flats, where farmers allow the salt water to flood their land, then wait for it to evaporate and harvest the leftover salt residue.

The Floating Market is an extensive network of canals where people gather to sell their produce. Two generations ago it was strictly a market for agricultural produce, since the Samut Songkhram area of Thailand is among the most fertile regions of the country. The water from the canals periodically floods the nearby land, providing an automatic irrigation system for the fields and orchards that grow nearby. We passed orchards full of jackfruit, guava, mangoes, and many other Thai fruits that just grow naturally without planting or additional watering.

The area is now one of Thailand's most culturally distinct attractions, so if you visit today you must jostle for position among the myriads of other tourists in long boats. Along with the boats selling fruit, sticky rice with mango, coconut pancake, you must contend with vendors on the riverbanks who sell the same clothes, decorations, and knick-knacks available on the streets of Bangkok. At times one feels like a rat in a maze, but it definitely still well worth the trip.

This woman was selling coconut beverages. She takes a machete and hacks the top to a point, cuts it open, then places a straw inside for drinking. With one of these in your hands you appear to be in tropical paradise, until you take a drink.


These women use their boats to sell all manner of fruits and concoctions. They can be quite agressive, telling you to purchase from them and not from another vendor, or they may even grab your boat as you go by to get your attention. Fortunately, Morg was there to protect me.


This is 'ngau?' fruit. You peel back the red-green spindly exterior to eat the white fleshy part inside. Thai legend has it that this is the fruit Willy Wonka used to lure the Oompa-Loompa's to his chocolate factory.


Since Meg's face got so badly sunburned in Phuket, we've opted for slightly more extreme measures in sun-screen protection. She seems unconvinced, but I think it will be next year's big fashion statement.








IN OTHER NEWS...

INSECTA-SIDE DISH: Pasta was on the menu for this evening's dinner. Kaddi took the package out of the cupboard, dumped it into the boiling water, and watched in horror as several bugs floated to the surface. She was about to throw the entire contents of the pot away before I stopped her. Given the choice of pb&j (again) and buggy-pasta, I choose buggy-pasta. I tried to convince everyone else that the boiling water kills the bugs and anything else, but there were no takers. I thought it tasted fine, maybe a bit crunchier than usual, but fine.

RADIUS DOES MATTER: My parents had to be at the airpot at 6:30 AM, which means we had to leave here so early we couldn't get a van and had to take two taxis instead. I called up a driver that I use regularly, and asked a friend with another taxi to come as well. My parents and I traveled in one taxi, and the luggage was packed into another. When we arrived at the airport I went to pay the drivers, and notice the fare for one taxi was 25 baht higher than the other. I thought this odd, since taxis here run on a meter system, and we had traveled the exact same distance at the exact same time.

During the ride home back to our apartment, I asked my driver how this was possible. He told me to guess. I thought that perhaps one driver had turned his meter on while he was waiting for us to load the luggage, prematurely increasing the fare. Or perhaps that he was from another taxi company that calibrated their meters in a slightly different manner. Neither of these proved correct. He informed that the meters function exactly like odometers. They are designed to calculate distance based on the number of tire revolutions. Entrepenurial drivers often mount standard size tires on their taxis while the meters are calibrated, then switch them out for smaller radius tires - say, from 175R to 165R. The smaller tire size increases the amount of rotations and tricks the meter into thinking the car has travelled a greater distance. The cutomer travels 25 km, but pays for 30 km.