Were half-and-half today, not semi-skimmed, just at sea this morning as we don’t roll into port until midday. We do our laps during this time, finding a new visitor, and chatting to folk – the most common question is how many laps do we do, since they see us every sea day. Of course there’s the odd person who refuses to speak to us, but mostly people are very conversational.
The port in question is optimistically referred to as Bangkok’s port, but in actuality Laem Chebang is 130km from Bangkok and that means between two and three hours drive or train journey.
We’re lucky enough to have two sets of friends who live in Thailand’s capital city, and one set is on their way to meet us after lunch. Suphoj and Art are staying nearby for a couple of days so we get to do a few things together.
We start by running the usual gauntlet of crazy taxi drivers, and having natives with us initially seems like no defence against their typical behaviour, but eventually we find an amiable chap who didn’t want to fleece us.
We head off just to the local town, visible as we sailed in. We wander around just needing the first afternoon to chat and catch up with Suphoj and Art, it’s incredible where time flies and we’ve a lot to talk about.
Meanwhile we wander through the area containing a temple and then along to the local docks where today’s catch is being left to dry out – squid being the predominant one. Time for a beer at the water’s edge before heading back home. Ironically we could probably swim back to the ship faster than the drive through this crazy and enormous port.
Work and a bit of blogging fills the remainder of the afternoon and it’s soon time to prepare for our evening. There is a Thai cultural show on and we catch 3/4 before dinner and the final quarter after. It’s wonderful to enjoy other culture’s music and dance.
I try another excellent new dish, beef tataki, tonight followed by lamb. We finish with a second newbie which is called cobbler but bears absolutely no similarity to the English one we know, however it is quite like volcano cake or fondant pudding and is very good.
