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On the Road: Chiang Khan to Chiang Mai with John Denver

April 18th, 2009

Nahm Prig (Chile Dipping Sauce)

I wanted to join Khun Pim and her family for breakfast, she was making rice soup, but I had to catch my ride to Chiang Mai at 9 a.m. So she stopped her breakfast preparations and put the fried thing on a plate. She put duck sauce in a small bowl, added dry chile and then handed me the plate with the dipping sauce. I wasn’t sure what the fried thing was, a long tube of golden-brown fried dough with something inside.

We’d bought it at the ba tong ko (fried Chinese doughnut) place this morning in the municipal market. It was made with the same dough as ba tong ko, but inside were glass noodles, minced pork and greens, the whole thing deep-fried in a wok, and, for me, served with a sweet spicy sauce. In a word, delicious, and Yunnanese, as I found out when my ride picked me up and I described my breakfast to them.

Though I’d already bought a bus ticket to Chiang Mai, I couldn’t refuse the offer to ride with three of the Thai NGO workers I’d met the day prior. Though pretty harmless, it’s the kind of thing you don’t tell your mother until after it’s happened. Hey mom, I going on a 9-hour roadtrip with three guys I just met. Don’t worry. It’s cool.

My traveling companions were Matr, 31, Tor, 28, and Tonkla, 24, an affable bunch, who insisted on my sitting shotgun and not contributing any gas money. As we made our way through the curving mountain roads, they put on as much English-language music as possible. First rock and country, then reggae and when they ran out of that it was bluesy Thai rock. Village kids were already starting on Songkran, the Thai New Year that doubles as a water festival, standing on the side of the road throwing buckets of water on passers by.

Lunch turned out to be everything I hoped for. We ate Thai-style, sharing a broad range of dishes in a sunny, outdoor restaurant with a fountain trickling behind us. There was gaeng keowan gai (green curry with chicken), which was mild and sweet, spiked with the bitterness of pea eggplant. The ma la pad kai or bitter melon with boiled eggs yolks was a simpler counterpoint to the rest of the dishes. We had two kinds of chile dip, nahm prig pala, a smoked red version served with raw vegetables, and nahm prig krapi, a milder, sweet version served with sweet blanched vegetables, the orange squash and okra were good enough to eat alone. “A roy (delicious),” Matr declared and finally on the subject of nahm prig, I had to agree. I wasn’t too crazy about the pla tul, salty grilled fish, but couldn’t stop scooping up the pad prig gaeng pla, spicy and sweet catfish in a dry red curry with kaffir lime leaves. Nor could I keep my hands off of the pad krapow gok, stir-fried bony seafood with thai basil and beans. Of course, there was rice.

It was a happy meal with good company and certainly preferable to eating a bowl of something all alone in the middle of the night, as I would have if I’d taken the bus. It made eating that bus ticket (and putting my precious life in the hands of strangers) more than worth it.