Rice is nice....

Here's a nice recipe from Hat Yai, a city in southern Thailand on the main route (both road and rail) between Singapore and Bangkok, and beyond. it's a city with a large Chinese population, a lot of Thai muslims and a fair amount of Malays, too. It's well known for it's food and there are several Hat Yai speciality dishes, famous throughout the region. This is not one of them.

I was travelling from Satun on the west coast of the peninsula - it's the entry port to Thailand when taking the ferry from the Malaysian island of Lankawi - to Songkhla on the east coast. I was with Sveta and her sister Lucy and we travelled as far as Hat Yai without a break. It goes like that sometimes: you get off the ferry and there's a sawn thew taxi just about to take off and you jump aboard; it gets  you as far as the bus station where the Hat Yai bus is just pulling out of it's bay, but stops for you, so you jump aboard....

By the time we got to Hat Yai we were famished. We stayed on the bus until the last stop at the bus station, which wastes about 40 minutes as the bus snakes through the city dropping people off, but we wanted to secure tickets for Krabi the following day and the bus station is the best place to do that (also, it's been four or five years since we were last in hat Yai and if we had got off the bus anywhere else, we probably wouldn't have been able to find our way around). Luckily the travel agent we chose at random when we reached the bus station was also a restaurant - well it wasn't quite at random; there were some other travel agent restaurants but I refused to enter any with dead ducks/hanging by the doorway - so we got our tickets and sat down to eat. I tried out my 'I am a vegetarian' sign written in Thai, and it worked perfectly. I got fried rice with baby corn, green beans, cauliflower and green chilli. It was flavoured with corriander seed and lime leaves. A very simple dish - easy to cook and tastes absolutely fantastic.

That set us up for the rest of the journey, although it was only another hour in a mini bus to our final destination - Sonkhla, a quiet little seaside town with a lovely beach. We stayed there a few years ago - round about the last time we were in Hai Yai - and we spent the night in the BP Samila Beach hotel, which as the name suggests is right on the beach. It's a four star hotel, but rather inexpensive, considering that fact, and unlike the few other cheap ''four star hotels we've stayed at, this one more or less lived up to expectations. That was certainly one of the reasons for taking this route again - it's not often we get the chance to break our journey wuth a little bit of luxury - but even without that, Sonkhla is worth a visit.
Here's a nice recipe from Hat Yai, a city in southern Thailand on the main route (both road and rail) between Singapore and Bangkok, and beyond. it's a city with a large Chinese population, a lot of Thai muslims and a fair amount of Malays, too. It's well known for it's food and there are several Hat Yai speciality dishes, famous throughout the region. This is not one of them.

I was travelling from Satun on the west coast of the peninsula - it's the entry port to Thailand when taking the ferry from the Malaysian island of Lankawi - to Songkhla on the east coast. I was with Sveta and her sister Lucy and we travelled as far as Hat Yai without a break. It goes like that sometimes: you get off the ferry and there's a sawn thew taxi just about to take off and you jump aboard; it gets  you as far as the bus station where the Hat Yai bus is just pulling out of it's bay, but stops for you, so you jump aboard....

By the time we got to Hat Yai we were famished. We stayed on the bus until the last stop at the bus station, which wastes about 40 minutes as the bus snakes through the city dropping people off, but we wanted to secure tickets for Krabi the following day and the bus station is the best place to do that (also, it's been four or five years since we were last in hat Yai and if we had got off the bus anywhere else, we probably wouldn't have been able to find our way around). Luckily the travel agent we chose at random when we reached the bus station was also a restaurant - well it wasn't quite at random; there were some other travel agent restaurants but I refused to enter any with dead ducks/hanging by the doorway - so we got our tickets and sat down to eat. I tried out my 'I am a vegetarian' sign written in Thai, and it worked perfectly. I got fried rice with baby corn, green beans, cauliflower and green chilli. It was flavoured with corriander seed and lime leaves. A very simple dish - easy to cook and tastes absolutely fantastic.

That set us up for the rest of the journey, although it was only another hour in a mini bus to our final destination - Sonkhla, a quiet little seaside town with a lovely beach. We stayed there a few years ago - round about the last time we were in Hai Yai - and we spent the night in the BP Samila Beach hotel, which as the name suggests is right on the beach. It's a four star hotel, but rather inexpensive, considering that fact, and unlike the few other cheap ''four star hotels we've stayed at, this one more or less lived up to expectations. That was certainly one of the reasons for taking this route again - it's not often we get the chance to break our journey wuth a little bit of luxury - but even without that, Sonkhla is worth a visit.