Posted Tuesday, December 26, 2006, 7:07 PM by Lonely Planet
Austin Bush keeps it real in Bangkok...
One of the most common sights along Khao San Road is of backpackers eating phat thai from foam dishes with bamboo skewers. I sidled up to one of the numerous vendors, ordered and was handed a tray of vegetable-laden, egg-free, vegetarian 'phat thai'. One bite and I ditched this abomination and boarded a tuk-tuk, but more on that in a moment.
Despite the name, phat thai is essentially a foreign dish. Noodles and the concept of stir- frying were introduced by the Chinese. Thai cooks combined them, added a sauce containing fish sauce and tamarind, as well as dried shrimp and eggs, then deemed it sufficiently different to add the word 'Thai' to its name. It stuck, and now this example of early Asian fusion is the most famous Thai dish in the world.
I knew that crimes against phat thai were being perpetrated on Khao San Road, so ordered the tuk-tuk driver to rush to Thip Samai, by all accounts the most famous phat thai restaurant in Thailand (and probably the only one with a website). Located a five-minute drive away, Thip Samai has been making phat thai for 40 years. Those only familiar with the Khao San Road variety of phat thai will notice several differences here. Firstly, phat thai doesn't normally contain vegetables, other than a scattering of Chinese chives and some bean sprouts. Secondly, tiny bamboo skewers are out of the question; use a fork and spoon, or occasionally, chopsticks. And finally, vegetarian phat thai is an anomaly. Although the true dish almost never contains beef or pork as it often does abroad, it must contain eggs, fish sauce, dried shrimp and perhaps a few fresh shrimp.
As we pulled up to Thip Samai I shouted my order at the cook before even reaching my seat, and in seconds was rewarded with a steaming dish of fried noodles. I dug in, and trading bites with the obligatory side dishes of banana flower and chives, was in phat thai heaven.
Thip Samai - 313 Mahachai Rd - 02 221 6280
Labels: Culinary culture
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Posted Wednesday, December 20, 2006, 4:42 PM by Lonely Planet
Tom Parkinson reports on a lively campaign trail as he researches the Madagascar guide...
Politics in Madagascar is like everything else on this crazy island-continent: colourful, earnest and unique. 2006 was a landmark year with the presidential elections held on December 3, arguably the first genuinely democratic elections in the country's history - a genuine milestone in a region where coups have been more common than parliamentary reshuffles.
This was the first presidental vote since the infamous elections of 2001, when then president Didier Ratsiraka refused to accept defeat and went to violent extremes to try and retain his 26-year hold on power. Rival candidate and current incumbent Marc Ravalomanana eventually won after a six-month struggle, but the memory meant countless travel agencies were advising clients to avoid Christmas visits until the situation was clear.
The peaceful cavalcade of campaigning, known to locals simply as 'la propagande', began two months in advance of the polling date, graduating from simple posters and slogans to vans full of loudspeakers, massive rallies and national tours. The humble T-shirt became a crucial tool, with party-branded shirts being distributed free to the public - cynics pointing out that in poor areas this was essentially as good as buying votes. Music, too, was a key feature, as competing politicians exploited the national obsession by adopting personal theme tunes and recruiting popular singers to attend their events and write campaign songs.
Two lady campaigners show off their Ravalomanana T-shirts
The dominant figure was undeniably Ravalomanana. The multimillionaire owner of the Tiko dairy chain showed his ardent admiration of President Bush in his adoption of serious business suits, frequent Christian rhetoric, and his use of personal resources and the media.
The President's picture takes over another wall
Other tactics, like setting the election date during the rainy season, when many voters would have trouble travelling to the polls, and while the main potential opposition candidate - exiled former deputy prime minister Pierrot Rajaonarivelo - was prevented from entering the country may not have been necessary as while some voters have been disappointed with the lack of improvement in quality of life around the country, most agree that Ravalomanana has been a good and generally sincere president.
At the final count, it appears that Ravalomanana has won a comfortable and predictable victory, with Ratsiraka a distant second, but as it will take another two weeks for countrywide results to be collected, verified and confirmed, Madagascar will be holding its breath for a little while yet...
Labels: Politics
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Posted Tuesday, December 19, 2006, 3:42 PM by Lonely Planet
Tokyo remains a very exciting slap in the face for first-time visitors, and like all the best cities it's stuffed full of surprises. On my recent trip there while kangarooing from Lonely Planet's London office to our Melbourne HQ I found myself on the trail of one of Japan's most famous son's. A casual glance at the new edition of our Tokyo city guide revealed three cryptic words on a map, not referenced in the text or index... Statue of Godzilla.
Enough to get any kitsch obscura fan twitching.
So, hot-footing it into the backstreets of Ginza, Tokyo's upmarket shopping paradise, I spent a very pleasant hour getting totally lost, but eventually discovering the beast himself. This Godzilla isn't towering over the top of the Roppongi Hills tower, in fact he looks almost cute. But seeing something new, following a chance tip and going on an eccentric quest proves very worthwhile; it's the best of city travel. Have you done anything similar you'd recommend? Discovered something unique amidst a sea of better known landmarks?
Also in Tokyo, the latest craze is for Rodeo Boy. This exercise machine is like a kind of miniature bucking bronco, and riders look like they're doing something pretty filthy while getting fit. More travellers should stopover in Tokyo.
- Tom Hall
Labels: Asia and Pacific, Inside Lonely Planet
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Posted Sunday, December 17, 2006, 6:46 PM by Lonely Planet
Time magazine has announced you, or is that - me - as its Person of the Year. Heck, I guess it's all of us. Those that contribute to this great wicked web of words, commerce and images - still and moving, users and producers - all are in control of what has now been formally dubbed the information age.
So how well has your appetite for travel information been catered to? What have you contributed to the body of knowledge that exists for your fellow travelling companions haunting the far reaches of the world wide web?
Do you really feel that you, or even we, should have been recipients of this time honoured title? We had some other suggestions to get you thinking:
1. Al Gore for bringing focus on climate change to the fore and making us forever question the carbon that we emit in the course of our travels.
2. Michael O'Leary - boss of Ryan Air - for making us question whether the benefit of being able to use your mobile phone on a plane would out-weigh the torture of sitting through everyone else's inane conversation as you fly.
3. Fran Bailey, Federal Minister for Tourism in Australia for thinking the question: "Where the bloody hell are you?" would get the punters coming to Australia in droves.
Labels: Breaking travel news, Travelsnitch
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Posted Wednesday, December 13, 2006, 2:09 PM by Lonely Planet
Austin Bush expands your culinary vocabulary...
Dining on the Thai island of Ko Samui has the linguistic variety of a UN summit; from Indian biryani to Korean bibimbap, pork pie to phat thai. However, one cuisine conspicuously missing from all this is the native cuisine of Ko Samui.
So what is Ko Samui food?
As the languid island lifestyle suggests, the food of Ko Samui embraces simplicity and locality, emphasizing ingredients that can be gathered with a minimum of fuss. This includes seafood such as sea urchin eggs and octopus, fresh herbs, the island's ubiquitous coconuts, and even a kind of local seaweed.
Intrigued? If so, there are a few places to try authentic Ko Samui cuisine on Ko Samui:
Bangpo Seafood (Ban Bang Po, 077 420 010). At this low-key establishment you can sample local specialties such as yam khai hoy men, a 'salad' of sea urchin roe, or tom som waay, a sour soup made from waay, a type of small octopus gathered just offshore. If you fancy getting really local, take your dishes with khao man thua khiaow, rice cooked in coconut milk with salt and dried beans.
Kin Khao Bang Kham (Ban Bang Kham, 077 426 181) is a beachfront eatery with some local dishes on its expansive menu, including fresh seaweed. The seaweed, known as saraay khor, is gathered in the waters in front of the restaurant, and is rinsed and par-boiled before being thinly sliced and combined with other ingredients in a spicy/sour Thai-style salad.
Sabeinglae (near Hat Lamai 077 233 082) is a well-regarded open-air seafood restaurant that caters to those put off by the word weed by offering an obscure kind of sea anemone. Here the anemone, known locally as het loop, is added to kaeng khua, a coconut milk-based curry that is topped with spicy cumin leaves.
Het loop, a type of anenome eaten on Ko Samui, Bangpo Seafood
Labels: Asia and Pacific, Culinary culture
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Posted Monday, December 11, 2006, 5:07 PM by Lonely Planet
What does his re-election mean for tourism to the country? One of our Venezuelan researchers reports:
Venezuela is a pretty full on country. Coming from Colombia, I am astonished just how different Venezuela is from its neighbour. I joke with the locals that I live in Colombia because it's safer than Venezuela.
I fear the political developments in Venezuela will have a negative impact on tourism in the country. I have spoken to many posada owners and tour operators, on the coast especially, who tell me that every year since Chavez came to power they've seen fewer and fewer domestic tourists. I meet middle class people who are making plans to leave the country.
Compared to other countries in South America, Venezuela is expensive, the people can be unfriendly, the food ordinary and the official exchange rate means there's no bang for your buck. Venezuela is a country drunk on its own oil wealth. It's not a quiet, chatty sort of drunk, though, it's the rude brawler in the corner looking for a fight.
So is the socialism preached by Chavez really an alternative to the unbearable tyranny of the American capitalist model, or just an idealised vision? If you go to Venezuela, obviously you can decide for yourself.
But the formula seems simple: if you get all the money you want from Uncle Chavez, who cares about tourists? Why bother attempting to provide good service? Heck, why work hard to begin with, some corrupt official is just going to mooch off your hard work anyway! It's sad, but the service industry will suffer, so the travellers may just start to stay away.
And the question remains - what happens when the oil runs out?
Like the ancient proverb goes, give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.
Labels: Breaking travel news, On the road, The Americas
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Posted Wednesday, December 06, 2006, 7:00 PM by Lonely Planet
Joshua Samuel Brown is on the road researching Lanyu (or Orchard Island) for the Taiwan guide...
"I found this revolutionary era artwork adorning, of all things, chip bags at a 7-11 shop in Penghu. I haven't seen this brand anywhere else in Taiwan, and can't imagine that the overtly communist Chinese style would be a big seller amongst the betel-nut chewing 'us-or-them-independence-or-die' crowd. My friend Catwalk tells me that this kind of art wasn't unusual in Taiwan in the 1950s, but I like to think that the chip company is using this archipelago halfway between Taiwan and the Mainland as a petri dish for this lovely bit of cross-strait artistic, commercial cross-pollination."
Makes your regulation chips' packaging look kind of, well, regular.
Labels: Asia and Pacific, Culinary culture
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Posted Tuesday, December 05, 2006, 6:59 PM by Lonely Planet
Are you the only person on earth who knows how to find the powerpoints at Albury [ABX] or Lugansk [VSG] airports? It's time to share! CNET have set up a neat little site called atlarge so that travellers can keep other travellers up to date on wifi, power points and landline phone connections in every airport in the world. So far we've only found one entry - unsurprisingly, New York's JFK airport - so if you know about the state of wifi at Paramaribo [PBM], get typing.
Labels: Travelsnitch
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Posted Monday, December 04, 2006, 4:27 PM by Lonely Planet
Used to be that if Americans were feeling frisky, all they had to do was drive over the border into Tijuana to indulge in the vices not so easy to find back home. Maybe they'd even pick up a black market velvet Elvis. Or a Bart Simpson piggy bank. Or a box of Chiclets.
Not so simple these days. As of January 2007, Americans looking to take advantage of all that Mexico has to offer will need a passport. This is also true for those looking to see what Canada is all 'aboot.' Folks heading to the Caribbean will need to remember their all-important passport when visiting the islands - at least if they're going by land. Cruise ship passengers get a little bit of a reprieve due to a strong lobby - almost as strong as the NRA, only this time, Gopher's in charge, not Charlton Heston. You will need two forms of ID - your birth certificate and a driver's license - to embark and disembark the ship at all ports. Of course, all this is slated to change as of January 2008, so you might as well just get a passport.
The situation is ever-changing, so you might want to check here for the most up-to-date information. Of course, our take is you should already have a passport anyway, just in case you need to get the hell outta dodge.
Labels: The Americas, Travelsnitch
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