Ko Samui, Thailand

Tuesday arrived, we slept in, still recovering from the travel ling. While ambling around Fisherman’s Village the previous evening, which is a very agreeable experience, we made a mental note of our possible breakfast venue for the morning. Hence we were back in the village and had a sumptuous English breakfast at the Karma Sutra restaurant, which is, oddly enough, located on both sides of the street.

Fueled up and ready to go, we stopped off at the local Tesco Lotus shopping centre, a large supermarket, to stock up on some basic foodstuffs. Got most of what we were looking for, i.e. breakfast stuff, pasta dish stuff…and of course beer, of which you get two sizes in Thailand, the normal 330ml and the big 640ml. Anyway, a funny thing happened to me on my way from the beer aisle. A lady store attendant approached me and told me to buy more booze… Huh ? I had already stocked up with eight big beers made up of a variety of Chang, Heineken and Carlsberg. Also one litre of gin somehow made its way into the trolley and I was busy selecting a bottle of wine when I was approached. Now I’m not one to shy away from a good trolley load of booze, but this was unprecedented. “Not enough”, she’d say with me replying that “it is enough… for today at least”. This carried on until she pointed to the sign on one of the
racks which says that if you happen to purchase liquor from a/this store between 14:00 and 17:00, you have to purchase more than 10 litres of alcohol… I like this place already ! I thus concluded my booze stock with a two litre bottle of Italian Rosso wine and threw in another couple of big beers for good measure.

Later the afternoon we went back to Fisherman’s Village, down to the beach, and lay in the late afternoon sun, catching our first Thai sun-rays, and also had a quick swim, our first of the holiday… come to think of it, the first of he year.

Still later we stopped off at a lady with a mobile banana pancake stand. Wonderful to watch her make these delicacies. She first takes a pre-prepared ball of dough, then rolls it out on a flat surface, pulls a couple of pizza moves, swinging the dough around until it is thin enough, after which she places it on the warm frying pan with a bit of oil. Then she takes the banana, deftly strips off three quarters of the skin lengthwise, using the remaining quarter as protection while dicing the banana into slices, which ends up right on top of the open pancake. We opted for the banana caramel, so she took the caramel bottle, drenched the banana with that after which she proceeded to fold the pancake over, to end up with a square of about 15 by 15 centimetres, with all the goodies inside. This is placed on a paper plate, a mini cleaver is then used to cut the pancake into little bite size squares after which condensed milk is drizzled over it. A toothpick, to eat this with, is then stuck into the pancake after which it is presented to you. Delicious !

This treat got the taste buds buzzing and we soon found ourselves at the Ali Baba Indian restaurant where we ordered a Tandoori chicken, a dish for two, which was simply divine. Seeing the Ali Baba sign, it reminded me of a trip I took to the Greek island of Rhodes, back in the 1990’s. We took a day trip from there to Turkey (Marmaris) and the tour guide on the bus introduced himself jovially with “I am Ali Baba, I know there are many who claim to be Ali Baba, but I am the original Ali Baba” !