Talkin' Shit About A Pretty Sunset

It's true that food in Thailand is weird as fuck, but every time I ordered the "fried reptile" (exact menu wording) or "bamboo worm", the answer was the same: "No have, no have". One of the farmers we met informed me that reptile is now illegal to eat in Thailand because it tastes so good that the species was at risk of extinction.

Riiiigt ...

My Thai associates got a kick out of my interest in exotic food, so they set out to track down the most rot-gut shit the country has. Today our car came to a halt on the side of a highway so we could make a purchase at the dust-covered stand selling snake, rat and bird. The woman quickly returned with a charred rodent-sized body without head or tail, but I decided---for once---it was a bad idea; I have business meetings for another week and don't want to piss out my ass for the duration.

I've seen no tourists in my five days here in Thailand and have spent eight hours a day driving pell-mell around overloaded trucks and slogging through muddy roads in a 4x4 Toyota diesel. The only relief are long discussions about crop yields and agriculture over Singha after Singha till 1AM. Then back to the same routine at seven the next morning.

I've also met farm families like the one in this picture that I took on the edge of a potato field outside Mae Sot, on the border with Burma (Myanmar). If you look closely, they all have light brown mud smeared on their faces---presumably to keep the sun from burning their skin. And the place was swarming with little feral dogs.

More later ...