The Best Phad Kra Phao in Thailand

Of the many excellent dishes of Thai cuisine's thousands of degustatory concoctions, one of my favorites is phad kra phao or fried basil leaves and hot chili peppers.

Typically served on rice with pork or chicken (but sometimes with shrimp or other seafood), you can also order it with a fried egg on the side, as the Thais often do.

There's also a version of the dish served with fried wide rice noodles, instead of the usual white rice, called phad khee mao (drunkard's noodles) which I've happily ordered instead.

When I began doing my annual revisits to Thailand in 2005 and 2006 one of my favorite pastimes was ordering this tasty and often spicy dish.

By the time of my last visit in 2007, my lust for phad kra phao had evolved into something of a quest to find the best of its kind in Thailand.

Without any real desire to find a definitive winner, however, I noticed after a time that I was ordering the dish at least once, sometimes twice, per day.

I ordered it from typical sit-down restaurants, from the smallest of street stalls, from air-conditioned food courts in shopping malls, from five-star hotel coffee shops, from fancy mountain resorts, from the humblest of village food shacks, from 20-30 baht menus (60 cents to 90 cents)  to 300-400 baht menus ($9 to $12).

My friend Pik would often make it, and anytime I visited other friends at home there was a good chance phad kra phao would be on their own extensive, family-style meals as well.

Did I ever find the best one?  I'm fairly certain I never had a bad one, with one remarkable exception.

In 1997 I was working the Phrae gig with the Banjoman Band.  The venue was a typical restaurant/pub job (owned by the same owner of today's Tiger Kingdom in Chiangmai), and band members were entitled to one free rice dish per night.

The chef was aware that phad kra phao was one of my favorites, and he would ask me:  "Dave kin phet dai mai?" ("Can you eat spicy?")

When I assured him that I could eat it spicy "baep Thai" (Thai style) it became something of a game for him to find my limit of phrik khee noo (hot chili peppers).  Gradually his version of the dish became ever more spicy.  After the meal he would smirk and ask me how it was:  "Phet mai?  Dave yang kin phet dai, reu?" ("Was it spicy?  You can still eat spicy?")  Always I would assure him:  "Kin dai nae nawn!  Arroi maak maak luhy" ("Of course I can eat spicy!  It's very delicious")

One night, possibly in frustration at my unwillingness to blink, he went all out and just loaded up the dish with as much crushed chili pepper as he could manage.  I forget now if I ordered it with pork, or chicken, or shrimp, or what, because it hardly matters:  his creation was so spicy that it was virtually inedible.  I went through the motions, but I conspicuously didn't clean my plate that evening.

As always, he was near the door as I was on my way home for the night, and he didn't waste time cornering me with:  "Khuen-nee arroi mai?  Dave yang kin phet dai, chai mai?"  ("Was it good tonight?  You can still eat spicy, right?")  What a smartass!

Still, I refused to bend:  "Arroi maak, kheun-nee man phet nit-noi tae arroi muean deum" ("Very tasty, tonight it was a little spicy but delicious all the same")

At this my culinary torturer roared with laughter as I walked out of the joint.  I never ordered the dish from him again.

So did I ever find a "best" one?  Who knows, but one occasion sticks out for me.

I recall that I ordered a standout version of the dish from a hole in the wall, outdoor-seated, food shack outside the so-called Fish Cave on the winding mountain road from Soppong to Mae Hong Son town.

If I remember correctly, the mae khrua (owner/chef) recommended the shrimp version, so I said okay.  It absolutely blew me away with its flavor, subtle spicing, and overall naa-kin (extraordinarily delicious) quality.

How do I remember this occasion after having tried phad kra phao hundreds of times over 25 years? 

Because on that day I said to myself: 

"I think I might have found the best phad kra phao in Thailand!"

Highlights of Five Weeks in Thailand

1.)  This year's "place that sticks" is without a doubt my former home-away-from-home Chiangmai, where I spent about three of my five weeks in Thailand.   It was great simply to hang out there as an informed ex-resident, now tourist, and surprising some of my old friends along the way.

2.)  Hanging out with Pik and Stefan and their kids.

3.)  Seeing Peppo, my niece, after seven long years.

4.)  Although I didn't seek out as much live music as I would have even 10 years ago, discovering the bands at Tiger Kingdom in Chiangmai was definitely a highlight of this trip.  The younger generation of singers and musicians here is very impressive, and though their older mentors--some of them contemporaries and friends of mine--have obviously helped with their development, I can tell that older musicians in Thailand can also learn a lot from their younger sisters and bretheran.

5.)  Revisiting Soppong Town, Bangma Pha District,  Mae Hong Son Province.

6.)  Visiting the old 16th century Ayutthaya City ruins.

7.)  Playing fiddle tunes with Sharon and Mick and others at Finnegan's Pub in Bangkok.

8.)  Best $12 hotel room:  The Rest Bull Bed and Bar in Chiangmai had everything I needed:  clean sheets and bathroom, hot shower, fridge, air conditioning, cable TV, free coffee and tea, and relative peace and quiet.

9.)  Best $22 hotel room:  a toss-up between the S1 Hostel in Bangkok's Soi Ngam Dupli--with most of the same amenities listed above, and Hanoi's Serenity Hotel--also with the same amenities plus an excellent, free American-style breakfast and a desktop with internet access in my room.

10.)  Best coffee:  Vietnam wins this by a large margin with its strong black coffee sweetened with condensed milk.  Thailand tries very hard with its many small espresso machines and $1 lattes, but at heart it's still a Nescafe nation.  On the rare occasions when I found kafe boran, the Thai version of Vietnamese coffee, I ordered it in anticipation of my return to Hanoi.

Junta Ends Curfew Just As Niece Arrives for a Visit

Bangkok's military rulers earlier this week eased curfew restrictions in several provinces, including Mae Hong Son, but left the midnight-4 a.m. restriction in the capital, in Chiangmai, and several other areas.

However, in a surprise move, the junta finally scrapped the curfew in all remaining areas effective last night (Friday June 13).

The move comes just in time for the second day of Fifa's World Cup in Brazil.  Thais are pretty crazy for football and will watch as many broadcast matches as possible, but many of the live broadcasts will be late at night.  Last night there were three matches at 10 p.m., 1 a.m., and 4 a.m.

Businesses with big screen HD and plenty of food and drink are expected, as usual, to cash in on the biggest sports event in the world apart from the Olympics.

While the curfew hasn't really cramped my own earlier-to-bed-at-this-age lifestyle, most Thais and farang are sure to welcome the news.  This morning I overheard some Thais talking about how they'd gone out partying in the wee hours.  In fact, they were only just returning home, at 10.30 a.m., to get some sleep.

Meanwhile, I had just slept through the entire canceled curfew following a somewhat difficult motorbike journey yesterday from Pai to Chiangmai.  While I made excellent time in the first hour of my trip, once I passed the provincial border, I started getting hit by intermittent rain.  In fact, the rain forced me to stop half a dozen times in the last 80 km (50 miles) of the trip.  It took me about five hours to cover the entire 80 mile journey.

So I was fairly pleased to be back in Chiangmai today, and thrilled to find out that my Thai "niece" Pepo, daughter of my friend Marc, has arrived for a three-day weekend with her family.  Pepo looks great and seems very happy and content with life.  She was bubbling with enthusiasm about things in general, and she filled me a bit about her PR job with the Bangkok film company.

Her entry level salary is okay, but she also gets paid for overtime.  The catch, however, is that she has to put in a lot of overtime.  In fact, it seems as if she's expected to put in 16 hour days--everyday.

On the bright side her weekends are free, and she has friends to hang out with as she begins to settle into the work life routine.

This morning I ate northern style food (with sticky rice) with Pepo and her sister Miriam.  This kind of food isn't for everybody (for many farang it involves acquiring a taste), but for northern Thais it is an integral part of their culture and home life.

I asked Pepo if she misses northern food in Bangkok.  "For sure!" she said, adding that she's far too busy with work to seek out the cuisine in the capital.

Cashing in on Pai

Stefan warned me that there has been a lot of new development in Pai, but I wasn't prepared to hear stories of prices doubling or even tripling during the high season.

Pai is the first major town on the road from Chiangmai once you've passed the border of Chiangmai and Mae Hong Son provinces.

Pai has long been a popular destination, especially with young backpackers and independent travelers, but for me it's usually been just a rest stop on the way to and from Soppong or Mae Hong Son town, the provincial capital.

I didn't have a clue where I was going to stay in a town that must have a couple hundred guesthouses, hotels, and resorts, but I knew I only wanted to spend 200-300 baht per night ($6-10).  This seemed to be an easy enough mission since I'd already seen many signs offering "Rooms Starting At $300."

I was almost set to check out a place across the street from the Be Bop Bar when an older gentleman rolled up to me and my parked motorbike on his three-wheeled motorcycle and side car.  We chatted for a bit, he wondering where I planned to stay, me lying at first that I'd already booked a room, so that I could get a better feel for him and his angle.

He revealed that he worked as a three-wheeled taxi driver and that he could direct me to good accommodations ("Just name your price and preferred type of room") for which he'd be able to claim a 5% commission from the owner.  "I have this arrangement with many owners here in Pai," he explained.  "If you like the room,  I collect from them.  It will cost you nothing directly."

I liked his manner, so I agreed to follow him to TaYai Guesthouse where the woman owner set me up with 200 baht room.

She and her husband are originally from Chiangmai, and they entered the guesthouse business in Pai only three years ago to escape the Bangkokization of their native city.

"The air is better here, it's nice and quiet, and there are no thieves.  There are so many thieves in Chiangmai! Do you see all this stuff here?" she asked, referring to the kitschy ceramic animals and other tchotchkes decorating her very well-kept garden.  "In Chiangmai, this stuff would be gone in one night."

I shared some of my story with her (used to live here for eight years, had a Thai girlfriend, how I learned Thai, played in a Thai country band) and remarked upon how affordable Thailand still is even after some of the most rapid economic development in Asia.

"Ha!  Not anymore, at least not in Pai," she said.  "If you visit during the high season (November through February), I would have to charge you much more than 200 baht.  In fact most places here will charge at least 600 for the room you have, and that means no air conditioning.

"It's so busy here, with farang and Japanese and Chinese tourists, that most places are full.  You have to reserve rooms in advance.  Just the other day, someone reserved a room here six months in advance!"

This was all easy enough for me to understand:  Pai is popular with a certain set (youthful, "alternative", neo-hippie, etc), there are only a certain number of rooms available, market forces dictate these prices, and so forth.  And I'd (barely) come to accept that restaurant prices were about double from those of Chiangmai.  But then my landlady dropped a real stunner.

"In the high season it gets so full that now they've opened up camping down by the river," she said.  "One tent spot is 600 baht!  Now they have hundreds of these camping spots, and still the tourists keep coming, Thai tourists, too.  Everybody wants to come here, it seems like."

Even now, with the low season, the rainy season now in full swing, she seems to be doing okay.  On the couple nights I've stayed here, she 's had at least 8-10 of her 15 or so rooms filled with farang, Thai, and other Asian customers.

Striking Development of Remote Areas in Northern Thailand

Today I write this from Amphoe Bang-ma Pha, Mae Hong Son Province, my favorite area of Thailand.  Bang-ma Pha town (Soppong) is about 180 km northwest of Chiangmai but 4-5 hours by bus because of the mountainous roads.

I did the trip on motorbike, stopping in Pai (44 kilometers southeast of here) on Sunday to overnight, and I arrived here yesterday morning.

Whenever I think about visiting Thailand, this is where I ultimately want to be.

I first visited the area during Christmas of 1989.  At that time, the roads from Soppong up to the caves at Tham Lot and Ban Mae Lanna were strictly dirt and quite treacherous even with 4WD.  Electricity was by expensive gasoline-operated generator, but most people used candles and flashlights for light after sundown.

Now both those routes are paved all the way, and both villages have electricity on Thailand's grid.

I can't say that I had a front row seat to these developments, but I've visited here countless times over the years, so every new thing that's built--from government offices to schools to hospitals (all the things we take for granted in the west)--is quite memorable to me.

The iconic 7-11 convenience store, for me, rather defines and epitomizes the development of Thailand over the past couple decades since there wasn't even one such store in Thailand in the late 1980s.

Beginning roughly 20 years ago, the gigantic CP Group of Thailand started to open 7-11 stores in Bangkok and Chiangmai, Thailand's second-largest city.  Before long, there was a branch or two, or more, in every town and city in the land.  (There are at least four in tiny Pai alone.)

So I couldn't believe my eyes when I drove into Soppong village yesterday and saw that 7-11 has arrived here, too.  My first thought?  "Amphoe Bang-ma Pha has joined the world."  My second thought?  Hard to describe, but it was something of a mixture of sad and wistful.

Soppong has long moved past being the definitive one-horse town it was in the '90s. It's at least three or four "horses" and gaining more by the day.

There are more guesthouses than before, and some of them--like mine--are a little more upscale.  There are many more coffee shops and restaurants, and where there used to be only two or three mom and pop stores selling all types of general goods, now I see perhaps twice that many.

To the best of my recollection, there were no shops selling brand-new motorbikes, even a decade ago.  Now there are at least two.

And the building boom continues.  I see a multi-story behemoth--probably shophouses--going up just 100 meters from my room.

With "development" of a relatively remote area come new types of problems.  For example, now that it's the rainy season, the late afternoon rains that come like clockwork every day also bring high winds that cause trees or mountain debris to fall on power lines, bringing temporary electric outages just at the time of day when demand is highest.  This happened both nights I spent in Soppong, so people still rely on candles and generators.

The owner of my resort told me that in the old days when the power went out, the electric company didn't care too much about getting things up and running again quickly because "there wasn't so much development as now and not nearly as many customers as now."

But with the growth of Soppong over the last 10-15 years, more people demand that the work crews get out there and restore power as soon as possible.

The 3-4 outages I witnessed over two nights lasted from about 15 minutes to as much as 90 minutes or so.  My first night here I saw one of the work crews working almost right outside my door.

Yesterday I saw a very large crew, perhaps two dozen strong with five or six trucks, working on a stretch of downed power lines about five miles west of Soppong.

While development has undoubtedly brought numerous benefits to the mostly hilltribe peoples who live here, I can't help but feel--from my privileged farang perch--that part of the charm of this place was that it presented certain challenges, that it took some gumption to get here and a certain resilience to stay.

How strange to feel so ambivalent about development!  The locals benefit a lot, of course, but how much will they lose in the long term?  Farang who have seen post-Communist economic wreckage, post-manufacturing "rust belts" in the West, and a massive Chinese economic powerhouse becoming one of the world's major-league polluters may be right to ask such questions.

But do we have the right to demand that China clean up its act, or that certain developing countries forgo certain kinds of developments?

I think the best we can do is try to set an example to the world with careful, sustainable development models that developing countries can eventually emulate.

Pik and Stefan and Their Kids

Pik is my oldest Thai friend.  She and I have known each other for almost 25 years (I am slightly older than her).  She married my friend Marc in 1990, and their daughter Pepo was born in May 1991.

Although their marriage didn't last long, Marc sent money regularly for Pepo's education, and recently she earned her bachelor's degree in film studies from Rajabhat University in Bangkok.

A month ago Pepo found an entry level position in Bangkok with the Kantana Film Company  with a decent starting salary.

Stefan, a young man from Germany, met Pik in the hills of Mae Hong Son Province in 1994 where they were both working--Pik as a trekking guide and Stefan as a silversmith.  They fell in love and Stefan became Pepo's surrogate father.

In 1995 Pik gave birth to a son, Caspar.  I remember Caspar when he was only two or three years old at the time I returned to Thailand in 1997 following a year in the States.  At that time Pik and Stefan and the kids were living high in the hills of Mae Hong Son outside a Shan village overlooking a spectacular view of the bordering area of Burma.  Their compound became a regular stop for me in my travels in northern Thailand in 1997-98 and early 2001, partly because it was a remote kind of paradise.

In 1999 their daughter Tara was born, followed quickly by another daughter, Miriam, toward the end of the year 2000.  Tara was only two or so and Miriam just a baby when I visited the family in early 2001.

They were--and still are--perhaps an unusual family by Thai and even by Western standards.  Never very affluent but always hard-working, they believed in a living philosophy of closeness to nature, limited materialism, healthy food, and a "balanced lifestyle" incorporating both work and and plenty of leisure.

This lifestyle was never easy for them.  For example, soon it became clear, as the kids grew older, that the school in the Shan village would not be able provide an adequate education for their children.  As the kids grew older, it became necessary for the family to move closer to the cities of the north, and away from their homemade paradise in Mae Hong Son.

By the time I returned again for annual visits in 2005-2007, Pepo was living with Pik's parents in Doi Saket, a town just a half hour's drive east of central Chiangmai.  Later, Caspar joined Pepo there, and the kids began attending school in Chiangmai.

Around this time, the family acquired a house in Doi Saket while keeping the property in Mae Hong Son.  It was here that I last saw everyone during my last trip in August 2007.  Pepo was 16, Caspar 11, Tara just 8, and little Miriam only six years old.

Now Pepo is 23 and succeeding in Bangkok while her younger brother and sisters are fast-growing teenagers:  Caspar is 18 and attending a technical school, Tara's15 and preparing for a year's exchange study in Germany, and little Miriam is already 13 and just starting the new school year as a high school student in Chiangmai.

While still keeping the Doi Saket house, the family began moving piecemeal but more or less permanently to Chiangmai about 2-3 years ago.

Currently they rent a 2 1/2 story shophouse not far from my hotel, and Stefan also rents a small shop in a heavily touristed lane in Chiangmai's old city where he sells his silver jewelry and custom-crafted silk screen t-shirts.

Life hasn't gotten any easier for them.  Though solidly middle class, they have never been as affluent as the typical Thai-farang couple.  Every baht they make is hard-earned.  The combined rent of their shophouse and store is about 14,000 baht per month ( a little less than $500) which seems very cheap by Western standards but which I know from my own experience can seem quite expensive under the circumstances.

As the kids grow older, the family faces different kinds of problems.  Today Pik and Stefan complain about having to pay so much for the IT gadgets the kids desire:  the laptops, cellphones, and other items that most Thai youngsters seem to require (and take for granted) in this wired new millennium.

They worry that their teens are wasting too much time in front of their own individual screens, and that this type of activity will negatively impact their education.

Certainly these kind of worries will sound familiar to Western parents, too.