Bryce learns to cook

Don't tell mum (or she'll make me cook when i come home) but i did a cooking course the other day learning how to cook Thai food.  It's pretty simple really once you have a wok the main thing to remember is to wash your hands before going to the toilet afterwards (you handle a lot of very hot chiles cooking thai so mistakes  forgetting this golden rule would be painful)

It was a great fun day with five other blokes in my group we learnt how to make curry pastes from scratch (using the mortar and pestle gave me a whole new respect for the food processor) green curry, sticky rice, spicy thai salad (does anybody know if you can get green papya in NZ?), pad thai etc.  If i am feeling really adventurous when i get back maybe there will be some thai salad for xmas dinner.

The Thai equivilent of maggi soup mix it is all the ingredients necesssary for soup wraped up with a rubber band on sale in the market.

How you know your fish is fresh (there is a bucket full swimming around next to the bbq)

Master Chef here I come

The proof is in the tasting

Other than my cooking i have had a moral tug of war over weather to go to the tiger temple where you can pet live fully grown tigers.  I would love to do it but it doesn't seem right that a wild beast should have somehow had its intstinctive nature changed so much as to be safe to pet (roumours abound about drugging etc).  I have a bus out of town in about 3 hours so i guess i have made the decsion not to go, though i am consdering coming back here later (mainly to trek and maybe hang out with the elephants). 

As time has marched on i am awear that time for my holiday is runnning out with all of Vietnam and Cambodia to go so i am on a plane the morning after tomrrow to Vietnam (Hanoi) and hopefully tomorrow i will finalise my plans from Thailand back to Wanganui so i will let you know when it is all sorted, but i think i am going to get to travel the Nullabor plane which i have wanted to do for years now.