Thai Cooking Class

Anyone who knows me, knows that I love food and especially dabbing in the odd bit of cooking. So it seemed appropriate whilst we were in Thailand to go and take a cooking class. After a bit of research online we selected the Silom Cooking School.

The day started off with an early morning visit to one of the local markets with our chef for the day, Hung. One of the market sellers very kindly showed us the live chicken that we were going to be cooking, but fortunately for us we didn't need to watch. 

The Chef had a wicked sense of humour alongside an amazing ability to cook some amazing dishes in a very simple manner. This is pretty much the essence of Thai food and fingers crossed some of the lessons we were given have sunk in so I can try and replicate some of these fantastic dishes. 

Making the Pad Thai

Spring Rolls with sweet chilli sauce

And yes this is Jenny cooking. First time for everything I suppose!

Chef selfie time!

Chicken Mussaman curry

Deep fried banana with coconut batter and coconut ice-cream

Bangkok

The final stop on our trip was three nights in Bangkok. We crammed quite a lot into these few days with a river trip, market trip and a lot of shopping. Overall I was very impressed with Bangkok and found it to be a city definitely worth visiting again. Some brilliant restaurants and cafes with plenty to see and do. 

We stayed in the W Bangkok which was a pretty cool place to hang out. Jenny seemed impressed with the cushions as you can see and took the opportunity to work out some of the anger she had built up.

This was the sky bar at the top of the Lebua State Tower. One of the coolest bars I have been to and was the same bar they used in the Hangover movie. What an amazing view!

Mekong Delta

After leaving Nha Trang we flew down to Ho Chi Minh (formerly known as Saigon), where we took a day trip down to the Mekong Delta.

We travelled to the city of My Tho, about a two and a half hour drive from Ho Chi Minh where we  took a long tail boat to an island on the Mekong Delta. Here we got to sample some of the local coconut candy and a very sweet honey drink. The very strange delicacy that I also got to taste was snake wine, pictured below with a snake and a scorpion in the bottle. It sounds much worse than it tastes!

After lunch and a ride around the villages on a motorised tuc-tuc, we took a further boat trip around the coconut swamps before heading back to town. Whilst it was a nice day out, it was all a bit too touristy for me.

Relaxing in Nha Trang

Sometimes travelling around exploring new countries can be very tiring, so when planning our trip we decided to arrange a few nights somewhere nice just to relax and recuperate - it is supposed to be our 10th anniversary trip after all.

We booked into the An Lam Ninh Van Bay villas. This was a lovely little resort with only 32 villas. We drove for about an hour North of the airport to the hotel's welcome lounge. We were then escorted on a private boat for about 15 minutes to the island itself, where we were met by the hotel manager and our private butler Hung.

Our mountain villa was spread out over three floors, the first having the private pool, the second the living room and bathroom and on the third floor was the bedroom complete with four poster bed.

The most amazing thing about this part of our trip was that coincidentally it fell exactly over the Eid holiday, so we had no emails and no phone calls to deal with - we were able to completely relax.

After a couple of days of pure indulgence, we decided that we should at least try and experience the local area, so we took a day trip into the town of Nha Trang and explored the temples and pagodas.

The hotel offers free bicycles to get around the island and runs daily treks into the jungle. We managed to drag ourselves out of bed one morning to go on the beach hike, which was definitely worth the effort. 

I can not recommend this place highly enough. It has to be one of the best hotels we have stayed in and the staff here were top notch. But unfortunately all good things must come to an end and we had a flight to Ho Chi Minh to catch so we had to wave bye to this little piece of paradise.