There's a photograph at my mother's house that shows a young family enjoying a day at the beach. Well maybe enjoying isn't the right word. This is Bridlington we're talking about, so maybe enduring a day at the beach is more to the point. It doesn't tell the whole story of course. It doesn't tell you about the long traffic jam through Malton, or that somebody wet themselves and somebody else got his front teeth wedged in a stick of rock. But it says enough. It says Daytrip.
I mention it because I needed to get out of Bangkok for the day. It didn’t really matter where, just so long as it was fairly quiet and I could stretch my arms without knocking someone off a passing moped. My only other requirement was that I didn’t end up anywhere that was heavily populated by noisy gap year students in conspicuosly well-travelled underwear.
I decided to visit Rayong, an unglamorous town close to the ever-popular island of Ko Samet. If Rayong and Ko Samet were sisters, Ko Samet would get all the wolf whistles and Valentine’s cards while poor old Rayong would be earnestly complimented on her cooking and choice of sensible walking shoes.
I took an air-conditioned bus from Bangkok’s Estakami station, where I managed to pick up a detailed map of Rayong. On it were noted such untempting wonders as the Agricultural Office, the Land Office, the Forestry Office, and the Cowgirl Strip Club and Grill. A closer inspection revealed that the last one was actually Rayong Technical College. My interest was oddly stirred.
I once made a joke about the marine museum in the east Yorkshire seaside town of Bridlington being home to nothing but a single starfish and an elderly lobster called Tracy. I made the remark in an affectionate review of Bridlington, which I have to confess scored a lot of mileage from dear old Brid’s tattered charm.
The museum I visited one chilly, rain-spattered afternoon at the very end of the season was so tiny that a second visitor would have filled it. As luck would have it I was the only soul in there, and so I wandered freely between the exhibits. It was a dark, cavernous room with a worn floor like driftwood. Fishing nets and lobster pots hung from the ceiling, stained with age and use and heavily coated with dust. It smelled rousingly of the sea, which seemed to give the place a strangely fanciful quality.
The exhibits themselves – an interesting if disappointingly inactive collection of native marine specimens - were housed in tanks along the length of the walls. The water was murky and badly lit, either deliberately so in an attempt to recreate the dim, natural conditions of British waters, or more likely because some of the bulbs had blown. In each tank sat an off-duty example of native sea life, usually a drab little fish with a morose expression and some kind of unfortunate skin growth designed to make it look like a clump of rocks, or an invertebrate creature of such indeterminable shape and mass that to call it an animal would require a leap of faith and a set of inverted commas.
Everything was conspicuously lacking colour and vitality - quite the opposite of what people usually expect from a display of marine life - and yet it was fascinating in that unfussy, low-level manner of Bridlington attractions. I had a simply absorbing time there.
I was hoping for a similarly unspectacular day in Rayong. I went first to the beach, which was clean and quiet and unobtrusively tended by a small number of concessions. I was offered a comfortable beach chair in a nice shady spot overlooking the water. This is how I like my daytrips these days. As a child on holiday in Bridlington I was dragged from one creaky, disappointing attraction to the next. Now I don’t really want to go looking for things to do. I want everything to come to the beach or the picnic area or the car park and sell it to me cheaply from of a basket slung around its neck.
I ordered a large bottle of beer and a meal of Gai Pad Gra Pow, a dish of spicy chicken and basil with rice. Most of the people dotted around me on deck chairs, eating lunch and watching the fishing boats chugging up the estuary, seemed to be office workers from the nearby fish-processing plant. Rayong produces most of the fish sauce sold in Thailand, you know - better for you than Bridlington rock but there’s no way to fashion it into amusing shapes. There was not another pasty westerner in sight. I was utterly delighted to note that I appeared to be the only person in the entire beach area who had his trousers rolled up to the knees.
Much later in the afternoon I decided to stretch my legs and visit the market. I stretched my legs as far as the road, where a baht bus inevitaby appeared to whisk me away. Baht buses – flat-backed Toyota trucks protected by a rollbar cage - are a wonderful thing, as only someone who has yet to fall off the back of one can attest to. I didn’t notice if they had them in Bangkok (I suspect there is less need due to the fact that the only way to get anywhere quickly in Bangkok is to fall out of a building ) but in other Thai cities they appear to be the fastest and cheapest form of public transport.
We bumped our way through an industrialised area of fish processing factories, storage wharehouses and businesses dedicated to keeping busy fishing vessels afloat. Men in dirty white vests and women in faded headscarves sat tiredly on upturned crates outside the factory units, smoking cigarettes and not talking. This was backstage at the seaside, a rough and ready series of dressing rooms that smelled of deisel oil, wet rope and the ocean.
The outside market in Rayong brought it home to me just how varied and agreeable the slow, mindful grazing of foodstalls can be in Thailand. It was starting to get dark and the warm early evening air filled with the deeply mouth-watering aromas of a hundred different foods. Fragrant steam wafted from simmering pots and deep-fat fryers as food was cooked and sold in plastic trays. It seemed that everyone was eating. More specifically, it seemed that everyone came here to eat, which is always a good sign. My own general rule of thumb concernign street food is that if the locals are eating there, the food should be fine. However, if the chef’s dog has no fur left on its bottom whatsoever, you should try somewhere else.
I ate my way through a number of small dishes, probably too many for a man whose only remaining football shirt has the legend ‘8 Dad’ printed on the reverse, but this stuff is impossible to resist. I ate more of my favourite Gai Pad Gra Pow, then shamed myself with a few small helpings of deep-fried chicken balls, Pad Thai (a dish of flat rice noodles served with spicy meat or prawns, plus beansprouts if like me you don’t know the Thai for ‘hey, hold the beansprouts!’) and washed it all down with a cold bottle of Singha beer.
That was it. That was my day at the seaside. I was pleasantly tired but for the life of me couldn’t recall doing anything tiring. This too was a fond reminder of my childhood day trips to Bridlington, where there were also few if any tiring distractions.
