Adventuring with Pong #2&3

Adventure 2: Hot Pot/Sushi Buffet

The town we are in is called Nong Chang and is quite small. For the most part it runs along a main road with little shops and family run restaurants along it. We buy our necessities at their equivalent of the dollar store and/or 7 Eleven. Everything’s quite cheap and the people always smile as we walk by and practice their basic English greetings. Typically the meals here are 40 or 50 baht so about $1.25 to $1.50.

So after a long first weekend of adjusting to teaching they wanted to take us to the closest bigger city to go to the market and have dinner at a hot pot/sushi buffet. The town was an hour away and we were forewarned that the meal would cost 400 baht (10 times the basic meals we’d been eating). At first we were thinking ‘what! that’s too expensive’. But then we came to our senses and decided $11 was not too much for an all you eat sushi and hot pot buffet 🙂

So that was really neat with all the little plates of food zipping along a conveyor belt around the restaurant.

Adventure 3: Hot Springs
The next day we headed to the hot springs. The coolest/craziest thing about these destinations are 1) we are typically the only people there so it’s like a private outing and 2) so far no outing has cost more than $1 per person.

The hot springs were really cool. It was set near a beautiful lake and was maybe a garden retreat center for the locals. There were bungalows to rent and our hosts told us later in the year they would come here to stay for a few days. There were 4 different bath areas- 3 outdoor and 1 indoor. You pay per bath. We chose to go to the the hot pool bath for 20 baht (55 cents). This was a nice, relaxing experience- being outdoors in a beautiful area near a lake. It was unbelievable how hot the waters were naturally. They actually would cut off the water flow occasionally because otherwise it would get too hot. The old lady on duty at the time was also selling these homemade banana crisp chips which were really good but we forgot to take a picture of them before eating them up.