Somewhere Along the Way We Misplaced the Energy Bars...
What happens when a day's cycling through Northern Thailand becomes an unexpected food tour
You can put an energy bar in your jersey pocket before setting off on a bike ride through Northern Thailand.
You may even remember it's there for a while.
But then someone hands you a length of bamboo.
Inside is sticky rice mixed with coconut milk, perhaps with red beans, packed into the hollow stalk and slowly cooked over charcoal. To eat it, you peel away the bamboo a strip at a time, a little like peeling a banana, until you're left holding warm, slightly sweet sticky rice.
Suddenly the energy bar has some competition.
And that's how it often goes when cycling in Thailand.
The food isn't necessarily something we planned to find that morning. Quite often, somebody simply spots something interesting beside the road.
A guide sees smoke from a charcoal grill. Our driver notices a little stand in front of someone's house. There's a row of bamboo stalks leaning over a fire. Or a market looks particularly lively, so we stop to see what's good today.
The bikes make that easy.
We're already moving slowly enough to see it, smell it and wonder what everyone is queuing for.
Whatever looks good today
Northern Thailand gives us a wonderfully changeable backdrop for a day on the bike.
We might ride beside rice paddies, pass through a small village, continue between fruit orchards and vegetable plots, disappear into forest and emerge into another community farther down the road.
The landscape keeps changing, and so do the opportunities to eat.
Some stops become favorites over the years. A guide may know the grandmother who makes particularly good sai ua, Northern Thailand's herb-filled sausage, and quietly make sure we pass at an appropriate time.
Others are complete chance.
Perhaps Grandma has set up a folding table in front of the house and is grilling bananas over charcoal. Whole bananas are flattened, grilled until sweet and smoky, then handed over on sticks or in a little bowl made from banana leaves.
That's difficult to cycle past.
Muu ping is another roadside temptation that requires very little persuasion. Strips of marinated pork are grilled on skewers over charcoal and paired with khao niew, sticky rice. Simple, portable and, after some time on the bike, remarkably effective at making packaged sports nutrition seem like a poor life choice.
There may be fried bananas. Roasted coconut. Something none of us noticed on the last trip.
And occasionally a chance discovery becomes a new favorite. If someone falls for the bamboo sticky rice, grilled bananas or a particular fruit, the guides and driver start watching the roadside for another opportunity to find it.
We aren't riding from one prearranged food tasting to another. We're cycling through rural Thailand, and the food keeps getting in the way.
Then there is the bamboo
Bamboo sticky rice is one of those things our guides particularly enjoy introducing to guests.
It is also hard to miss when you come across a family making it.
At a small roadside stall, Mum may be out front selling the finished bamboo tubes while Dad tends a fire pit behind the stand. Rows of bamboo stalks sit neatly angled over the glowing coals, slowly cooking the sticky rice and coconut milk sealed inside.
There is nothing elaborate about the setup. That's precisely what makes it memorable.
You watch it being made, choose a stalk and learn how to peel it open. Ten minutes earlier you were riding through the countryside. Now you're standing beside someone's home eating warm sticky rice out of a piece of bamboo.
Nobody needed to build a visitor center around the experience.
A market depends on the season
Markets offer a different kind of food stop.
A guide can walk through with the group, pointing out unfamiliar vegetables, herbs and fruits, and seeing what happens to be particularly good that day.
Mangosteen hides delicate white segments inside a thick purple shell. Sala looks considerably less inviting at first glance, its reddish-brown skin covered with tiny spines, but inside is a fruit with a sweet, tangy, slightly sour richness.
What is available depends on the season, which is exactly as it should be.
Sometimes we eat the fruit there. Sometimes the guide buys a bag and it disappears into the support vehicle, only to turn up a couple of hours later when everyone stops for a break.
Occasionally it completes the entire day's journey with us.
A bag of fruit bought at the market can be handed to the restaurant at dinner. The kitchen slices everything, arranges it on a platter and brings it back to the table for dessert.
No eyebrows are raised.
TIT, as you will sometimes hear people say here. "This Is Thailand."
The phrase gets used for all sorts of things, good and bad, that simply work a little differently here.
A restaurant happily turning your market shopping into dessert definitely belongs on the good side.
Not everything needs to be eaten immediately
Some food discoveries develop a life of their own during the day.
Sai mai is one of them.
The brightly colored strands of spun sugar are wrapped in a thin flour crepe and are more closely associated with Central Thailand. But our guides still encounter it in the north from time to time.
It doesn't necessarily disappear on the spot.
Sai mai may be tucked away until later in the afternoon when legs are beginning to notice the day's distance and everybody could use a sugar boost.
Or the guide may carry it all the way to dinner and produce it afterwards as an unofficial dessert.
Again, nobody at the restaurant is particularly worried that we've arrived with our own food.
This is Thailand.
"We're going to eat what?"
Dinner is different.
The bikes are parked. Showers have happened. Nobody needs to worry about what a chili-heavy meal is going to feel like halfway up the next hill.
This is when our guides can get a little more adventurous.
Yam pak boong regularly produces the appropriate level of suspicion when it is first described.
Water morning glory is lightly battered and deep fried, almost tempura style, and served with a punchy sauce that can include seafood and strips of green mango.
"We're going to eat what?"
Try it.
The plate usually disappears faster than we can order another one.
Kung chae nam pla can be a more divisive proposition.
Raw shrimp arrives with garlic, chili, herbs and a spicy fish-sauce dressing.
For some guests this requires considerably more contemplation.
Sashimi lovers, on the other hand, tend to make short work of it while everybody else is still deciding whether they are feeling adventurous.
And that's fine too.
One of the pleasures of eating your way through Thailand isn't pretending you'll love absolutely everything. It's having someone at the table who knows the food, can explain what you're looking at and is enthusiastic enough to persuade you to try something you probably wouldn't have ordered yourself.
Sometimes you discover a new favorite.
Sometimes you decide everyone else can finish it.
Ride first. Dinner tastes better.
Pedalers' Thailand trips aren't food tours with bicycles attached to them.
But neither do we see food as something separate from the journey.
Over the course of a day you might ride beside the fields where ingredients are growing, pass homes where something is being cooked over charcoal, wander through a market with your guide, carry seasonal fruit in the support vehicle and sit down that evening to dishes you might never have ordered without a little encouragement.
You begin to connect the landscape with the table.
And because you're traveling by bicycle, you have the time to notice all the little things happening between the places someone thought deserved a dot on the map.
The grandmother grilling bananas.
The family tending rows of bamboo over a fire.
The fruit you've never seen before.
The roadside stand nobody knew would be there.
The bag from the morning market that somehow comes back beautifully sliced after dinner.
Which brings us back to that energy bar.
It is probably still in the jersey pocket.
It'll keep.