Lower Normandy

Our rental was a barn, approached by a long gravel driveway; a tumbledown farmhouse to its right and rich, green pasture to its left. There was a small patch of woodland in the garden, a bit like a spinney, blossoming apple trees and a plastic swing strung up between two trunks. The fencing was simple post and rail, the kind used to keep cattle in place. I'd come out into the garden, early morning and hear the cows in the nearby fields, a soft cough or snort, the scuff of a hoof. The silence was deafening and dawn was on its way, but there were still thousands of stars and a white moon suspended just above the house. The dogs' noses were covered in dew, it showed on the tips of my shoes and our breath made thick silver clouds. We were standing by the wooden fence, looking out over the darkened countryside, over the crests of hills that had seen some of the bloodiest battles in French history. 

The pain, the mud, the landing beaches. Everyone knows Normandy, it has a special place in the heart of most Americans and the English. But we were in the department of the Orne, in peaceful springtime, a time of revival. Where French countryside is at its most bucolic, and the classically rolling fields were pockmarked with yellow dandelions that were the first to salute the re-emerging sun. There were leggy colts grazing and curious lambs peeping through fences, verdant green lettuce leaves at the market. We arrived on a balmy spring day, the French were clogging up the autoroutes near Rouen, headed to the coast at Le Havre, and we diverged on an almost empty stretch of road that took us into the green heartland where little had changed from the time the Allies had stormed through. We rented a barn conversion on an unnamed, unmarked lane and we wandered through still-life villages built around a single, stone church; market towns with old squares and boulangaries where the locals congregated. There were forested tracks with two options when our car met a tractor head-on: reverse a few miles or take a tumble down steep sides to join the cows grazing where a stream babbled through. I had been expecting a flat, undisrupted landscape, the kind of topography for digging trenches, but in Lower Normandy the terrain was satisfying hilly. Not so steep that we were always climbing, but enough that there were views stretching for miles,  a mélange of earth tones, browns interrupted by an unexpected shock of yellow from the mustard flowers, the verdure dotted with white; cattle, scattered around crumbling farmhouses; daisies on a suburban lawn.

This area of Normandy is a cow stronghold. Every part of France has its trucks - the grain haulage engines in the Loire, the old American-style timber trucks in forested Burgundy, and here, diary tankers. Even the smallest farms seemed to have a few girls, chewing the cud contentedly in fields far bigger than any British cow could've imagined. We were at the supermarché, looking for free range eggs, which we couldn't find, but figured in this region at least, the concept of caged birds didn't even exist. At the market there was local cauliflower bigger than footballs, grassy asparagus spears still wet from harvest, apples proudly marked as being Francaise. We weren't far from  Calvados country - there isn't much wine in this area, but rather the apple liquor and cidre normande. The trade-off was worth it for the miles of orchards and the break-away trees that watched over the winding roads like sentries. It was springtime and the blossom made that clear; the flowers bloomed in great clusters of pastel, swirled in the chilly breeze and settled  in a layer of childish bubblegum to downy white. The tiny, ancient Citroens that sped along the quiet stretches of tarmac had pooled petals under their windscreen wipers, the fallen flowers decorated the landscape like confetti at a wedding. A marriage between ground that had felt the footsteps of William the Conqueror's army, had given under the weight of tanks and a scene that could now be the poster child of mellow, provincial French living. 

It was simple, down to earth, and steady. Our Audi stuck out like a pretentious sore thumb among the rickety cars in any town we visited, farmhouses had been renovated just enough, tractors looked third generation but well loved. Any barn that had new double glazing was owned by a foreigner, but even those were enjoyably few. I was struck, initially, by the huge areas of pasture that were well fenced, with solid wooden rails, divided into neat squares. The houses that went with them were refurbished but in the old style, oozing class. Then I saw that each pasture had an outbuilding - a foaling booth, and to my horse-mad eyes, it all fit into place. Lower Normandy is home to the Haras du Pin, one of the national studs of France, where French racehorses are bred. The studs - haras - (or, according to my mum and sister "the harass") were the more prosperous farms and they too were dotted along country roads. We found one where the equine residents were close to the road and stopped to take photos, a group of four extremely elegant young horses, perhaps yearlings. Reserved but curious, polite at a distance, like the French farmers who'd give us a curt nod in their beat-up tractors. In the UK, Thoroughbreds this valuable would be under lock and key far from the road, but there was some sort of an understanding in France. A respect for each person's land, and a huge appreciation of the animals and plants that it nurtured.  Pruney and Suzi were petted; they could go everywhere, the French love their dogs. Our girls walked through the grounds of William the Conqueror's fort, I scrambled along the battlements where the archers would've hung out, church bells rang from a cathedral that lost its steeple to bombing, and a man disappeared into the tourist office with his Beagle puppy.

Every time I visit France, I say the same thing. I need a French country house. This départment brought that thought more often than before. I could see myself with a barn here, somewhere on a crest where two hills met, among the dandelions and apple blossom and rugged farmers. Somewhere to go for simplicity and silence. If one day you find that I've disappeared from a desk job in a soulless European city, you'll find me somewhere like this. A countryside truce; a ceasefire from the constant scramble of powerful cars, traffic jams and filed nails. I'll be renovating a barn, a sourdough boule of pain intégrale in the oven, with swallows singing from the hedgerows, the dogs patrolling a rambling garden, and a couple of retired racehorses grazing green pasture. Enfin de la paix, for sure.

30 hours - Bangkok

30 hours on the clock. Standing in Bangkok airport, waiting. A quickly filling memory card, blistered feet and one pair of impractical flip flops, an Iphone metaphorically set to count down. A delayed internal flight, a long wait for baggage. Tactical discussions in the taxi on covering as much ground as possible, a reconnaissance of Bangkok's sprawling metropolis. The traffic moved in stops and starts, freeways and flyovers criss crossing as if an ambitious kid's lego creations; sharp edged high rises sprouted like thickets of concrete and steel along the road. A place that was the very defintion of urban - fast moving, dynamic, slightly harsh, ever evolving. 

The Chatrium was tucked away in the leafy Riverside district of Bangkok, a cell of calm inside a growing, pulsing body. The hotel was fronted by quiet bamboo gardens and paths flanked by white stones, green fountains and granite edging. I have a thing for a design hotel and floor-to-ceiling glass facades with sharp lines make my heart flutter. I liked what I was seeing. Inside were high ceilings, a slick lobby and slightly dark, cushy rooms big enough to live in. There was a balcony framed by thick curtains, with views over the Chao Phraya river and the roof tops, more high rises piercing the blue-gray sky, the overlapping flyovers a tangled rope in the distance. We left soon, ever conscious of ticking clocks, to wander in the neighborhood. Layla had stayed at the hotel years ago for a sports tournament and had fond memories of the area, for good reason. There were hundreds of narrow shops with red and gold lanterns strung to tiled ceilings, swaying in the evening breeze. Each one was a 'mom and pop' store of some kind - local tailors, hardware outfits, metal forges, fruit sellers, lantern makers, a garage, a speciality noodle place. Kids sat at rickety plastic tables, still in uniform, slurping thin noodles from steaming bowls of spicy broth as their grandparents lay on fraying sofas watching Thai soaps and their parents endlessly swept the storefronts. Commuters, walking from place to place would bow their heads at delicate shrines decorated; in memory of the king, the bell on the door of the local 7-11 never stopped ringing. Hawker owners fed the stray animals and school girls popped in and out of buses on their own, we stumbled across temples hidden in dilapidated courtyards and passed only one other tourist.

I thought of dad a lot, because of the river and the boats. I was surprised - the Chao Phraya is like an artery, flowing, keeping the city alive. We stood on the Chatrium's private jetty, waiting for the hotel boat to take us to the public pier a few blocks down, and it was a throwback to Rotterdam, dad's hometown. The working river with its tugboats, barges, the slightly industrial veneer, the scruffy sailors and their dogs, the quietly competent boatmen who steered us alongside a containership. I liked Bangkok already. Alongside the grit was - glamour, maybe, and a slightly rogue edge. Bangkok would be the one who managed to bluff their way into a super expensive, exclusive club they could never actually afford - and take the party by a storm. There was electricity, everywhere, and there was no way I'd be in bed on time tonight.

14 hours. A riverside breakfast, eating papaya, watching fish jump in the murky water of the Chao Phraya. Little birds flitted among the tables, out of the hotel's bamboo garden. Messengers, telling us to hurry, this day would wait for no one. We drew up our battle plans and studied the terrain, jumped onto the Chatrium's boat, climbed up to the metro station. The trains were futuristic pods, running entirely on tracks elevated above the city. They were crammed with daily commuters, men in suits and pretty women with perfect manicures and nice dresses, a handful of other tourists who looked, as I did, shamefully shabby in comparison. I felt even scruffier in the shiny malls around Siam Square, each tiled with wide, white marble slats. At Siam Paragon - the most instagrammed place on earth - the entire top floor was dedicated to sports cars. You could not help but stand and gawk as you came off the escalator and stood face to face with a shining black Lamborghini; next to an Aston Martin Store, across from the Rolls Royce store... there was a Mini, too, which made my car at home seem like a budget option. When London tried these stunts with super expensive cars, it just felt... pretentious. Bangkok pulled the enterprise off with natural flair.

10 hours, and nowhere near enough. The sweaty, pulsing streets beckoned and we abandoned the sports cars for the roads crowded with tuck tucks and motorbike taxis, lined by hawkers selling every type of noodle imaginable. There were fewer other foreign faces, the more you wandered, and the few you did see were hustling, like us, covering ground without skimming over it. A stopover destination in a city that was already constantly moving, echoing with the footsteps of its own people and visitors.

We lost the afternoon somehow. In the maze of streets where we wandered for the obligatory Chang beer t-shirt, at the stall where we bought a mango for under a quarter of a dollar and the lady threw in a second for free. Waiting at the pier for a boat back to the hotel, watching a man who looked like he was barely scraping through feed the remainders of his own dinner to a local stray, and the dog lay his head on the man's hand. Sitting on the boat alongside some school kids, who seemed to use the hotel boats as shuttles from place to place.  Again we looked for sleaze, found nothing, it had either headed underground or been concentrated into tiny pockets that were far out of the way. I was charmed by the Thai culture; the courtesy and respect they had for their own people. Taxi drivers bowed to the staff in highway toll booths and friends genuinely met each other with the traditional greeting. They were hardworking, tolerant and humble, preferring to just look away and pretend I didn't exist when I pointed my camera in their direction. The youth hung out in mixed groups, I was jealous of the girls' straight, light brown hair and manicures.  Bangkok's locals were proud, too, of their city, that was clear. The public spaces were well maintained and immaculate, temples had been recently painted and most neighborhoods were safe enough that primary school children were sent home on the back of motor bike taxis. As the older kids poured out of school, you got the feeling that they worked hard and did well; enjoyed it, but also knew where the fun would be on a Friday night.

The second hand flew around the face of my watch, our battle plans fell away, we failed as generals, but made pretty good foot soldiers. We packed up in a flurry, having sat out too long on the balcony watching the party boats light up the Chao Phraya. Still scruffy, still sunburnt, out of battered flip flops and into jeans instead. Into the taxi and out of Bangkok, into a dark, steamy night, where every building illuminated and burst through the horizon. There was nothing like it, no other feeling, it had been like starting a race or sitting an exam, pure adrenaline. It was unlike India because the chaos didn't leave you feeling drained; it was more satisfyingly more gritty than Kuala Lumpur, strikingly less hedonistic than Dubai. Every electric billboard suspended from a glass and steel building, each sports car, all the towering office blocks showed progress, they were arrows pointing forward, screaming this is the way the world is going. With each step we took on Bangkok's streets, it was clear, it's these cities that are leaving Europe behind. Bangkok had grown up, pushed its misspent youth behind it and there was no stopping it now. Thousands of cars on the roads, but the traffic still flowed fast; each road had four lanes and flyovers laced the arteries together, so the blood would never clot. Oh hell, Europe, you have no chance. I'd visited European cities so many times, but never had done anything like this, there I'd slept like a baby and my heart rate remained constant.   Our cab rolled onto the freeway, leaving the glittering buildings behind us. Zero hour.

I am again going to direct you to this post on Layla's site for a really good guide to Bangkok with all the practical details you may want.  She writes much more... coherently than I do, without making all the info boring... she has a great sense of humour, and I am always fascinated by how we perceive the same places. She doesn't write in the way she acts, if you know what I mean... I mean in real life she's into anything fun/whimsical/live for the moment, preferably involving heights, speed boats or long haul flights, but she has a retrospective, thoughtful style of writing. Anyway. I hope you gathered from this that I really, really liked Bangkok - I surprised myself by how much I warmed to the place. It's an amazing city and so worth a visit if you're ever in the area/passing through. 
I plan to (finally) bake a little something in the coming few days and have a recipe up on the blog end this week. Hope that you all have a lovely weekend xx

Phuket

The elephant was having a bad day. It charged the same man twice, by mistake or by design, hard to say. I watched them, holding my camera in one hand, shielding my face from the sun with the other. Futile. It was 33 degrees and no semblance of cloud, little cover where the mismatched group of tourists stood with six rescued elephants. My sister’s dream. The closest to ethical touching a wild animal could ever be, she’d singled out this sanctuary in an obscure corner of Phuket. We’d been picked up early in the morning by a white jeep, with plastic awning and some rudimentary benches strapped into the boot. Our first taste of the island, just as it was coming to life. 

 We were thrown around in the back of that pick up, taking hairpin bends as if partaking in a car chase. The roads were winding and rugged, hugging the sides of craggy hills in a spectrum of green. It was like a frustrated painter's palette, he kept mixing shades to find the right one; ferns, palms heavy with coconut, rubber plantations. You’d go round a bend and down the sheer cliffs the sea would peak at us, sparkling like an Alpine lake, somewhere between blue and white in the glare. The village houses were tidy, most with a Toyota, a water buffalo anda satellite dish, banana leaves drying outside, for the thatching. The towns smelt of breakfast congee, made sweet in the morning with sticky rice and mango, cheerful kids in starchy uniforms climbed onto the back of daddy’s motorbike, open top trucks moved groups of construction workers from place to place. The ride in the boot of the pick-up jolted me around, shaking me out of my jetlagged grogginess and forcing me out of my sulky disappointment . I'd been reluctant to take this trip at all, being so busy with school work, and a week out of it all would only set me back further. A week to a place that initally seemed so... familiar, like I'd been there before. An amalgam of places I'd already visited, pictures I'd seen in magazines, I imagined grotty backpackers everywhere, nothing 'real' about it. And in a way, I was right. It will be like places you've been before, but with a touch of Thailand, and not too many backpacks. Phuket was adventure made easy.

Sweet familiarity. Less polished than Malaysia, less crazy than India, sitting nicely at the crossroads of tantalizingly exotic and easily palatable. Like adding a dash of curry powder to your favorite leek soup, or cardamom to carrot cake. No doubt Phuket was touristy. At every turn, every market stall you’d stumble across another foreigner, themselves stumbling through reading Thai signs. Another of my reservations about this trip, knowing that it would be much more leaflet-toting tourist heavy than our usual destinations. But there was a charm in the mingling of Australian accents, French flair, Thai politeness, Chinese brusqueness and Malay spice. I could see what brings people to here. All along the beach, there were colorful stalls selling pineapple chunks on sticks, banana pancakes and whole coconuts, kids ran in and out of the green Andaman Sea with buckets and spades like it was the local pier. There is no 'other' Thailand; nothing more ‘real’, the whole of Phuket is a tourist’s playground. No sleaze, almost disappointingly so, locals were cheery, tolerant and genuinely welcoming.  Layla and I were almost tripping over ourselves to find a more dubious character but met no one remotely strange. Phuket was quickly shedding its reputation as a tacky backpacker magnet, fading to a more family-orientated island with a leisurely pace and long curves of saffron sands. 

We paced the old streets of Phuket town, bumping into multi-generational Scandinavian families and backpackers who’d also come to gawk at the intricate pastel facades of the Portuguese houses. It was like that frustrated painter couldn't decide what color he wanted for the town, so each house was a different shade - pastel pink, coral, teal. Cameras were out everywhere, the tourists were sweaty and red in the face. But then so were the locals who stood, smilingly tending giant vats of burning hot oil as they fried batches of banana fritters and ladled out noodles into the bowls of regulars. The tourists wandered among them, a welcomed part of the scenery, a mutual understanding that Thai life would carry on all around us, without us having to really seek it out. And that was what we came for, some with backpacks, most without; it was enough to make even the most reluctant warm to Phuket.

There is a charm to a place where you can wander out of your hotel, right into a Thai village, where chubby toddlers with their weathered grandmas would wave chubby hands, and grandma would look on through slightly suspicious eyes. A charm to a place where your taxi driver helps you negotiate with your boatman so that you get the best deal on an island trip, a charm to a place where you can charter a long-tail boat for just two people, because the boatmen know they'll find enough tourists the whole day. The boats are iconic Phuket, and another line on my sister's Thailand must-do list. Again, I was doubtful, because we'd been so spoilt on a recent trip to Corfu when the two of us had skippered our own speed boat in the Aegean. We didn't need someone tagging along, I moaned, Layla said it would be fun, I sulked, she won. It was so Thailand, to have someone doing it all for you for little more than the cost of a taxi to the train station back home. There were vertiginous slabs of dark granite that fell into the sea, waves bashing rythmically onto rocks, twin palm trees swaying as if to a beat. Our skipper mentioned sea turtle sitings, salt water ate at our sun burnt skin, turned our hair wild and brittle; a lone diver paddled by the shore.

There was a California beach-club-style rooftop terrace in our hotel. The place itself was a startup, shiny and new, not well established, totally unpretentious but somehow sleek. Lots of white stone, wooden decking, color blocking bean bags and fake grass in clean lines. We sat on rattan chairs in the shade during the insane heat of the day, looking out over the sea at white yachts skipping over the waves, beat up jeeps rolling through the village and dogs bounding up to peeling iron gates, meeting their owners. In the evening too, we loved that terrace spot, we'd sit with our feet up on the chairs, scratching mosquito bites and peeling sunburn. Somewhere between being polished resort kids with expensive cameras on the fancy furniture, somewhere near boho veteran travellers with tousled hair, flip flops and printed shorts. The strongest desire to ditch the crowds and total inauthenticity, far too rational and perhaps too arrogant to even fathom backpacking. A sticky point on the bridge between veering off the beaten path and staying with hotel transfers and tiled lobbies. Forever lusting after far flung destinations and new scenery, too often reminiscing about places we'd like to revisit. Luckily, we found Phuket. 

Details-wise, I am going to be lazy and direct you to Layla's site itself where she's posting a really in-depth guide in a couple of days. I was honestly blown away by how much research she's done about Thailand so she's really in a much better position than me to give any advice. 
After Phuket, by the way, we spent a day and a half in Bangkok. I have a few photos I'll be sharing in my next post, after my week of work experience, which I shall proceed to start with a nose peeling from sunburn and some very red skin. I'm great at first impressions, you don't have to tell me.
A lovely week to you all, and hopefully a beachy adventure sometime soon. Hugs xx