The Lion's Mouth

From the travellin' journals of Ramblin' Ollie Bettany...

Saturday 3rd December 2005
Location: Phra Sumane Park, Bangkok

I've just stuck my head in the lion's mouth by eating a pad thai made by a street hawker, and not one of your tried and tested Khao San Road street hawkers either, an entirely random one. Now that I sit here, stomach gurgling alarmingly, I realise that it was quite a rash thing to do, and possibly quite foolhardy.

The logic I used to make the decision to sample some authentic Thai street food was thus: the sweet old lady doing the cooking looks clean, her ingredients look clean, as does her cooking pot. In addition, I'm an experienced traveller and I by now I must have an innate sixth sense about these things, ergo, I'm gonna eat the fucker.

I forgot two important things whilst I scoffed my dinner and congratulated myself on my adventurous spirit. Firstly, germs are invisible. Secondly, this self-professed "experienced traveller", in an embarassing bid to win the respect and admiration of a fellow passenger (female) on the airport bus, got up from his seat and in one fluid motion expertly hefted his backpack onto my shoulder as the bus slowed to stop at the end of the Khao San Road. However, I was labouring under a bit of a misapprehension. Much to my embarassment I discovered we were nowhere near the Khao San Road. We were, in fact, still a number of kilometeres from it. Feeling a rather deflated, in one fluid motion dumped my bag back on the floor of the bus and slumped back in my seat.

Ergo, I am clearly not as experienced as I would like to think, should stop wearing my "I get it cheaper than the locals" t-shirt and start worrying about basic hygiene again.

Well - down the hatch, as they say. What's done is done - they say that too. I may have just eaten the culinary equivalent of a time bomb and, embracing my newly grasped humility, should now leave this park and go somewhere where, should the bomb go off, no innocent people will be harmed.