Category: Photos

Triton is no longer the Bang Saen Special

We wanted to transfer my lowrider to Nam’s name from her sister’s, in order to prepare it for possible sale. The prefectural inspection officer we ran into at the Land Transport Office either wanted a bribe and didn’t ask for it clearly enough, or was just having a bad day, and decided to insist that my truck was too low and had to be restored to standard height (which is technically not a law here). Either way, we were not in the mood to pay into corruption and thought it might be easier to sell the truck at standard height anyway, so we took it for modification to Nam’s old classmate across the street, who runs a garage in front of his house. Pics of the restored-to-stock truck will follow after I’ve replaced the tires to match the ride height. The photos below are just a remembrance of why I bought it in the first place (in honor of the lowered racing trucks AKA rod sing cruising the beach roads in Chonburi Province).

Gauge cluster (mostly wrong/defunct – true racer style)
A shift indicator – the first one I’ve used since learning to drive stick in a Porsche 944 35 years ago!
Up on the stand
Rear drums, baby!
Pickle loves hanging out under the truck and in its shadows all day – it’s very secure

The shop pictured is the one written about above, but the photos are from a previous visit, when they were replacing brake pads and doing maintenance.

BBQ Prawns

Hope to shovel more of these guys in my tummy later this week. Some friends are coming from Japan, so we are doing an end of year trip to see them in Pattaya, Bang Saen, and Bangkok. Ironically, it’s hard to find good seafood near the sea in popular places here, so we have to scope out good places online before we go. Over the past decade, Google Maps has become the best in gauging places from their reviews, and more importantly, the kind of people posting them.

Thailand’s best Crispy Pork resto

We found the holy grail of crispy pork shops on Koh Chang over the summer. Everybody on that trip still talks about it. We were there to visit students interning on the island, so I was with a couple coworker pals and we brought Max along as well. Tee drove us to Bangkok, where we stayed at his condo for a night, then we set out for a few days of island life.

This was probably the best meal of the whole trip because the prices were cheap (less than 2 dollars a dish) and the portions were huge!

Of course, the place is a total hole in the wall, and run by the friendliest people.

The name of the shop? YUMMY

Random soi dog

Thai soi (street) dogs are mostly chill. This huge concrete lot near our house was supposed to be a fresh market years ago, but before it was completed, there was a huge storm. It toppled the poorly-constructed first market area roof and someone was killed by the falling roof while several others were injured. As it turns out, it was built too low and gets flooded a foot deep for the entire duration of rainy season anyway. This doggo and his friends run around here freely now.