So Where Were We Really?

To follow along on the journey that Joy and I took, look up “Samut Songkhram” in your favorite atlas or on Google Earth. If you’ve got a really good info source, you’ll discover that this part of the country is home to endless fields of salt, or at least that’s what “grows” there during the right season, which the current one is not.

Apparently the windmills we saw in the distance are used to help get salt water over the earthworks and into the paddies, where it is allowed to evaporate and leave behind a thick layer of white crystals. These are then raked into little salt mountains for further drying by people who have among the sweatiest jobs on the planet.

We hopped off the train too early—distracted by salt fields?—and had to catch up by hopping a motorcycle to a ferry, which took us across a river to Samut Sakhon. The people there acted as if they’d never heard a foreigner speak Thai before. This was quite good for my ego.

Seven or eight hours after setting out, we arrived back in Bangkok, but on the far side of town from where Jip and I live. For a few minutes we waited along a canal to catch a long-tailed boat that we thought might provide our seventh different kind of public transportation. But some tattooed boys who were diving backwards off the pier told us we’d missed the last one of the day, so we settle for a tuk-tuk instead. We both felt we’d gotten out of whatever ruts we’d been in.