Cha Am: The First Road Trip

It's been thirteen years since I last owned a car.

I loved my first car, a 1987 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight Regency. I drove it all throughout high school and college until it finally gave up a few months before I graduated and moved to Thailand.

I never really wanted a car in Thailand. It was so easy to get around by bus, train, taxi, and metro, but my wife and I have got some big life changes coming up, and we decided it was time to buy one.
I now drive a brand-new little blue Mazda CX-3, and I have to admit that I've grown pretty fond of my little compact.

A few weeks back, excited to take the car out on the highway and explore parts of the country that we couldn't get to as easily before, Pinky and I decided to go on our very first road trip to celebrate her birthday. I booked two nights at a hotel in Cha Am, just north of Hua Hin on the western side of the Gulf of Thailand. We set out one morning for a small adventure.

After our first seafood lunch at the salt flats in Samut Songkram, we drove onwards to Petchaburi Province.

Back when I was a teacher, we went on a senior class trip to Hua Hin every year, and we would usually stop halfway in Phetchaburi for lunch and coffee. There was a huge hill towering over the city with some sort of unusual structure on top that I was always curious about. It turned out that this was a holiday residence of King Rama IV, and there is even a funicular you can take to get to the top!

Nearly a decade later, my curiosity could finally be satisfied! We bought tickets for the cable car and were soon jerking and lurching our way up the mountainside.

The deeply religious former monk who would become King Mongkut, or Rama IV (famously portrayed on stage and film by Yul Brynner), was the first King of Siam to truly embrace Western science, technology, education, and culture. He was especially fascinated in astronomy, and in 1868 predicted a solar eclipse with even more precision than the French scientists he had invited to observe it.

This eclipse, dubbed the King of Siam's Eclipse, indirectly led to the discovery of the element Helium, as well as to the unfortunate and untimely death of the king, who contracted Malaria at the event and passed shortly after.

The complex, today a Historical Park managed by the National Museum, is called Phra Nakhon Khiri, meaning "Holy City Hill", but is better known as Khao Wang, which means "Palace Hill".

The Western-style residence is home to guest rooms, dining areas, and patios looking out from the top of the hill across to the sea. It's a beautiful place, and it's easy to imagine the king enjoying it as a small summer palace. Given his interest in astronomy, I can also appreciate its hilltop location as a great place to look up to the heavens.

We arrived at the Raddison in early afternoon. Cha Am isn't Thailand's best-known province, and it was the middle of the week in low season, so we were able to get an incredible deal and very nearly had the entire resort to ourselves.

It was so nice to be able to spend a few days enjoying a beach vacation and relaxing.

The next morning, after a fantastic buffet breakfast, Pinky and I set out to explore the area. Our first stop was Wat Tham Chaeng, a Buddhist temple dominated by a massive, iridescent Naga statue. In Buddhist and Hindu mythology, Nagas are powerful serpent-like beings, often depicted as guardians of sacred places.

The statue is part-shrine and part-art installation. After purchasing a small basket containing some flowers, incense, candles, and red ribbons, which we gave in offering, we were instructed by the monks at the temple to walk through every one of the loops in the great snake-like Naga's body.

The loops form into nine passages, each associated with a different blessing: protection, financial and career stability, good fortune, love, family happiness, health, wealth, business success, and finally the fulfillment of one's wishes. Visitors are told to begin at the Naga's tail and walk through all nine, ending beneath its head. 

As I've always said, an extra blessing can never hurt!

But what is a Thai road trip without stopping at some interesting cafe?

I ordered a matcha and yuzu latte, and Pinky had a strawberry milk, and we shared a few of the cafe's unique Thai-inspired macarons. They came in flavors like Thai tea, pandan, and mango sticky rice (some of my favorite things in Thailand).

Next, we visited the Huay Sai Wild Animal Caring and Breeding Center, a wildlife conservation facility about 15 kilometers south of Cha-am.

The center is free to visit and isn't a conventional zoo, but instead part of a larger forest-restoration project established in the 1980s by His Majesty King Rama IX after the surrounding area had been badly degraded by deforestation and poor agricultural practices. The goal is to breed and care for threatened and endangered native wildlife and, where possible, return animals to restored forest habitat.

The center is home to a variety of animals, including several species of deer, gibbons, peafowl, pheasants, and other native wildlife. The animals all had huge areas to roam around, and it was a very quiet and peaceful place to visit. I was impressed with how well cared for they seemed.

My favorite exhibit was the binturong, or bearcat, an arboreal mammal native to the forests of Southeast Asia. Despite its nickname, it is neither a bear nor a cat, but a member of the civet family. 

The one we saw was so funny! He was rolling back and forth on his branch to scratch his back, and he looked really comfy.

And here's a weird fact about bearcats: apparently, they possess scent glands that smell almost exactly like buttered popcorn.

Do with that what you will.

It was lunchtime, and that meant seafood at the Chomview Seafood Restaurant.

First up, pad cha talay, a spicy Thai seafood stir-fry made with scallops, fresh green peppercorns, red-hot chilies, aromatic fingerroot, and Thai basil. Ours was served with a rich, fragrant, spicy curry-like sauce.

That was followed by the restaurant's legendary khao pad talay, a massive platter of seafood fried rice topped with fresh octopus, squid, shrimp, crab meat, and crab roe.

And you can't take Pinky to the coast without her ordering an entire mountain of steamed crab, which we shared as well.

The next morning, it was sadly time for our short vacation to end. After breakfast, we loaded up the Mazda and set out for Bangkok. About halfway back, we stopped for coffee at a cool 100-year-old house that had been converted into a retro cafe.

And finally, when we were about an hour out from Bangkok, we made a final stop at Benjarong Village, or Ban Don Kai Dee, a small traditional crafting village in Samut Sakhon Province known for its beautifully painted benjarong porcelain. 

The community has been making benjarong, a traditional Thai style of intricately decorated porcelain finished with gold, for generations. The craft was once closely associated with the royal court, but here it has been kept alive by generations of local artisans.

Interestingly, the village's modern benjarong industry began when a nearby ceramics factory closed in the 1980s, leaving many of its former workers to establish their own independent workshops and pass their skills on through the community.

There are five main workshops and showrooms (each producing a distinct and unique style of porcelainware) that you can visit, and the locals were happy to let us look around and tour, even telling us that we didn't have to feel pressured to buy anything.

One woman was particularly proud of her family's work and showed us a framed photo of the Thai Princess visiting her workshop a few years back.

The village even offers free pottery decorating workshops throughout the week, and I think it would be a ton of fun to return to make my own custom pottery sometime in the future.

Eventually, we returned to Bangkok.

It was a wonderful, short trip, and now that we have a car of our own, I expect that we will be taking more trips like this one in the near future.

It is almost like our whole world has been opened up, and we are now able to reach places in Thailand that we never were able to before.

Stay tuned for more adventures on the road!