time spent on the water.

Several times now I’ve had the chance to dine on the water. The Thais have all these fun little boat house things on most sizable bodies of water and they use them to great advantage. The first place we went was strictly a restaurant. You walk down a long stretch of bamboo walkway with private ‘rooms’ on each side. Your waitress seats your party in one of the rooms and takes your order and you make yourself comfortable on the floor around the little table in the middle. Once the food comes you untie the rope and float your way out into the middle of the water to eat and escape the sounds of the karaoke (they do love their karaoke, participating in it everywhere; loudly and terribly!) from the room next door. When you’re finished you simply tow yourself back to the dock and pay your tab. It’s quite romantic! (the 5 of us girls had a lovely time ;)

The next experience was at a reservoir. The idea was similar but on a larger scale. A group of us from school all went, took a 2 ½ hour drive to a more rural area surrounded by trees and mountains. The lush setting was perfect for our Sunday afternoon outing. The boats here were considerably larger, tall enough for me to stand upright and big enough for the 8 of us to have plenty of space to all lounge about. We placed our order for dinner at the dock and then were towed out to the middle of the reservoir by a guy in a motor boat. There we swam and soaked up the sun until another guy in a boat brought us picnic baskets full of our food. When we decided we needed more som tam (and alcohol for the others) we made a ship to shore call and soon there was another boat speeding our way with the requested provisions. And again later when it was time to leave, another phone call produced yet another motor boat to tow us back to shore. It was quite the setup. I don’t know of anything quite like it in the states but someone should jump on that business venture, pronto.