Food on Wheels; Mobile drinks and naam kaeng sai

Mobile drinks and naam kaeng sai

If you have been to Thailand before, you know that food, at pretty much any given time of the day or night, is never really far away. A brand new player in this field are the 24 hour shops like 7-11 and Family Mart that pop up seemingly everywhere.

Today however, on a visit to the local Makro near Chaweng I noticed a more old style drink provider. This pick up trip has been modified and is now selling (soft) drinks and naam keang sai.

Naam kaeng sai is literally a frozen ice block from which ice is shaved off with a grater or rasp, which presents the naam kaeng, Thai for ice. The sai means with and the twist is just that, a very sweet syrup is added on top of the shaved ice and this is your naam kaeng sai. Cool and simple.

It's very popular with kids but in the current tropic temperatures that Samui is enduring, plenty of grown ups enjoy a cold bit of sweetened, shaved ice as well. It also seems that the vendor picked the right location at Makro's, namely next to the motorbike parking lot.

This old, seemingly beaten up pick up, is one of the great things about Thailand, which makes living so nice here. If you look around, there are plenty of similar vehicles like this, selling all kind of drinks and food. Most will be smaller and be either hand pushed or side mounted on a motorbike, some are bigger, there are pick up's out there that sell soup and who knows what, in much better shape than this one.

I like this one though, probably because it is battered up and it represents something that is slowly dying out.

Camille