Lots of things in Pattani, especially the boats, are painted bright colors. With the afternoon winds all trace of haze disappeared and Pattani gleamed in the low, late afternoon sun. It was great to be in a place that was colorful at spots other than the vegetable markets. We shot an entire roll of film.

A bunch of young men watched Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future in our hotel's lobby (Earlier in Sai Buri we saw another group of people watching another Michael J. Fox movie. He must be big here).

We had yet another good meal at a little Chinese place across from the hotel. The family car was parked "in" the back of the restaurant, behind the tables. The food was in trays in a glass case so we just pointed and the woman scooped our choices out onto a plate with rice. Thai people spice the food a great deal more than any other place we've been. That night we learned to look out for little red peppers that have enough BTU's in them to light Singapore for a week.

In addition to being hotter, there seems to be more effort here to give the food more delicate flavors. I can't believe I'm using phrases like "delicate flavors." Next I'll be talking about palates and bouquets. Put it this way: they use non-hot spices like basil as well as the hot ones so everything is just loaded with flavor. (Joan: the other way to look at it is, you just can't get a bad meal in Thailand. Maybe a slightly disappointing one, but never a bad one).

Pattani seemed like a healthy town with lots of motorcycles, cars and pedestrians. There's a really good bookstore if you can read Thai. I saw an impressive selection of computer books, business books (Dale Carnegie, among others) and books on learning English. But I coudln't find any good phrase books for English speakers to learn Thai.

We needed a good phrase book. We had found one in Kota Bharu, but we quickly found it to be useless, although hilarious. It had phrases like "From now on we must reduce expenses as much as possible," (Joan: not a bad phrase for us) and "Excuse me, please pay this now because I still have so many places to go."

The literacy rate in Thailand is about 93 percent. That means Thailand has 65 million readers. We never saw such well stocked, local language book stores in Malaysia, Indonesia or Costa Rica. (Joan: In Costa Rica, as in Indo and Malaysia, the book stores are primarily stationery stores, with a few books thrown in. In Costa Rica, the books are almost exclusively about Catholicism. I remember one in particular was for parents trying to teach their kids about Catholic views of sex. No novels at all. At least you could find novels in Indo and Malaysia). There are quite a number of Thai language magazines too.

Walking down the street in Pattani we passed electronics stores that sell fridges, air-conditioners, phones, and stereos, often blasting some rock music; hardware stores; variety stores with maps and buckets displayed on the sidewalk; greasy car and motorcycle repair shops; some shops that had one or two giant boat engines sitting in the middle of the floor; lots of restaurants and food stalls; barber shops; grocery stores; and pharmacies. Most of the shops don't have doors except a large rolling steel door, the kind you see over shops in high-crime neighborhoods in U.S. cities.

We got a lot of attention from eveyone. A few times people came up to us, abruptly stuck out their hands and introduced themselves. We shook their hands, and then they'd walk away. We were left wondering what it was all about.

After a nap I decided to be adventurous and try out the night market. Joan was a little sick so she stayed at the hotel. I was tired but also hungry, and I wanted those great pancakes we had had the day before. But the night market in Pattani was a disappointment. Only one stand made the pancakes and they wouldn't sell me any for some reason. Also, the motorcycles, often driven by kids who could barely reach the foot-rests, insisted on driving right through the crowds of people in the market. So I was constantly dodging them. Then some kids ran up to me and held out their hands for me to shake just like the men had during the day. I did and they ran off laughing. I felt like a fool.

When I got back to the hotel I was a little pissed off about the whole experience, but was also mad at myself for being pissed off. It's just hard to be the center of attention when you're tired and just want something to eat.

It was slightly hazy again and calm early the next morning when we left. We rode out of town on a much busier highway than we had rode in on. But it had a wide shoulder for bikes so we were comfortable despite the trucks and buses zooming by. The outskirts of Pattani had several large new shopping centers and apartment buildings and some quite posh looking Japanese car dealerships labeled, in English, "Car Gallery."

Around lunchtime we stopped near Chana at an unattractive roadside place. It was in a dirty, concrete building that had a couple of dark food stalls and a few abandoned shop spaces. One tree grew in front in a wide gravel parking lot. If it were in America we would never stoop there unless we were trying to unload some scrap metal. Here that's a standard strip mall.

We walked into the food mall hesitantly. A woman came up to us and waited for us to ask for something. We just looked at each other and tried to think of some Thai word for food. We started flipping through the phrase book. Then the woman said, "Fried Rice?"

We were so relieved. "Yes, yes, two," we said.

We also asked for ice water and sodas and they gave us plenty of both. The food was awesome. The prawn fried rice was as good as I've ever had.

After we finished eating, and not before, the woman who spoke to us sat down to talk. She was about 30, pretty, and wore a 101 Dalmations T-shirt and a white hair bow with black polka dots. Her name was Duk and her eight-year-old son's name was Dom. She spoke English well considering that she learned it from a book. We found out she came from Yala, about 100km down the raod. She was here with Dom to visit here sister during the school holiday. Her sister had a few kids of her own running around. When we asked about Dom's father, Duk made a sound like "no good" and said, "He has no father."

The kids watched us intently as we talked to Duk. A little girl said something and Duk translated, "She says she likes you." Then Dom said something to Joan and she translated, "He says you have a very beautiful nose," which shows he will be some kind of excellent sweet talker some day. (Joan: I've never thought of my nose, which inherited bigness from my Filipino mom and my Scot-Irish dad, as particularly beautiful. Now I'm a big fan of Dom.)

Duk showed us that Dom's nose has no bone and not much cartilige in it. She could press it flat against his face all the way from his forehead to the tip of his nose. It was a little humorous, and Dom didn't seem overly sensitive about it.

Joan: As we were leaving Duk asked us if we had dollars. We did have about US$100 in emergency funds ($100 of which was later stolen in the Philippines), but we never touch the stash because it's very hard to get US dollars outside the U.S., and we may need them in a pinch some time, like if we have to pay some bribe to police in China or something. So my answer to that question is always No. Eric likes to be honest, so he said, Yes. Then of course, Duk's sister's husband was hot to change them to baht for us. We tried to explain that we already had baht, and we needed to hang onto the dollars. I hated to disappoint them like that.

Eric: The rest of the day was hot and windy. We had tail winds during the morning but from Chana we headed north and had strong cross winds. We were pretty beat by the time we made the 33km to Songkhla. We ended up at a mid-range hotel with AC for about US$10 per night. It's hard to turn down AC at the end of a hot day.

Next: Songkhla, home of the greatest seafood in the world.

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