Seasoned travelers and honest travel bloggers know, even if they don't like to admit it, that often our understanding of a place and people is partial at best. If we're lucky, we glimpse one or two scenes from a larger story. Travelers have to work hard to learn the broader social or historical contexts of the places we visit. At most, traveling leaves us primed to ask better questions and develop our understanding in the future. 

On my arrival to Thailand, I started with a plan to learn about a regional Thai food, but only when I was done--and moved on to Cambodia!--did I realize how little I was able to experience (eat!) and understand in Thailand.

Let me back up. We were in Thailand for almost two weeks, a week in Bangkok and then five days in the northern city of Chiang Mai. It's fair to say that every superlative dished out about Thai food in Thailand is true. We ate for almost two weeks and didn't once have a bad meal. As friends and guide books advised, we ate plenty of delicious street food. But restaurants were tasty too. 

The internet has many Thai food blogs filled with photos and information about the street food of Bangkok. I didn't want to repeat this. And frankly, the best of those blogs are by Thais or foreigners who have spent years in Thailand, thus better than anything I could attempt. Instead I wanted to look more in-depth into one Thai food.

In our second week, we flew to Chiang Mai in northwest Thailand. Most of the dishes in Thai restaurants around the world are from the central or southern regions near Bangkok, the red and green curries with coconut milk, for example. However, my Fodors guide told me that green papaya salad, a favorite of mine served in almost all Thai restaurants around the world, is originally from northern Thailand. So I was excited to taste and learn more about this regional specialty. 

I was excited when we arrived to Chiang Mai to see a street cart in a night market near our hotel serving over seven variations of papaya salad. 

In Thai, the name som tam means "sour pounded." Shredded unripe papaya is pounded in a wooden mortar with tomatos, green beans, carrots, and then dressed with a mashed sauce of garlic, chilies, palm sugar, fish sauce, and lime juice. Som tam Thai, green papaya salad with dried shrimp, is one of the most common iterations of the salad and I've eaten it many times. I'd had it in Bangkok the week before even. So here in Chiang Mai I wanted to try an authentic northern variation: I ordered Som tam Thai sia poo or papaya salad with mixed salted crab and dried shrimp.

The crab gave an additional depth and salty flavor, but it wasn't a lot different than the version with just dried shrimp.

The next day I took an excellent cooking class, where one of the dishes I prepared was a simple green papaya salad. Instructor Sue showed me the technique of using palm sugar to mash the garlic and chili peppers.

On our last night in Chiang Mai, we ate at Huen Phen, one of the best restaurants for northern food in the city. The multi-page menu listed ten versions of green papaya salad.

We ordered the papaya salad with salted egg, som tam Thai kai kem, which wasn't too unusual as we'd eaten plenty of salted eggs in the Philippines--even once in a green mango salad there. At Huen Phen I also ordered papaya salad with stuffed pork E-San style. When it arrived to our table, I realized the pork was a cooked pressed pork sort of sausage (a bit flavorless), salted crab, and rice vermicelli noodles.

Later, though, the menu page for E-san style food sent me down a path of research that led to the realization that Fodors had been a bit misleading. The home of papaya salad is not the northern Thailand of Chiang Mai (regionally referred to as Lanna), but in fact Laos and the northeast Thai region of E-san. E-san (also spelled Isaan or Isam) is a region in Thailand bordering Laos, where the majority of people are closely related ethnically to Laotians.

In other words, if I wanted to find the authentic roots of papaya salad, I really needed to go to Laos! Unfortunately, Joseph and I had had to make the choice between going southeast to Cambodia or northeast to Laos on our way from Thailand to Vietnam.  We chose to go to Cambodia and the ancient temples of Angkor Wat near Siem Reap. Sadly, this meant no Laotian food in Laos for us.

Laotian food bloggers report that the differences between Thai papaya salad and the Laotian original (called tam som or tum maak houng) come down to the use of lime juice (often less), peanuts (some say they're included, some say none), palm sugar (some use it, some don't), fish sauce (more of the stinkier Lao version!), and shrimp paste or Lao freshwater fish paste called padaek (yes and yes!)

It appears that like many Southeast Asian foods, there are many variations of Laotian green papaya salad depending on individual tastes. And once again, one of the variants in Laos is the inclusion or absence of the funky fermented fish paste!

Honestly, though, I wouldn't know the full wonder of authentic Laotian papaya salad because we didn't go to Laos.

That's the thing about traveling and learning, the more you know, the more you realize there is yet to see, experience, and learn.

Laos, the first stop on our next Southeast Asia tour!

We took a slow, hot train from Bangkok to see the ruins of Ayutthaya--a great center of Thai culture and power from the 14th to 18th centuries. At its height, the kingdom extended from the Malay Peninsula to Cambodia. In 1767, Ayutthaya was destroyed by invading Burmese armies.

Out the train window from Bangkok, we passed by a modern ruin that caught my attention: miles and miles of aging massive concrete pillars that supported nothing. It looked like an interrupted and overgrown construction project. Before the Don Meuang Airport stop, graffiti suddenly appeared on pillar after pillar. On the way home, I rested my iPhone in the window and snapped pics as we clickey-clacked down the old train tracks.

Later I learned that the concrete pillars were part of a failed elevated hi-way and rail line project from the late 20th century. The Hopewell Project--sometimes now referred to as Thailand's Stonehenge--was abandoned in 1998 due to poor planning, faulty financing, rampant corruption, and Thailand's political instability.

I had heard many people rave about the delectable mangosteen, but hadn't tried one until we went to Bali in late May, where the season was well underway. Since then, we've seen mangosteens in the markets of Thailand and Myanmar. In all of these places mangosteens are usually sold for about a dollar per half-kilo--about ten mangosteens. 

While the mangosteen will never replace the mango (no relation) as the most supreme tropical fruit, most people agree it's right up there as one of the most delicious and delightful fruits.

Its hard and fibrous purple rind protects a white fruit that is tangy sweet. The fruit sections inside have a texture similar to but softer and spongier than citrus.

To eat it, one cracks the outer rind, usually by just pinching and tearing it off. The revealed fruit sections slide out. Usually there is one section that contains a small tough seed, which is inedible. 

Mangosteens grow on trees native to Indonesia. Nowadays, however, mangosteen trees grow all over Southeast Asia and India, and they have been planted in tropical places in the Americas like Puerto Rico and Columbia. 

Once mangosteens are picked ripe, they spoil pretty quickly, so it's hard to find mangosteens anywhere outside of the tropics. The New York Times reported in 2007 that the purple fruits were available in NYC for about $45 per pound. At prices like that, I'd suggest you just hop a plane to the tropics during the mangosteen season.

In our ten days in Bali, we stayed on the tourist path, dividing our time between the artistic and cultural capital Ubud, the beach (along with a lot of Australians), and a mountain village retreat.

Most visitors to Bali are struck immediately by the abundance of displays of Balinese Hinduism: the statues to Hindu deities and the many offerings or banten placed on the ground in driveways and sidewalks and upon altars outside homes and temples and stores. The trays, constructed of coconut and banana leaves, are filled with flowers, incense, rice, and other sweets. 

One of the first times we encountered these banten was on the sidewalk outside a restaurant entrance. To show our respect for the Balinese, we were careful to not step on the colorful trays.

Later, we realized that the banten placed on the ground were for the demons and negative forces, or bhutas and kalas. The offerings are often made of old or decaying things in the expectations that the demons are greedy and will consume anything. And stepping on them is not really a big deal.

Though this mass of leaves and flowers looks like it may be ready for garbage pick-up, in fact its been put there as an offering to the kalas outside of a temple.

When I snorkeled near Lembongan Island, before I jumped in the water, I noticed flowers floating on the surface. These, I realized, were offerings scattered by my boat pilot to the bhutas and kalas to placate them and protect us from harm.

Offerings to the Gods are everywhere in Bali and one of the visible signs or sekala of Balinese Hindu daily religious practice. 

Offerings to the higher aspects of Gods, “those manifestations that the Balinese called betara-betara,” are more beautiful and made of things to delight the senses of the Gods. Traditionally, these offerings are made of fresh flowers, betel leaves, palm leaf weavings, coconut shavings, and cooked rice or cookies, though we also saw Mentos and cellophane wrapped cookies in banten trays.  These offerings sit outside stores, on bridges, on car hoods and motorcycle handlebars.

Sometimes I wondered, too, if the offerings were a way of feeding hungry birds. (Surely this is considered auspicious.)

The fact that both the positive and negative spiritual forces are given offerings reveals a central philosophy of Balinese Hinduism: human existence must seek to find a balance between the good and evil in the world. As Fred B. Eiseman Jr. in his book Bali: Sekala and Niskala explains, Hinduism goes beyond the western dualities of good and evil. Balinese Hinduism “includes what can be considered a third position, ‘center,’ which balances the other two.”

Balinese Hinduism, which differs significantly from Hinduism in India and Nepal, has roots and even religious practices from the animist beliefs of indigenous ancestors of Java and Bali, and in Buddhism, which spread through much of Southeast Asia in the 8th century. 

When the independent Indonesian state was established in the last half of the 20th century, laws protected the freedom of religious practices, but the state only acknowledged monotheistic religions. In the 1960s, the Bali Hindu Council got around this monotheistic requirement by emphasizing the supreme diety, Sanghyang Widi Wasa who manifests himself as the Hindu holy trinity or trimurthi: Brahma (the creator), Wisnu (the preserver, the God who Indian Hindus call Vishnu), and Siwa (the dissolver of life, the God who Indian Hindus call Siva or Shiva).  

There are, as is the nature of Hinduism, many other minor Gods and Goddesses in the Balinese pantheon. For example, Brahma’s consort is Saraswati, the Goddess of learning and she is often depicted in statues and paintings riding a goose.

Almost every house or shop or restaurant has a small altar in the entryway. And there are temples everywhere. According to Rough Guide there are over twenty thousand temples in Bali, which is impressive for an island less than a hundred miles across. 

In the city of Ubud, a visitor is struck by the surrounding beauty and artistry of everything from the buildings’ architecture of red brick and black stone carved portals to the prevalence of arts and handicrafts. Though it might be easy to romanticize the beauty or even wonder if it’s a bit of intentional show for the tourists in a place like Ubud, it seemed as though most Balinese had mastered the practice of living intentionally with balance.

Travelers can go to Ubud to admire the ingenuity of the irrigated rice terraces, trek to the natural splendor of the neighboring volcano, or search for one’s own personal spiritual balance. 

Joseph and I discovered the beauty of Bali in its art: paintings from the past few hundred years range from intricate pictorial images of the Balinese Hindu calendar to the contemporary representations of modern Bali where locals are doing laundry in a river surrounded by bicycle-riding and picture-snapping tourists.

Museums with sizable collections are across the street from small fine art galleries, which are next to compounds where artists paint traditional scenes in popular styles over and over to sell to tourists. The art of Bali, like the banten offerings, delight the senses. One guide at a small museum told me that in Balinese, there is no word for art or artist, rather paintings are just part of one’s beautiful offerings to the Gods. 

We had only a couple days left in the Philippines and there were a few thing I still needed to do. (Sadly, there was little consensus among my readers for me to attend a cockfight--the vote turned out pretty even.) I still needed to eat balut, the partially developed duck egg or embryo. 

Joseph's friend Christina gave me an "out" the day before. While bagoong-eating is often considered the test of a "true Filipino," she said, balut-eating is not required. Plenty of Filipinos forego the delicacy.

In Dumaguete every evening, balut-sellers line up under the street lights of Rizal Avenue next to the sea wall. People sit at make-shift stools and tables, drink a refreshing beverage, and eat balut served from the warm baskets of the balut vendors. Every evening, the area is teaming with foreigners, Filipino tourists, and locals. In places like Manila, I read online, balut-eating is declining as the rising middle class view balut as peasant food. But it still seems very popular here in the Visayas.

Ironically, a pearl-wearing American retiree, the lovely Joanne, offered me the most helpful advice about finding the best balut in town. "You've got to go to the seller right across from Bethel on Rizal Avenue. He sells balut at 16 days. Some of the other vendors sell younger balut and it's like you're eating a boiled egg. You've got to have the embryo developed some to get the best flavors." A balut connoisseur!

So that's where we ended up on our next-to-last night in the Philippines. 

This seller told us he gets his duck eggs from Manila. They're boiled and then placed in a basket with hot stones at the bottom to keep the eggs warm.

Warm balut in hand, I cracked a hole in the top.

I drank off any remaining liquid, or it would just spill everywhere. Not surprisingly, the liquid tasted a bit like chicken broth.

I peeled the shell. Added condiments like salt, vinegar, or soy sauce and I was ready.

It was actually pretty good, a mix of egg and duck flavors. You get to see what I ate because of the flash from the camera. To be honest, I couldn't see it! LOL. Possibly the best way to eat balut--outdoors in the dark!

(Photos by Christina Newhard. Thanks, Christina!)