The Tour is a Culinary Adventure with Guests Traveling from Market to Farm to Kitchen – Eating All Along the Way – to Learn About This Increasingly Popular Cuisine

(TRAVPR.COM) KHON KAEN, THAILAND - May 27th, 2015 - Isan Explorer, the leading tour company for Northeast Thailand, has created a food tour showcasing the cuisine of the country's seldom-visited Isan region.

The full-day tour begins in a large fresh market to buy most of the food that guests will be eating for lunch and the ingredients they will use to cook dinner. It then moves out of the city to a small village. The menu is designed for sampling: in total there are 20 main dishes – including bamboo shoot curry, pork laap, sour fish, grilled chicken, steamed mushrooms, green bean som tam, fried crickets, and eggplant dipping sauce – plus many sides, snacks, and drinks. Before helping their village host prepare dinner, guests will walk around the village to collect some additional ingredients, such as leaves, flowers, fruits, insects, and crabs, depending on the season.

"Isan food has some similarities with Thai food, but overall it's a very different cuisine," explains Tim Bewer, Isan Explorer's founder. "And some popular foods that people think of as Thai, such as spicy papaya salad (som tam), are actually Isan foods adopted by the rest of the country." Bewer, a long-time resident of Thailand adds that because this tour spends most of the day in traditional villages, it is as interesting from a cultural standpoint as it is for its culinary side.

Besides the shopping, eating, and cooking, guests will visit a few other places along the way including a noodle factory and a cricket farm.

A full itinerary, prices, and other details about the Taste of Isan food tour can be found on Isan Explorer's website and a short video about the tour is available on Isan Explorer's YouTube channel.

Hi-res photos and video are available upon request.

Tim Bewer is available for interviews about tourism or any other topic related to Isan; or Thailand in general.

About Isan Explorer
Isan Explorer is a family-run boutique tour company (TAT License No. 54/00028) offering slow travel tours in Thailand's seldom-visited northeast region, the most fascinating part of the country for cultural travelers. Known as Isan, this vast area – covering one third of the country – is brimming with culture, wildlife, and history; and its myriad sites are just as beautiful, inspiring, and evocative as anything the rest of Thailand has to offer. Yet because only 1% of visitors to Thailand come here, Isan offers the kind of authentic travel experiences that are increasingly hard to find elsewhere in the country. All tours stop in off-the-beaten-path villages, temples, and markets to give their guests a full immersion in traditional life.

About Tim Bewer
Isan Explorer's founder, Tim Bewer, first visited Thailand in 1997 and returned several times for work and pleasure before moving here permanently in 2007. Travel is his primary passion and he has visited most of Thailand's 77 provinces and also over 80 countries. Before opening a tour company, he worked fulltime for many years as a freelance travel writer and photographer, primarily writing for Lonely Planet, and he continues to update their best-selling Thailand guidebook as well as covering many Africa countries. His wife and business partner, Suttawan Intarapanich, has lived her whole life in Isan and has a Master's Degree in Mekong Studies.

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