sybarites

The city of Hoi An is a UNESCO World Heritage Site completely filled, or nearly so, with hundreds of tailor shops. Tourists spend most of their time shopping for clothes or running to fittings as a suit may require three fittings or more. I ordered two suits and Janet ordered one, which required three hours of fittings. A lawyer friend of ours ordered seven or eight suits, which would require an unimaginable number of hours standing in front of the mirror.

At times it was hard to see past the colorful jackets to the beauty of the ancient town. It was easier at night, when the tailor shops dimmed, the restaurants lit up dozens of lanterns and lantern shops seemed to light up with hundreds.

We had a pleasant stay in the town, in part because of the wonderful hotel that was recommended by some other Calgarians. The cleaners placed fresh flowers on the bed each day and silk robes were provided for lazy mornings. The staff at Thanh Thien were very friendly, even waving from the curb as we drove out to the airport.

On our first night in Hanoi, we visited Highway 4, a restaurant we happened to come across while wandering in the old quarter of the city. We first flipped through the drink menu and were happy to find some flights of locally distilled liquor for sampling, of which we ordered two. Most of them had interesting flavours like ginger or rose-apple but some were un-finishable, like the one with the name that translates as “one night, five times, give birth to four sons.”

However, so as not to completely pickle ourselves, we ordered some snacks off the tapas menu. We were not, however, nearly hammered enough to order any of the items on this page:

Otherwise, we had a fantastic meal at a French restaurant here called “Cafe des Arts”. It might sound silly to be eating Western food when we have so much good Eastern food to try but I am weak when it comes to foie gras and cheese platters. Thus, we have prune-stuffed filet mignon with foie gras sauce and – heaven! – mashed potatoes, followed by a tray of French cheeses. We ate there twice in three days.

Completely unrelated, here is a picture of Hanoi traffic from our hotel room.

Traffic is a neat mass of confusion. The only way to cross the street as a pedestrian, is to walk slowly across the road while scooters, trucks and cars weave around you. The key is not to stop!
If anybody is interested, I’ve made an attempt at loading video onto YouTube; see a street in Hanoi.

While sitting in a cafe one afternoon, we watched this guy selling goldfish from the back of his bike. At first, it seemed kind of strange because who would be driving by on this busy road, see the guy and think, “Oh yeah, gotta pick up some fish”, then swerve to the curb. Yet, this occurred no less than five times while we were sitting there.

On the first day of our motorbike tour through central Vietnam, one of our guides answered some of our language questions over lunch. Among other things, I was curious about some of the signs I frequently saw whipping by that said “thit cay”. It turns out that this is an advertisement for dog meat for sale. And they weren’t few or far between. Even better were the signs advertising “thit cay to”, puppy meat.

We stayed one night in a small resort just outside of the city of Buon Ma Thuot. Over breakfast the next morning, we watched as some of the construction of the newest part of the resort was underway. At one point, the guy inside the digger that was perched on top of a small mountain of dirt, paused in his loading of a dump truck and beeped the horn. This was a sign for the dump truck driver at the table next to us to take a coffee over to the digger-guy. Carefully balancing the cup, he walked over to the massive shovel and stood inside it. The machine operator then slowly lifted the coffee-bearer up to window height where the cup was passed though the window.

Scooters in Vietnam can be used to transport anything.

We don’t have a picture, but we’ve seen pigs in bamboo baskets strapped to the backs of scooters, too.

We stopped in one tiny village in the mountains to visit some of the Montagnards, the descendants of the earliest inhabitants of Vietnam who used to live independently in the jungle. The kids were especially happy to see us (foreigners = candy) and one little guy peddled his younger sibling over to see us.

Near Lak Lake, we couldn’t stop laughing at this kid who apparently would take a nap wherever he stopped. His mother and aunt were making bamboo baskets nearby.

Outside the city of Hoi An, we learned about a religion known as Cao Dai. I just happened to notice a temple in a village we were passing through and, because it didn’t look like anything I’d seen before, I asked our guide about it and he took us through. The religion is a combination of “the best parts” of Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism and others. The alter is topped with an all-seeing eye and a painting inside depicts Victor Hugo as one of the saints of the religion. Fascinating to learn about something of which I had never heard.

It has been so rewarding to eat Vietnam with an insider. Our Easy Rider guides were so thoughtful as to order our meals and eat with us each day; that’s how we ate the best food in this country.

Before lunch on our first day, Bang stopped to pick up a few kilos of a fruit I didn’t recognize. It turned out to be passionfruit, our dessert for that meal and the following six. Cut in half, they are eaten with a spoon like pudding. Tart, sweet and juicy.

Along the way. we would stop at small eateries, mostly scrubby little joints with greasy tables and a woodstove in the back. A lot of them had names that were also the address and sometimes someone would be cooking meat over a tiny charcoal BBQ in the front. It was at these places that we would learn that bitter melon soup is eaten at the end of a meal, that tofu can be delicious when it is stuffed with spicy meat, and that crispy, deep-fried chicken can make an outstanding meal.

We also tried honey-barbecued squid stuffed with beef, stir-fried deer meat with morning glory, stewed wild boar, barbecued weasel (I think it was weasel; they didn’t know the English name for the animal but described it as “like a fox with a long nose”), and a fantastic seafood hotpot.

For breakfast one morning, we had Vietnamese steak and eggs, which were cooked as they were brought to the table on a scalding iron hot plate. The steak was actually buried beneath fresh coriander, tomatoes and cucumber and was only one of three different meats on the platter. We figured out pretty quickly that Vietnamese people love meat- I don’t think I’ve ever eaten so much in one week.

Plus, at breakfast, there was always hot, Vietnamese coffee with sweetened condensed milk.

In my opinion, one of the best things about travelling is other travellers. If I’m honest, it is also one of the worst things, too. I cringe from embarrassment as I watch travelling jackasses behave ignorantly and/or disrespectfully to people in a different country. However, more often than not, I love meeting random people and finding out where they’re from, where they’re going and collecting opinions on destinations. It’s so easy to strike up a conversation with other people on the road* and especially easy to have a good laugh if we’re all in the midst of a harrowing journey. How else, other than travelling, would we ever have had the opportunity to meet so many people from other countries? Dutch, Italian, Israeli and Spanish in India, Brits in Mongolia, Germans, Koreans, Japanese and Australians in Vietnam, South Africans in Thailand, and an endless stream of Canadians. Most recently, we met two other Calgarians while swimming in a river in the mountains of Vietnam. She and I grew up in the same quadrant of the city.

As an interesting side note, most of the people that we run into and spend time with seem to be of the same demographic as we: couples who are in their early thirties who have quit their jobs to travel long term around the world. Relatively speaking, nobody is rich or has a trust fund or any such pool of cash, but that hasn’t seemed a deterrent. Like attracts like and I guess that’s why we connect so well with these travellers and keep in touch in case we are able to cross paths again. And always, any extended conversation between any four of us will devolve into “the worst bathroom in the world” competition.

One recommendation that we got from several other people who had been to Vietnam was to go on an Easy Rider tour. Actually, it was less a recommendation and more an insistence because the tour is universally beloved among travellers. In the mountain town of Dalat, there is a club of about 70 guys who offer guided motorcycle tours of Central Vietnam. Actually, for $50 per day, they’re willing to take tourists pretty much anywhere they wish to go inside the country. We weren’t in Dalat one hour before we approached by one of these fellows and offered a tour, so it was easy for us to arrange a six day trip through the mountains, along part of the old Ho Chi Minh Trail and ending on the coast. **

Now that we’ve arrived safe and sound in Hoi An, I must say that this was one of the best and most interesting things we have done anywhere in the world in the last nine months. Our two guides, Bang and Thiet were friendly, English-speaking, knowledgeable fellows who had a pile of information to share about the people of Vietnam, the traditions of the cultures in the mountains, the language, the war and just about anything else we wanted to know. We stopped frequently to visit silkworm farms, coffee farms, a silk-making factory, a mushroom farm, old mountain villages, and national parks. Really, it was like nothing we had ever done before and such a brilliant experience. Because we were travelling by motorbike, we not only got to see so much more of the country than we would have while travelling by bus, but we were able to meet some of the people along the way. That was my favourite part.

(The woman squatting down in this picture is nearly 100 years old.)

* I have to add a note here to say that it is humbling that so many other people in the world speak English as a second (or third, or fourth!) language.
** If anyone reading this is inclined to take the tour, email us and we’ll give you the names and email addresses of two of the best EasyRider guides. They’ll arrange tours by email and even do a pick-up right from an airport.

I think it’s safe to say that, while on this journey, Marc and I have been pretty open minded about the food we’ve eaten.  Some of the nerds who have been reading this blog since we left will recall that we’ve tasted fresh, curried, goat in Rajasthan, century eggs in Hong Kong, betel leaves in Gujurat, beef spine in Korea, and – lest we forget – fermented horse’s milk in Mongolia.  All of these things required a certain degree of bravery, a certain forced ignorance of the contents of our mouths as we chewed and swallowed.   But sometimes, we just don’t possess the courage to eat the unusual.

Most recently, as we travel through a region whose inhabitants will glean sustenance from almost anything, we’ve come across a few things that have proved too much for our sissy Western palates.  There were the fried tarantulas being sold by a couple of women at one of the rest stops on our bus journey from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh (I wasn’t even brave enough to take a photo, let alone taste one);  there were the crispy, deep-fried locusts which, again, I couldn’t bring myself to try;  and the fertilized duck eggs.   On  menus in Vietnam, we’ve seen ‘Fried Mouse with Onion’, ‘Fried Pork Hearts’, ‘Chopped Snake’, and a whole section dedicated to eels.  But  who am I to judge what is or isn’t edible?  At home, I eat oysters, snails, beef carpaccio and American cheese.  Thus, until I have tried any of these Asian menu items, I am just a pot calling a kettle black.

When we do get past the fried mouse though, there are some tasty things to be had in restaurants and from street vendors hereabouts.   We had a fantastic $0.80 lunch of BBQ pork with spicy vegetables and rice from a street vendor in Cantho, several marvelously delicious Vietnamese iced-coffees (we are up to 3 per day now),   and bright, fresh salad rolls dipped into spicy, peanuty, vinegar sauce.

It’s hard to prove but there seems to be an inverse relationship between the seediness of a food stand/restaurant and the brilliance of the food it produces:  the seedier the joint, the more tasty the food.  For example, on our first night in Saigon, we made it a priority to find and procure a decent bottle of wine to enjoy on the balcony  unexpectedly attached to our room in the guest house.  But what to consume with the wine?   After eating out so many times and for so long, there are times when we just want to stay in, and this was one of those times.  So, imagine how pleased we were to see a woman with a stall a block from our place selling Vietnamese sub sandwiches for $0.40.   Even better, there were a bunch of locals beating a path to her stall which is always a good sign.  We stepped right up to order two and watch as the fresh baguettes were filled with crisp veggies, a little soft, French cheese, and several kinds of unidentifiable meats and sauces.  When we got back to our balcony, I admit that I did open the baguettes and pick out the chunks of pork fat but otherwise, to quote Marc, “Those were the best forty-cent sandwiches I’ve ever had.”

Also of note, are the frog’s legs and the pho (pronounced like the ‘fu’ in ‘full’), a lovely, beefy soup with rice noodles, fresh basil and lime.  How could we visit Vietnam and not have pho at least once every two days?   The version to beat is the one I had today at a place called Pho 2000 where, according to the prominently displayed photos, Bill Clinton visited for lunch.  His people must have known the right people in order to find this joint.

The frog’s legs with mushrooms and garlic were something that Marc ventured to order while we were in Cantho.  I tried my first-ever bite of amphibian thigh and agreed that it tasted of chicken but with the delicate texture of a fish;  quite remarkable, actually.  The wine that he ordered, however, could be described as “grape juice with added alcohol” or as “a cross between a wild-berry vodka cooler and prison wine”.   Vietnam can cook a mean frog leg but it’s got a ways to go in the wine department.  I guess French colonialism can only penetrate so far.