Hanoi Eats

Hanoi food is very special. Especially bland. Fortunately, there are a range of food options, even Mexican food.

Nothing beats the cold (50 degrees is cold for us Saigonese) like a good cinnamon hot chocolate.

A wonderful and adventurous home cooked meal of crocodile and ostrich. The crocodile tastes like toasted chicken skin and ostrich is just like beef.

Groan, another Vietnamese hotpot. I hate it--you wait 3o minutes for them to set up the pot and bring raw meat. Then you have to cook the meat for another 30 minutes, and the end product is like instant soup with gristly meat. We stay in the restaurant for 3 hours eating little bits at a time. Eventually the staff hides for their evening nap and leave us alone barking orders. Meanwhile I'm completely bored with no one to talk English with and after an eternity leave tired and hungry. Like I said, not my favorite.

There are loads of wonderful restaurants and cafes totally hidden away. Here we walk down a bamboo lined path to a room with a full sized cherry tree replica and a fountain that simulates rain.

Here we sample specialty foods from Hue--the stuff I didn't get to eat while I was there, and thankfully not the shrimps that poisoned me. My favorite is the glutinous Banh It Ram, and my least favorite is yet another hotpot--chicken a la plastique.

So Long Ha Long

It's about a 3 hour drive from Hanoi to Ha Long--not a very interesting drive except for the murderous traffic circles on the highway, the occasional accident site, and row after row of pineapple stalls.

We take a break at a highly tacky tourist trap selling all kinds of junk you wouldn't buy, like wine made from scorpions, snakes, or Geckos, like this one:

These giant geckos (Gecko gecko) are famous for scaring the hell out of campers with their loud "Gecko!" calls, but are becoming scarce because they become products like this.

The area is decorated with the most beautiful mountains. Unfortunately they are being totally quarried away for their marble to make brummagem. But who could bare to pass these up?

Fortunately, the beautiful Karst formations in Ha Long Bay are protected by Unesco and will be here until they crumble away. It is like being inside a beautiful watercolor painting on rice paper.

The Islets often keep a shear 90 degree cliff face as fresh limestone sheets peel off, while they are hollowed out from the inside. there are many caves here, though not many are accessible.

Here is our hotel for the night, the Emmeraude. It's a replica of one of the first French tourist steamboats in Ha Long bay in colonial times. There is a vast fleet of tourist ships, but except for the Emmeraude they are all wooden junks--they look very appealing, but I'd imagine they wobble and creak a bit more.

We are often followed by remora-like traders selling all kinds of crazy crap--mostly carved and uncarved shells, but also cookies, soda, junk food, beer, and anything else you can imagine. At hugely inflated prices, of course.

Our cabin is small but super quiet, thankfully blocking out the noise from our rowdy Vietnamese poker fiend neighbors. Unfortunately it is about as cold inside as it is outside--about 55 degrees, but cold for us Saigonese.

Elsewhere, people live their whole lives on floating villages in the bay. Unfortunately, visiting them is not on our itinerary.

The largest tourist stop, with hundreds of boats bumping and grinding together, is Surprise Cave, where the French have trained their little poodles and practiced their miming for ages.

The guides are pretty useless. They point out indistinct animal shapes in the muck. Otherwise, the cave is massive and a fun place to run around.

This one is supposed to be a turtle, and apparently a rich one. But don't bother wetting your beak, these are worthless 1,000 dong notes.

It's too cold to kayak, so we're ferried to a little pearl farm. Farming pearls is a complicated process which is filtered through a guide with only a smattering of English. So "mantle" becomes "mental," and somehow "gonads" becomes "coconut." They sell pearls here, but this is no place for bargains.

There's not much to do on the boat. However, Jenny picks up a new culinary skill--making a beautiful rose out of a tomato and mint leaves.

Dinner is fairly good, but the spring rolls are out of this world.

The next day we head for home. One major flaw with this trip is this: it isn't our first. Sadly, Ha Long Bay is a once in a lifetime opportunity and no more. People come so they can look around and realize they are not in Kansas, or New York, or London, and are as far away from home as it gets--not quite the same effect for Saigonese. There is snorkeling in the warmer season, though the waters are very murky and you won't see the absolutely amazing fish beneath you. But, thanks to Jenny's work benefits, it's all free for us.

Trussed for Success

When living in a totally foreign culture it is best to keep an open mind. And then there are some things that make you want to say "wake up people, this is stupid. Do it this way."
For instance, they like to carve huge smiley faces in their fish for no discernable purpose except that it sells more fish. Often in the US we just cut off fillets, which is very wasteful and makes us cowardly meat-eaters. But when it's done right fish are left with their heads and tasty jaw muscles intact and gutted. Vietnamese leave all the guts in--why? It's not like they eat them, probably because they taste like you'd expect fish guts to taste--absolutely jaw-rottingly horrifying. So the first side of the fish is tasty but the other half has been stewing in gut-sauce and isn't worth leaving for the dogs. I'd like to think the guts are left in for sheer laziness but it is pretty time-consuming to extract the face, which as I mentioned is rather pointless. Maybe they do it for sanitary reasons, not wanting to lick the inside of an animal's mouth?
Nah, probably not. This chicken will be hacked up and every little bit will go on the platter, mouth, eyes, wattles and all. Very creative presentation, no? Better than a Sicilian necktie. Makes me wonder how they kill the chicken--obviously not the traditional and quick guillotine method. But all chickens in Vietnam, even in the city, are free-range, organic, lean and delicious, and as someone dear to me once said, "just have one bad day."

Worst name for a fruit.

It tastes sweet, very decent custardy texture, but it has the worst name in history--translated from Vietnamese it's called Breast-milk Fruit. That ruins everything. Its juice is decidedly milk-colored and even flavored, it's flesh is very tissuey, and it's very size and shape makes you think you are actually eating--well, like I said, the name ruins everything.

We've got one...

...skyscraper. Can we call ourselves a city now?

The Bintexco Financial Tower, at 68 stories is the tallest building in the whole country. It's supposedly shaped like a lotus petal, which is a good excuse as any to put a helipad in a helicopter-less city. It opened on October 31 with a neat light show. Then I forgot about it until now.