Our Time in Vietnam (and a Few Other Places)

We've really enjoyed our time in Vietnam. It's been a whirlwind of experiences, some expected and others less so. It's been very different from what we’ve seen elsewhere, from its crazy cities to beautiful terraced rice paddies, and I’ve loved every minute of it. I suppose I shouldn't be reminiscing yet, we're still here and will be for a while, but I just wanted to show off some of our more memorable experiences. As a testament to my organizational skills, some of these events didn't even happen in Vietnam!

On our last day with our Vietnamese hiking guide Duong (credit to Jason and Eryn for the recommendation), he took us on a tour of Ninh Binh on the backs of scooters. The scooter drivers were him, Thuk (our van driver while hiking), and two tiny Vietnamese ladies, Luan and Mei, that must have been some of their buddies. Don't be fooled by her tough biker demeanor—she still loved to squeeze Quill's cheeks and arms, just like all the other Vietnamese ladies. They would often cross the streets or leave their shops unattended just to pinch her chin. We later learned that it's because the Vietnamese love their little girls to be healthy, cherubic, and pale skinned. I guess that pale Alaskan tan is serving her well!

Walking in the tea plantations of Long Coc (Yup, that’s pronounced just like it looks!). The landscape was amazing: endless steep, domed hills stretching to the horizon. Bin, the man who ran our homestay and the manager of the plantation, helped us avoid getting lost. He, Thuk, and Duong ran ahead, laughing and collecting greens for dinner, seeming almost giddy in the dusky twilight.

Eating a massive feast with Bin and his family. It was an amazing spread his wife cooked up: pork skewers, fish steaks, fried random cuts of chicken, stewed bitter greens we collected, sticky rice that was harvested the day before, bamboo shoots we picked up from a roadside stand, roast skin-on cuts of chicken, “sour meat” (a canned delicacy in the region) that was wrapped in a fresh herbal leaf,  and stewed squash. It was lots of fun but very awkward, as no one spoke English except for Duong so he had to serve as translator. The family was particularly proud of serving “walking chicken” which is their translation of “free-range”....hopefully it was walking in the rice fields and not the near-by trash pit. 

Partway through the meal, a loud female voice started booming over nearby loudspeakers for almost a half hour, which the locals explained to be the government announcing news and propaganda. This happens each day at the same time and is broadcast across the village. 

The family was really friendly and happy that we were there, and they even wanted to take a video of us for advertising purposes for the town. But hopefully our faces don’t end up on some Vietnamese government propaganda saying “Long Coc has the best food!”

After a two hour dinner we retired to the “night table” where we were served tiny teacups of an extremely bitter green tea. I really liked it, but it was so bitter that it dried out your mouth and water tasted as sweet as soda afterward. It was quite an evening, and the tea made it so that we got very little sleep that night.

Long car rides between hikes gave a chance to catch up on missed sleep. If anyone is willing to be a vertebrae donor, it would really change my life!

Many of our homestays came with puppies, much to Quill’s delight. The local village dogs looked almost like mini german shepherds, and we saw a few that I swear had husky blood in them. They all seemed super hot and never left the shade. We shared their discomfort.

Hiking in the beautiful terraced rice fields was one of the highlights of our time in Vietnam. Our favorite were the morning walks, because we quickly learned that the heat of the day was not the best time for these thick-blooded Alaskans to walk. The water buffalo seemed pretty hot, too.

Notice the sign in the background; there were many hilarious false cognates. I love the Vietnamese language.

The streets of Hanoi were incredible: scooters, pedestrians, cars, tour buses, and crazy bicycle/rickshaw contraptions all shared the same lane. People drove on both sides of the street, went totally across the flow of traffic, and honked like crazy, both as a greeting and an expression of anger, it seemed like they had their own horn language. Some of you may appreciate this: Beep Beep - SNL. Traffic lights existed, but were totally ignored as traffic constantly flowed in all directions through the intersections. Total chaos, I loved it!

            

         Near our hole-in-the-wall hotel was “silk street,” which was crowded on both sides by shops often only three feet wide. This is because during the 19th century rule of the Nguyen Dynasty, shop owners were taxed by the width of their shop. People responded by building the largest buildings possible while still avoiding taxes: they built their shops very narrow and long, and if the shops were successful they might add another story. This made for a lot of narrow, multistory buildings which are sometimes called “tube houses”.Silk Street was an awesome and unique shopping experience, where we were crowded into narrow shops looking at handmade pure silk and cashmere scarves for 150,000 dongs (yes, that’s their currency), which translates to roughly $6. Quill even got a dress tailored for her and it only cost $20.

Every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night, the streets of Hanoi’s Old Quarter get closed off from motorized traffic and become the night market. It’s actually similar to daytime Hanoi, but also different with it’s huge crowds of people pushing in every direction, boomboxes and street artists playing on every corner, little vietnamese ladies dancing their hearts out, scooters zooming way to fast through the crowds, and vendors setting up anywhere they wanted. You could buy anything from cheap tee-shirts to knock-off Prada and Fjallraven for less than $5. There was a whole intersection full of tiny Vietnamese old ladies working at identical carts selling and cooking saute’ chicken, pork, beef, and whole octopus tentacles. On a corner a little old man sat at his stool, where he sold one brand and type of men’s underwear briefs off a tiny camp table. I wonder how that business works. Do people need new underwear and think “Oh, I better go find old Clark!” or did he just get a really good deal on men’s boxers that week?.

This market was also the site of one of my favorite Hanoi memories: As we were checking out the saute’ carts, one of the little old ladies barked an order at the vendors next to her. Then, all three of them moved out in a big wall of flaming octopus carts, pushing us out into the main flow of people. Just then, what must have been nearly an eighty year old lady on a scooter, loaded with flowers, zipped around the corner, shrieking and braking just in time to stop from colliding with Mom. Quill still got poked in the eye by a whipping lily.

   

Vietnamese chips were pretty different from the flavors we were used to. I don’t know where Lays has been hiding their Texas Tenderloin Steak, Brazilian BBQ Pork Ribs, and Nori Seaweed varieties, but I’d sure never seen them before. We tried some Chicken Pho flavored chips, which tasted so much like Pho it was disturbing. Seriously, the flavor was so spot on that you expected them to be soupy, not crunchy.

I wonder if you can taste the marbling in the tenderloin…

  

We all felt like giants in the Vietnamese restaurants. Trying all the varieties of Vietnamese coffee was quite an experience: salted coffee was a bit…salty, but robusta beans were amazing, and egg coffee was like what every cappuccino wants to be. 

Vietnamese food was different from what we expected. In America, Vietnamese restaurants are such a departure from our normal cuisine that it didn’t even occur to us that it had been Americanized, but of course it had. Strangely, we found that Americanized pho is actually better than traditional pho, at least in our humble opinion. In Vietnam we didn’t get to add sauces to adjust the broth to our hearts’ content, and they served it in normal portions instead of gallons. But I do think that Mekong Delta style Vietnamese pancakes might be one of my new favorite foods (credit to Rachel for first introducing me to them).

One Vietnamese food custom that I don’t think has come to America yet is rice paper wrapping. Often, when we were served a stir fry or similar food, they also gave us rice paper with it. We were instructed to wrap the food with sheets of it to make little burritos, which was a fun, if messy, experience.

We really enjoyed trying out the Hawker centers in Singapore, (to find out more about Hawker centers, read my post about Singapore.), but we quickly learned that the locals’ tastes weren’t the same as ours. If you read anything about foods to try in Singapore, you’ll hear a lot about things like fish head curry and Hokien Prawn Mee. Despite being local comfort foods we found much of it to be a bit fishy for us.

We did try a few local classics, such as BBQ stingray, which was actually much better than we expected. The stingray’s flesh felt like it was made of individual strands of meat, and the BBQ sauce was almost like a fishy hot sauce, very different from the ketchupy American ones. Quillian ate nearly half a stingray!

The light show under Singapore’s famous living sculptures, the Supertrees, was amazing. Music swelled, lights flashed, all in all a very pleasant way to spend fifteen minutes laying on benches digesting way too many saute's.

Going back to Indonesia, I thought I should include a picture of the Jakare, our Indonesian liveaboard SCUBA dive and snorkeling vessel that served as our very own floating paradise for nine whole days. The Jakare crew had a variety of people: friendly Greeks, some Scottish Kiwis full of amazing stories, and a group of very photogenic Alaskans. We loved our time lounging in the sun, hanging out with octopuses and cuttlefishes, and jumping off the boat. I did my first night dive and got my Nitrox certification, which are two exciting steps in my diving career. For more on the Jakare, my sister will be coming out with a post soon.

New Zealand’s holiday RV parks were dangerous places!

Yes, this one’s all the way back from New Zealand, and I know it's random, but I just saw this picture again and thought that I had to show you guys.

Okay, I’m gonna hang up now. Bye-Bye!