I Love the smell of Vietnam in the Morning.....

Day 17

We rose early to take our tuk tuk from the hotel the Vietnamese border, a journey of about 8km of road and the following 37km on a dirt track. It rained for the first 30 minutes, soaking us to the skin before the storm blew itself out.the tuk tuk’s here are not like the average three wheeled trikes that you see in Thailand. Here they are a motorcycle, usually 125cc, with a 2 wheeled carriage attached to the back. Most of the ride was bumpy and uneventful, passing rice paddies, coconut palms and bungalows made from wood, the locals swinging from hammocks waiting for the sun to reappear. About 5 km from the border, our tuk tuk driver received a mobile phone call, wedging his phone under his helmet to speak. Then he turned around and drove to a small shack where 5 men wearing army cammo preceded to ask us to leave the tuk tuk and climb aboard their motorcycles for the last hike to the border crossing, judging by their clothes they were not officials. We refused to get out, you could see that the driver had been called by these thugs and demanded to return so that they could make some money ferrying us to the border. After much gesticulating and Neil being forced to talk to someone who could speak English on the mobile phone, we were at last allowed to proceed to the border, as originally planned in our tuk tuk. The driver, was paid and we left Cambodia as we had arrived, on foot.....

We passed through the Cambodian side of the border with no issues, walking the 300m to the Vietnamese border control. Unfortunately, it was lunchtime and the border, she was closed!

After a 20minute wait for the controller to eat his lunch, we had our passports stamped and haggled for a motorbike (xe om in Vietnamese) and we were driven in convoy to a hotel in Ha Tien.

Here is where our food adventure began! Cambodian food does have some fab dishes. Khmer curry, a delicious dish of chicken in coconut and spices, fish Amoc is also great and of course loc lac, beef marinated in lemon and pepper. But to be honest, after 2 and a half weeks of eating it, we were bored and ready to indulge in a little culinary adultery with the Vietnamese next door neighbour. Walking around the hotel, we found the local market, piles of produce, fresher, better prepared and more abundant than in Cambodia. In quick succession Sam, Neil and I sampled a beef, egg and onion steamed bun, a coconut bun and a sticky rice parcel. It was all delicious. I could hardly wait for dinner....

Dinner was noodles with fish cakes eaten in a tiny street kitchen, their tables and chairs set up on an empty bit of pavement. The noodles were served with fresh stir-fried veggies, morning glory |(a type of spinach) pak choy, cucumber and onions....delicious. After only 4 hours, we all decided that we liked Vietnam...after all, no one had tried to sell us a bracelet or a leg wax all day.

Day 18 – Oh how I have missed good coffee.....

We rose early to investigate the unidentified frying objects......Vietnamese street food is considered to be some of the best in the world, having tasted it, I have to agree. We sat in a local coffee shop and managed to order fresh filter coffee. It was served with its own mini dripper on top of the cup, alongside a pot of Vietnamese green tea. After enduring the coffee of Cambodia, which has the weirdest taste of plastic and syrup (even before you add sugar) it was a pleasant surprise that Vietnamese coffee is delicious, strong and enables you to run a half marathon after only one cup. We sat outside the coffee shop waiting for the rain to stop, getting completely soaked to the skin despite the canopy we were sitting under. Breakfast was calling so we ran to the covered market and quickly devoured several unidentified frying objects. One like a sweet flat Yorkshire pudding was delicious, then in quick succession, some coconut sticky rice and a pancake omelette type thing served with prawns and pork and wrapped in leaves was eaten dipped in a sauce of chilli, lime, fish sauce and palm sugar.....delicious. We also ordered a bowl of rare beef pho (pronounced fur) which is beef broth flavoured with lime, chilli and lemon grass which is poured over raw beef strips and noodles for breakfast. It was delicious, dipping the beef in the chilli sauce and adding our own veg and extra chilli kept the dish different and interesting, like having 7 dishes in one.

Having dried out over breakfast we were ready to visit the next town on our list Chau Doc. The bus collected us at 12.30pm and then subjected us to the most terrifying ride of our lives. In Vietnam, the left and right hand side are only there for guidelines, it is not necessary to drive on the correct side of the road or even go the same was as everyone else. Interesting.... in the course of the 2 hour ride on the bus we managed to knock a small child from their bike, hit a truck wing mirror and drive over the piles of rice that were drying on the side of the road. All this in a bus with no suspension and with a driver who obviously needed therapy for anger management issues. We gratefully found a hotel and collapsed to recover.

Day 19

The American as well as the Durian is a strange fruit. Spending their formative years on a diet of meatloaf and McDonalds, football (the American kind) and apple pie. They then feel the need to visit lands far away. The gap year students, for whom everything is Awesome! I guess not having any history of your own would make everything awesome. However there are a few other adjectives that I feel schools in the states may want to think of including in future syllabi.

So I’m a kid from some middle American backwater with a school sports field that would rival Wembley and I’m going to go on a trip RTW (Round the world), I have to use acronyms as words are just so passé. ‘Vietnam looks like a good stop off. Dad was bombing them in the 70’s and said it was Awesome!’

I find the whole idea of Americans or French for that matter visiting Vietnam a little odd. After defoliating most of the country and killing more civilians than military personal with their friends Agent Orange and napalm. A legacy still seen here today. Do Americans feel safe ordering food in restaurants? It must be so tempting to drop something a bit nasty into a dish for table number 4. It’s not as if their taste buds are going to detect it.

I am of course not forgetting the English gap year students from the Home Counties in there designer shorts and T-shirts, i-phones permanently glued to their ears ‘texting’ friends across the table. We like to eat chips and South East Asia has accommodated this peculiarity offering western versions of classic dishes everywhere, usually by adding chips and reducing the chilli content. Imagine if you will, the beef loc lac we described earlier, garnished with that excellent asian accompaniment of chips....somehow it detracts from the experience of asia, but it is what the people who visit here seem to want. A group of girls in a restaurant a few days ago were seen perusing the menu and after not enough deliberation one announced that she was going to the shop to buy some crisps. Returning a few minutes later to tell her confused nest ‘ I couldn’t find anything in English’ So they ordered chips and a bottle of Banana wine. My advice, go to Spain.

Can Tho, at the heart of the Mekong delta is a melting pot of tourism and industry with Vietnamese going about their daily lives surrounded by tourism. The people seem weary of tourists and therefore not as engaging unless a dollar is to be made.

Today we ate at two restaurants. One geared up for tourists and one mainly patronised by Vietnamese. The verdict; The local restaurant won hands down and Nic was beaten by a chilli. This is a first.

The journey from Chau Doc to Can Tho was driven by Michael Schumaker’s Vietnamese cousin a journey which was scheduled to take two and half hours was covered in a little over two and included a fuel stop, numerous dogfights with other buses and a group of bikers who we kept up with for a surprising amount of time. Never taunt a bus driver from the pillion seat of a bike. Mercedes Sprinters are surprising agile in the right hands. Upon a triumphant arrival at Can Tho Bus station the driver was present with a laurel wreath having shaved two hundredths of a second off his best lap time. Other passengers were given Valium.