Headed for Vĩnh Long

From Saigon to Vĩnh Long

Today is the fifth full moon. It's also a day of travel for us. We're headed to a town called Vĩnh Long to pay a visit to our family. We'll travel in the comfort of a coach bus. It's about five hours, or so I'm told. Vĩnh Long is a small town in the Mekong Delta that doesn't get a lot of tourists. This destination will open my eyes about how most of the Vietnamese people live beyond the city limits. I'm looking forward to seeing what's in store. Hopefully I'll have a cell phone signal and can keep you posted.

Fun with Food

Grocery stores in far-off lands are often good for a couple of laughs. When I was in Taiwan, I posted this about one of the funnier marketing descriptions. Since then, I've stumbled upon many similar promotional cut-ups, and have collected them here. Be warned. Some of my observations are absurd. Some are irreverent (sorry Mom!) I hope you enjoy the first Fun with Food post.

1. Nut House
The craziest part: how much the wacky packaging resembles that of another brand.

2. Marion: "Filled with Mom's Heart
Just like the ones mom used to make, by tearing out her heart and baking it in shortbread

3. Tò nam chua: "Probably the Best in Vietnam"
We're just not quite sure.

4. Red Bull and Gold Cow
Store them together and in a few months you'll get Orange Calf.

5. Quality: "Do not use borax. Do not use formaldehyde."
There's always somebody.

6. Phúc An Bakery Bánh Pía
Made with real Phúc An durian and green beans. By the way, their website has awesome theme music.

7. Danisa Traditional Butter Cookies
If butter cookies are good, than a whole aisle of butter cookies is awesome!

Lẩu - Simmering Soup

Sushi, in its simplest form

Sooner or later, a great idea comes along. And then, someone steals it. I'm talking about the greatest idea that ever happened to the glutton of sushi--the kaiten-zushi conveyor belt restaurant. Customers take seats near a moving belt that snakes through the restaurant delivering plate after delicious plate of endless sushi varieties. You simply snag a covered plate, eat the contents, stack your empty plates, and grab more. You're awarded with immediate gratification and are afforded every opportunity for overindulgence.

Truth be told, the genuine sushi experience is to savor and appreciate the delicate flavors from the sea. Sushi was not meant to be wolfed down. The conveyor belt totally defeats the sushi experience. But someone stole the idea of the conveyor belt and applied it in the most positive way to that wonderful savory simmering soup meal. It is known by many names. The Chinese huǒ guō. The Japanese shabu-shabu. The Thai suki. In Singapore, they call it "steam boat". In Vietnam, it's lẩu. Conveyor belts were meant for the simmering soup.

The setting for the simmering soup meal

This is family eating at its finest. At the center of the table is a metal or clay pot that rests on a heating element. Inside the pot is a soup broth, carefully regulated to poach, simmer, or boil. At home-cooked meals, the table is filled with plates that tower with piles of thinly-sliced meats, various vegetables, eggs, and noodles. The ingredients, both of the broth and of the items to be cooked in it, are different from region to region. But one thing remains the same. Each of these are plunged into the pot and cooked right there at the table. The cooked ingredients are ladled out into individual dishes and wolfed down. As the ingredients cook, the broth gets richer and more flavorful. While sushi isn't supposed to be wolfed down, this kind of food most certainly is.

In a typical restaurant, you and your kin may have wolfed down everything at your table besides the napkins, ladles, and plates. You're left to suffer moments of idle taste buds. You wait endlessly for a server to pass near your table to deliver more ingredients from a cart, or to take your order so you can wait some more. Waiting for food completely defeats the experience. The conveyor belt solves the problem of idle taste buds. Everyone grabs whatever they fancy as it passes by. It's a veritable belt-driven cornucopia.

Saigon has a chain of conveyor belt lẩu restaurants. To the best of my knowledge, it's a Vietnamese enterprise, although there is at least one affiliate restaurant in Singapore. We dropped in there for their fixed price, unlimited food buffet. I didn't know exactly what kind of restaurant it was until I recognized the simmering soup pots sunk into recesses in the table. Where we sat at the bar, each person got their own small pot. I ordered the mushroom. Mike and Lữ had the hot and sour. Our broths arrived, and once they reached a boil, we began to feed.

The conveyor belt brings the goods

When eating simmering soup, I find there's a certain order to the procedure. The first ingredients I grab are the things that cook the longest, like carrots and corn. Also, I like to grab things that give the broth good flavor, like chives, seaweed, and wafer thin slices of fatty beef. By this point, I'm ravenous, so I want something that cooks quickly and fills me up. I might hold a shrimp in the boil, long enough to cook through without turning to rubber. Same with squid. Then I'll throw in a nest of noodles. Once the noodles are perfect, I pick them out and place them in a bowl, and drizzle some broth on top. While I chew on that, I dump in dumplings, chuck in some chicken, or toss in some salady greens. Fish out some fish. Mash in some mushrooms. Egg an egg into the boil. Steak a claim on... well, you know where this is going. By the time I start feeling full, the carrots and corn are just about done. I wash the last few bites down with a bowlful of the richest broth in the world. Now that's a meal.

When you're sharing a hotpot, there are a couple common courtesies to follow. Keep your own chopsticks out of the communal pot. There will be a set of cooking chopsticks that you use to snag food. You can cook a small piece of food, like a shrimp or dumpling, by dipping it in the broth with your ladle; just don't bring the ladle to your mouth. When you pull your ladle out of the broth, make sure not to drip a trail back to your bowl. Try to match the pace of everyone who is eating. Be courteous about the ingredients; there might be a few, particularly shellfish, that other people don't want in the pot until the end. Finally, the simmering soup is a time consuming meal. You'll be there for a while. The point is to spend time eating with the family. And thanks to a conveyor belt, you can be sure you'll all spend more time eating together and less time waiting to eat.

The Last 24 Hours In Thailand

It's good to be back in Saigon. Back to urban hiking, rooftop lounging, and teaching guitar. But I feel a little sad leaving Thailand. It was especially hard to leave behind the the exotic, heavenly world of Phra Nang Cape. Every day was straight out of a Jimmy Buffet song. We were treated to a week of unseasonably blue skies and starry nights. We carried home unforgettable memories of paradise. The alien calls of tropical birds around dawn that reverberate from everywhere deep in the lush trees. The lazy morning sun that took hours to crawl up over the jungle-capped karsts. The one-minute stroll down the path to the white sandy beach and mirror flat emerald-blue Andaman Sea. The long-tail boat taxis waiting in the surf that are the only access this landlocked peninsula on the southwest side of Thailand.

Real Thai food
photo by Lữ Như Tiên

We spent the day lazing in the shade of a craggy karst on the southern beach, beneath rock climbers and tricksy crab-eating macaques. Sun-drunk and weary, we stumbled back to our bungalow and treated ourselves to an extraordinary meal for our last evening on the cape. A local chef dropped by carrying a rice bag brimming with shrimp, dried catfish, pomelo, basil, lemongrass, mushrooms, shredded coconut, peanuts, limes, and those ubiquitous firey Thai chilis, to whip us up authentic home cooking. A tiny woman with gold rimmed glasses and a heavy hand with the spice, she fixed up mountainous dishes of basil fried chicken, pomelo salad, fried catfish with shredded green papaya, and salty-sour tom yum soup. We feasted until filled to the gills, and still had enough left over for breakfast. With full bellies, we moseyed over for a Thai massage and ice cream before tucking into bed under a bright half moon.

I woke up before dawn, sat up under the white mosquito net that shrouded my bed, and listened to the jungle orchestra for the last time. Lữ was the next to stir, then Mike, who rallied me for a scramble up a nearby karst to check out the view, and then down into the valley to find the lagoon we had heard about in the guide books.

Phra Nang Cape

Red, mud-stained handropes snaked down the vertical path up the pitted limestone karst. The spectacular vista at the top revealed both coasts of the peninsula cradled between mountains and sea. Getting to the lagoon meant a short rappel down a wall into a muddy canyon littered with fallen trees and flittering butterflies. It looked straight out of a scene from Jurassic Park--specifically, one of the chase scenes where there's no where to run but forward. I imagined a herd of raging triceratops trampling through the canyon behind me.

The lagoon
wikitravel.org

I pressed on, and descended to bank of the lagoon. The space had craggy stalactite walls and clear water, with vines, moss, and indirect morning light that cascaded down from the rim. It was still and quiet, like a stone cathedral, except for a moment when a lone hornbill clucked and crashed through the thick palm leaf canopy. Shortly after 7 a.m., I made the climb back out, up from the lagoon and down the steep slope to the base of the karst. Around the bend, I caught a glimpse of a kingfisher with its broad, knife-like bill, before it darted into a clump of mangroves.

Back at the bungalow, we four packed up, breakfasted on our leftover feast, and marched down the path and into to the sea to board a long-tail boat to Ao Nang. The propeller kicked up a rooster tail behind us as we sped off into the waves, past sheer iron-red cliffs and impossible vertical islands, and up onto the beach where we had scheduled a van to meet us take us to the airport in Krabi.

Our van, like most touring vans in Asia, was outfitted a television and a karaoke-ready DVD player. But you'll have to bring your own microphone, since the ones in the vans are hidden by the drivers for the sake of their ears and sanity. Only once did I have the fortune to travel in karaoke style. In Taiwan, we took a weekend excursion with our class around to Hualien county on the East coast. Our bus had a karaoke machine with a wide selection of western songs. We sang until we ran out of tunes we knew, so we sang them all again.

The time between the Krabi airport and Bangkok flew by, with me passed out upright in the seat, head-back and mouth-agape before we even hit the air. We touched down and were shuttled off to a hotel, where a woman in a lilac colored dress, sitting at a lilac desk in front of a lilac wall, served us bottles of light, purple juice. We dropped off our things in our lilac-trimmed rooms and headed to the light rail bound for the weekend market in the city.

The market is overwhelmingly humongous. We had dropped in on it for about an hour on the day we left for Phra Nang Cape, but we never even scratched the surface. It can take a good twenty minutes to walk from one side to the other. The fact that people usually walk a mile in about twenty minutes should give you an idea of the enormousness of the thing. Inside the long dark corridors you'll find stacks of silk, Thai handicrafts, housewear, artisan pieces and antiques, cages of sugar gliders and other pets, and all kinds of clothing both original and knock-off varieties. Not to mention the stalls upon stalls upon stalls of food.

At the end of an evening of browsing just a fraction of the thousands of stalls, the rain began to fall. We ducked beneath a tarp, out of the rain, and tucked into a noodle stall for some stir fried wide noodles and fried rice. We grabbed a table beneath a glaring lightbulb dangling by its cord from the tarp overhead. The rainwater flowed down from the pitched tarp and collected at the edge before it could run off. The pocket of water swelled like a distended belly above the noodle cart, sending the owners into a tizzy trying to prevent the water from dumping onto their business. To add to their misery, rainwater dripped through the ridgeline of the tarp and down the central post covered in electric boxes and outlets. We watched anxiously as the cart owners stood in the flowing water and cautiously tugged rice cooker and light cords out of the sockets. When we finally got a break in the rain, we headed out into the freshly washed street and made for the subway.

We got back to the lilac colored hotel where we had scheduled our final Thai massage. After a blissful hour of having our muscles kneaded and joints yanked, Mike and I were ready to call it quits and get a good six hours of shut-eye before we had to set out for our flight back home. Lữ would have none of our nocturnal lazing about. She bounced into the room like Tigger to rally us up and out the door for happy hour between 2 and 4 a.m. at a notorious tourist magnet called Khaosan Road. But getting there wasn't going to be easy.

I've had bad taxi experiences before in Malaysia and Singapore. I hate to acknowledge the fact, but the physical clues that broadcast "I'm not a local" seem to also broadcast the message "Rip me off!" When I was in Malaysia, I watched my friends flag down a taxi, talk to the driver through the front door, then slam the door and flag down another taxi. Apparently, some of the Malaysian drivers will refuse to run the meter, in spite of signs that guarantee metered fares. The cheat comes when the drivers pretend to start the meter, drive you to your destination, then charge you 2 to 3 times what the meter would have run.

Refusing to run the meter is one scam. The roundabout route is another. In Singapore, a couple of us backpackers hired a taxi to take us to the nearby light rail station. Our driver started the meter. When we got to the station, instead of pulling over, the driver turned left, passed the station and took a right. We passed by other taxis letting out their passengers at the curb. I said to the driver, "here is good. Stop here please." But he behaved as if he didn't understand English and took another right behind the station. I pointed at the station, "no, we want to go there." He kept driving, took another right, and finally pulled over when we had taken a complete lap around the station. We had passed several taxi stands and dropoff points, and racked up an extra ten Singapore dollars on the meter. I was furious, paid the metered fare, and walked away without paying a tip.

Several times in Bangkok, we ran into taxis that refused to start the meter. As we left the lilac hotel bound for Khaosan Road, we hopped in a taxi--one of the pink ones that are supposedly well regulated. But the driver didn't start the meter. Mike used his authoritative voice, "use the meter." The driver said no. We all agreed to get out, and at the corner, when the cab stopped, I opened the door. The driver said, ok, ok, ok. Mike said, "meter?" The driver said ok. I shut my door, the taxi pulled out, but the meter wasn't running. Mike pointed directly at the dead box on the dashboard and said "you said you'd use the meter." The driver said "ok" again. And at the next corner, we all bailed. We flagged down two more taxis before we got one that would use the meter, which he used only after negotiation. We finally got into our metered taxi, and sped off into the night.

Our driver, a youngish guy with a ponytail and a scraggly mustache and goatee, blasted music and drove like he was on cocaine. He ground the gears and accelerated hard. To stop, he pulled the emergency handbrake. We almost hit a scooter, with its two unhelmeted riders. And we nearly slammed into a moving bus. In the back seat there were no seatbelts, and we seriously thought we'd never make it to Khaosan. But we did, and when we got there, there was a bumper to bumper line of cars. Our insane driver pulled into the oncoming traffic lane, tore past traffic and stumbly drunk pedestrians, and swerved back into the road within several yards of a head-on collision. The taxi pulled over to the curb. We were still alive. The meter was 100 Baht less than the guy would have charged us. Grateful to be among the living, we gave him a 55 Baht tip, and got the hell out of that car as fast as we could.

Khaosan at night is a lot like the backpacker district in Saigon. It's a party scene, and around midnight, the place is a cacophony of trance musics emanating from gaudy clubs, food and beer hawkers every few steps, and hordes of tacky locals and drunken tourists. There we were, on a quest for a bar, pushing through the multiculture crowd and hungering for the tasty objects peddled from the carts: pineapples the size of softballs and sweet as sugar, roasted bananas, heaping styrofoam plates of perfectly seasoned pad thai noodles for less than a dollar.

Fish Spa: nom-nom-nom
photo by Lữ Như Tiên

But first, we dropped into a fish spa, where we indulged in our second "massage" treatment of the night. We sat on the edge of a massive aquarium, plunged our legs into the water up to our knees, and offered up our feet to fish that feed on the dead skin. The procedure is painless. But I felt like an unbearably ticklish current of electricity had formed a cloud around my toes, soles and ankles. And that's just the physical sensation. Add the ick factor of being superficially eaten alive by fish, and you realize that you are probably in the middle of the strangest activity you've ever done. For about $66, you can have the ultimate treatment--completely submerged--a full body, all-you-can-eat buffet for the fish.

Breakdancing with a tuk‑tuk
photo by Lữ Như Tiên

We pulled our feet from the tanks just as a pack of lightly toasted Europeans plunged theirs in. The fish had not yet filled themselves with dead skin, and went to work, sending our replacements into fits. We walked out of the fish spa, and the sound of squeals faded as we were pulled into the current of Khaosan's revelers. It was not yet 3:30 a.m. A circle had formed around a troupe of young breakdancers. They danced to the music coming out of one of the nearby clubs. Aerial feats defied gravity and physiology. Intense acrobatics drew more and more people into the crowd, which filled up the street and made hard crossing for taxis and tuk-tuks. Anytime one of the small auto rickshaws found a gap in the crowd to pass through, one of the dancers took the passing cart as an opportunity to show off crazy horizontal skills.

We still hadn't found the bar that was the reason we left our lilac colored hotel. With only a few more minutes left of happy hour, we decided it was time to give up and head home, when we spotted the bar's sign overhead. We headed in. The girls ordered pints of Thailand's most popular domestic beer. Mike ordered a pint of the black stuff. I instructed the bartender how to make a shandy for myself, and we all settled down for an hour. Our thirsts slaked, we headed to the street and searched for a taxi that wouldn't try to scam us. With luck we found one immediately, who shuttled us across Bangkok, drowsy and dozing all the while.

With no sleep, we packed our bags, checked out of our lilac hotel, and arrived at the Bangkok International Airport to board our flight home. We returned to Saigon by 9 a.m. on Sunday. I spent the next two days catching up on sleep missed on Saturday night. As good as it is to be home, our homecoming had a hint that is slightly bittersweet. We padded around barefoot in the bungalow, just like back in the states, and I have to get used to wearing houseslippers again. And I have to fall asleep without the sound of the ocean, like cyclical breathing, just a few hundred yards out the window. And... there are no coconut trees either.

Cuckoo for coconuts
photo by L. Nguyen

นวดแผนโบราณ - Thai Massage

I wanted a massage. What I got was my body tied up into a pretzel and twisted until everything cracked. Such is the essence of Thai massage. The masseuse, an expert in physiology, subjects your body to heavy pressure on muscle groups, extreme stretches, and the satisfying snap of sinovial fluid as your joints are pulled to the point of popping.

The best reason to get a Thai massage in Thailand is the price. At home, a real Thai massage in a spa starts at around 45 dollars an hour, but can run in the hundreds. Granted, the cost of a ticket to Thailand will substantially offset your savings at the masseuse. But if you happen to be in the neighborhood, you can get a whole bunch of back-crackingly fine massages for pennies to the dollar. In Bankok's tourist district, an hour massage sets you back about six bucks. On Pranang Cape, a touristy place with relatively inflated prices, my family and I all got worked over for a little more than eight dollars. Tonight, on our last night in Thailand, each of us has an hour scheduled for less than the price of a pizza.

Labor in Thailand is cheap, and that pushes massage prices down. Mike says the minimum wage here is five dollars. Not per hour; per day. Low income explains why massage prices are rock bottom. The masseuse makes more in an hour than minimum wage earners get in a day. The funny thing is, a human being with a specialized skill takes in less money for an hour's hard work than the fish at the fish spa for the same amount of time. Sitting with your feet submerged in a tank in which tiny river fish nibble the dead skin off of feet costs twice as much as a highly-trained masseuse. The fish make more money than the people.

This will be our fourth massage in Thailand, but only my second Thai-style. I chose an oil massage the first time, and I chose poorly. I received a light smear of scented oil, rubbed on gently like I was a chicken getting basted for the oven. However, the last minute of the massage was worth the money. The lady sat me upright and crosslegged, folded my hands over my head and put me in a full-nelson headlock. She locked her right leg around my body and twisted me to the left, and half my spine went pop-pop-pop. Then, she switched legs and twisted me the other way, and the other half of my back cracked too. That was real Thai massage.

For a real Thai massage, the masseuse uses the whole body, not just the hands, to work out your kinks. The hard ridge of the forearms, the sharp points of the elbows, the knuckles and fingertips, and even the feet, are all employed in giving you a workover from the top of your head to the tips of your toes. You're fully clothed the whole time, and the masseuse puts you in various positions that are kind if like yoga. The second massage I got was a head and shoulders only job on the beach. Although I didn't get any of the cracking of joints typical of the full Thai package, the lady worked the deep tissue in circles, working out all the knots, and it was divine. Last night we went to the parlor at the east end of Pranang Cape, took adjacent mats on the floor, and enjoyed an hour of sensational bliss from top to bottom. And tonight, I have to say, I'm quite looking forward to being tied up and twisted on my last night in Thailand.