Category: Cambodia & Vietnam (2015)

Joined by our friends Richie and Andrea, who flew from Munich the night before (and were immediately introduced to the full night of outdoor chanting and an early-morning construction site that unfolded next door specially for their arrival), we had a food walk with Jodi on today’s agenda. This was the part I specifically was very much looking forward to.

Jodi Ettenberg, international lawyer turned nomadic food traveller and soup connoisseur, is the writer of The Legal Nomads travel blog and the author of “The Food Traveler’s Handbook” I stumbled upon on the Internet half a year earlier. Jodi is also an international ambassador of street food, and having learned that she was going to be in Saigon at the same time as us, I reached out to ask if there was any chance to meet up. Turned out, she was organizing food walks in Saigon, in an attempt to share with people her knowledge of Vietnamese cuisine and passion for street food. Richie and Andrea gladly signed up, and before we knew it, we were meeting Jodi on the corner in front of the KFC in District 3. KFC was not on the menu, but a lot of other places were.

Jodi turned out to be a beautiful miniature girl, who spent 3 hours walking the four of us through downtown Saigon, feeding us all sorts of local street delicacies that we would otherwise never have ventured to try on our own, and sharing stories about Vietnamese culture, people, and food. This was a most amazing evening!

We started off by eating Banh Canh Cua – a tapioca noodle soup with crab broth, crab pieces and sliced pork. The soup was delicious, and full of flavor, and the Tapioca noodles were a surprisingly yummy change to all the rice or egg noodles we tried before. Almost all soups in Vietnam come with pork – it is an essential ingredient, like noodles. Other meats, fish, seafood or anything else imaginable is added on top.

Next on the menu was Banh da xug hen – a dish from Hue, an old capital of Vietnam, which looked like a big dry rice pancake with sesame seeds on top of a mix of mini clams, Vietnamese coriander, lemongrass, chili, onions and peanuts. It did not look like much, and I honestly would have never been attracted to it by sight, but the dish turned out to be the highlight of the evening. Full of flavor and juices, tangy and spicy, it had an amazing taste that lingered in our mouths long after we wolfed it down.

After a short walk we ended up at a tiny food stall on the corner of a kindergarten (kiddies painted on the wall behind us were a very fitting backdrop to the teeny-tiny plastic stools we sat on). The second soup for the night was Hu tieu – with rice noodles and the inevitable pork, topped with fried shallots and green onions, and served with broth on the side.

We were already quite full, but the evening was far from over. Our next stop was at a small local square with a pond, a popular student hangout, surrounded by street vendors, selling all sorts of snacks. We had Banh Trang Nurong – a grilled rice paper pancake, folded in half, and filled with a mix of ground pork (what else?!), dried shrimp, a quail egg and scallions. It sounds like a lot, but the pancake was exceptionally thin, and the stuffing was merely a spread over the rice dough – all together a delicious combination and a great snack.

We continued criss-crossing through the district and walked into a big green park with a creepy past. The park used to be an old cemetery, which the city authorities at some point decided to give new life. All the foreign residents were dug up and sent home to their respective countries, and all the Vietnamese were rounded up and relocated to a more convenient spot outside of town. The resulting free space in the center of the city was landscaped into a park. By the sheer force of denial locals believe that the spot has always been a park, and put it to good use. After the sunset the park turns into a multi-faceted entertainment venue – in one corner you see people engaged in group aerobics classes (old and young, jumping together, including a couple of middle-aged ladies in what looked like pajamas, and giving the exercise a really good go), next to them others were practicing their ballroom dance moves, kids were playing by the fountain, and food stalls on the side were offering all sorts of snacks. This was where we were heading. A refreshing break from all the consumed soups and pancakes was Yaourt – a yogurt from Dalat, fresh and cold – a delightful end to the evening! Or so we thought…

Turned out Jodi had one more item on the menu for us – in the same park we went to a different corner food vendor, a lady famous for her Goi du du bo – un-ripened papaya salad with beef jerky, rice crackers and peanuts, topped with Vietnamese coriander. She only made so many plates for the day, and when they were finished, she went home. The salad was delicious, and the warm beef jerky added an unusual tang to it, but we were too full to finish our plates.

Rolling over from side to side, we said hearty good byes to Jodi, and following her recommendation decided to finish the evening with a drink in a rooftop bar of the nearby Novotel.  The view was spectacular – in the dark of the night with the lights lit all over the city you could really appreciate how massive it was. Saigon stretched below us for miles and miles around, close but distant, content in itself, allowing to be admired, but never getting too close.

The food walk and drinks with a view were a perfect ending to our stay in Saigon. They left us with good memories of this contradictory city with great and tumultuous past, uncertain present, and hopefully bright future.

What lay ahead of us was the trip up North to Dalat, a former French resort place, wine region, home to spectacular mountain views, and breath-taking scenery. At least, this was the plan. As quite often happens, real life interfered, and the next day took us in a totally different direction. But this is a whole different story…

Turned out, Saigon was not so easy to say good bye to. As luck would have it, our last memories of it were going to be not the drinks with a view, but a completely unexpected oompah band that started playing outside of our hotel at 5:30 the next morning. Judging by their sound, the band could use a bit of practice, but preferably not at our expense.  We were not planned to leave before 9, so this loud and out-of-tune wake-up call was not very welcome, to put it mildly.

Our first reaction on hearing the first loud brass accords of the band at full pitch, was “What the fuck???…” But so is Asia – annoyed as we were to lose our morning sleep, we could not help but be amused at this totally out of place happening. No idea what it was – an after-wake party, a morning rehearsal for a wedding, a Wednesday morning special, but the band was going at it in full swing for the next two hours with half hour breaks in between.

The sounds were, again, coming from the next alley, and my curiosity made me run down in an attempt to check out the band. Unfortunately, the hotel door was locked up and barricaded with a dozen scooters brought into the lobby for the night. The hotel manager was sleeping peacefully on chairs behind the reception desk with a T-shirt over his face, and I simply did not have the heart to wake him up. The mystery of the oompah band remained unsolved…

It was that same hotel manager – an extremely likable and helpful guy – who a day earlier volunteered to give us a hand with our travel arrangements. Everything seemed to work perfectly: we had the confirmation receipt (in Vietnamese) in our hands, and we were picked up from the hotel at 9 in the morning, as promised. Then the adventure started.

I have to say here, that in our experience, everything in Vietnam runs on time. If you were promised to be picked up at 7, it would be 7 sharp. If the bus is scheduled to leave at 10:15, it leaves on the dot. The Thai “ten minutes” that mean anything and can stretch from the actual ten to half a day, apparently did not make it as far as Vietnam.

A guy who picked us up walked us from the hotel to the nearby travel agency, where two girls with telephones glued to their ears gave us tickets (all in Vietnamese), and ushered us into a taxi. The taxi took us to the downtown bus depot, where we were very quickly re-potted into a mini-van together with 5 or 6 Vietnamese passengers. The mini-van delivered us to the big inter-city bus depot with a couple dozen big red buses, surrounded by a big crowd of people, waiting to board them. This relay bus transfer sounds quite complicated and elaborate, but to our amazement everything worked like clock-work, and without much effort on our part we were gently herded off into the right direction at every place of transfer.

We must have looked lost at the big bus depot, for the official-looking guy walking around the area, came up to us, asked to see our tickets, and reassuringly pointed out to a nearby bus, repeating “fifteen minutes” several times in broken English. Even though all signs on the bus were in Vietnamese, none of them resembled Dalat, and we started getting slightly worried.

Next time the official guy was passing by, we gently tugged at his sleeve, and made an attempt to communicate.

– This bus,” we said, pointing out to the one he identified to us earlier, “is it going to Dalat?”

The guy’s face registered surprise, he double-checked our tickets, and said:

– “No, no – Can Tho! But is good. Good bus!”

He kept pointing at the bus, though, and the numbers on the ticket matched those on the bus, so we figured this Can Tho must be another name for Dalat in Vietnamese. After all, it used to be a French city, so maybe there were two names to the place.

In exactly 15 minutes the bus pulled over at the depot entrance, we presented our tickets to another uniformed official, our luggage was thrown in, and we took our assigned seats inside. The bus started at 10 sharp, just as was indicated on the tickets. It also had free Wi-Fi! For the first fifteen minutes of the trip we were busy logging in and admiring this technological advance, so when the conductor came to check our tickets, we were already well on the way. Yes, the Vietnamese long-haul buses have conductors, travelling with them! They announce the pit stops and destinations, distribute the complementary water (each ticket comes with a small bottle of water and a disinfection towel), and make sure the TV plays the best of Vietnamese shlagers for passengers’ pleasure throughout the trip.

The conductor was the second person who did not share our belief in Dalat being the destination of the day. He kept saying Can Tho, Can Tho, and after about ten repeats our story about it being the Vietnamese pronunciation of Dalat started to wear quite thin. We finally decided to solve the mystery, fished out the map, and pushed it in the conductor’s face, pointing at Dalat, located about 300 km North of Saigon. The conductor shook his head, looking at us as if we were a bunch of retarded children, and pointed out to a place on a map about 300 km South of HCMC, which, was, indeed, called Can Tho. That caused the second big collective “What the fuck?!…” of the day.

Ok, we had to accept it: we were on a wrong bus. And we were going in a wrong direction.  All we could do was make the best of it.

We quickly regrouped and decided to spend the 5 hours on the bus reading up on our unintended destination. We were going down South into the Mekong Delta and were intent to enjoy it.