Foodie Corner: Street Food

Vern.  Hanoi, Vietnam

There are many places in the world in which food purchased from street stalls is bound to cause stomach issues, sometimes for both locals and tourists alike.   In Vietnam, however, the safe, simple and delicious dishes prepared and served by roadside vendors is one of the country’s highlights.

Vietnamese “street food” is so popular and so much a part of the culture that tour operators offer excursions focused entirely on sampling these local staples. 

As we’ve journeyed from south to north through the country, we’ve made a point of eating at street stalls almost daily.  It’s not just the food – the ambiance is part of the adventure as well.  You’ll normally sit on tiny little plastic stools at a low plastic table, fitting right in with the local crowd… with the possible exception that taller westerners either need to splay their knees or keep them up around their chin.  (A little pre-meal yoga stretching might not be a bad idea.)  It’s fun, it’s good and it’s cheap. 

“Pho”, the ubiquitous Vietnamese noodle soup, is considered by many to be the country’s national dish.  While it can be found in many upscale restaurants, street side establishments can have equally tasty varieties.  We discovered that pho in Saigon is generally different from pho in Hanoi.  We’ve been informed that the recipe for the broth is a guarded family secret, whether north or south.   Be sure to try both Pho Bo (beef) and Pho Ga (chicken). 

On a motorcycle tour of Saigon, we were introduced to Bhan Cuon, essentially a rice roll filled with ground pork, mushrooms and spices dipped in fish sauce with chilli peppers.  Delicious!

Today we tried the specialty of Hanoi:  Bun Cha.  This is served as a “some assembly required” noodle soup.  You’ll be given a bowl of broth containing vegetables and pork.  Fresh cilantro and mint are served on the side, along with a plate of soft vermicelli noodles.  Chopped garlic and chilli peppers are available to spice up your dish to your personal taste.

Any one of the above meals will cost you in the neighbourhood of 30,000 Vietnamese dong, which is about $1.50 US.   Filling your belly with tasty local cuisine for less than two bucks… it doesn’t get better than that.

Motorbikes in Vietnam!

Vern & Carolyn. Motorbikes, motorcycles, scooters - whatever you call them, they are everywhere, in all shapes and sizes.  Most foreign tourists are overwhelmed by them, even scared of them.  But because we have just spent a month in India's insane traffic, nothing here in Vietnam phases us!

The population of Vietnam is about 92 million, and there are about 42 million motorbikes.

In Saigon, we were very happy to hop on a 4-hr motorbike tour of the city, and after seeing how easily the traffic flowed around each other, never really exceeding a steady 30 km/hr, we've now rented our own bike for 2 weeks in Hanoi (see photos below).


For your amusement, here is the review of the Saigon motorbike tour we wrote for Trip Advisor:

Superb:  Not Your Average Tour!

We were intrigued by the idea of a motorcycle tour – but we didn’t quite understand how it would work for our family of three (surely we wouldn't all be expected to ride the same bike?!).  Turns out it was fantastic!  

 Three motorbikes arrived with a driver/guide for each of us – and while it was at first a little disconcerting to watch our child being driven away with someone we had just met, it was quickly obvious that this experience was going to be great for all of us!

We chose the night tour (too hot during the day) and it was an evening of fabulous fun, learning, and feasting.

Guides Sunny, Kien and Harry were exceptional.  Each was knowledgeable, spoke English very well, and, most importantly, they were all enthusiastic and clearly enjoyed their work.  Safely mixing in with the throng of thousands of scooters and other motorcycles on the downtown streets of Saigon was magical.

The 4-hour tour offers a unique perspective of the city.  Not only did we visit landmarks, we sampled popular Vietnamese fare at three different street venues and even had the opportunity to prepare one of the dishes ourselves before we ate it. 

Another destination was Saigon’s flower market, and armed with a "cheat sheet" of key bargaining phrases in Vietnamese, we were given some money and had to negotiate a purchase (a very useful exercise!). We also spent time at the popular pedestrian mall, asking questions of our guides and interacting with the locals (primarily to give away the flowers we had acquired, appreciated by everyone).

We’ve raved to several fellow travelers about our experience, eager to refer more well-deserved business to Saigon Adventure.  But it seems many foreigners are reluctant to join the traffic chaos on the back of a motorbike.  We can assure you that at no point did we feel unsafe.  The drivers were very conservative within the flow of traffic, and we cruised through the streets at a relaxed pace.  Having said that, just being in the middle of it all was very invigorating and exciting, and we left our night tour with more energy than we started with.

If you are looking for an experience that goes beyond the ordinary, we highly recommend joining Saigon Adventure on one of their many tours!

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And now it's almost three weeks later in Hanoi, and we are independent (and careful) motorbike enthusiasts!  Although it is quite a lot less fun when it's raining...

Tourist AND Tourist Attraction

Carolyn. All the way through India, the locals - and specifically the domestic tourists viewing the same sites that we were visiting - were fascinated with Cooper.  It's as if he is a famous celebrity, so many people asked to take their photograph with him!  He is not only a tourist, but he is also a tourist attraction.  White skin is considered to be exotic, Cooper is usually the only white kid around, and the Indian people are not shy.  So say "cheese"!!

Sometimes Vern or I were also asked to be part of the photo, but we think they were only being polite - really, they only wanted Cooper.  After the group shots, they almost always asked for another photo with Cooper alone.

The funny thing is, we had to adjust our timing at most sites we would visit (to communicate to a waiting driver).  If we thought we might take half an hour to visit a certain temple, then we also added another 10 minutes for the extra time it would take for Cooper to pose in other people's pictures.  Should take an hour?  Better make that an hour and a quarter.

Great interactions result from this exchange of a few words and smiles on camera, and we almost always feel like we've made new friends - but the extra attention can be overwhelming.  Once or twice Coop said he didn't want to leave the hotel room because he didn't want to be hounded for photos anymore.  Poor little guy.  But honestly, whenever we were out there, he was always happy and willing to participate.

Nothing like this happened in South America or Africa.  Now we are in Vietnam.  The 'Cooper as celebrity tourist attraction' phenomenon has continued a little bit.  But nothing like it was in India.

 

  








Click here to see the rest of the pictures from our world trip so far: Trip Photo Album

India

Cooper. India is many things. You can say that it is crowded, it is beautiful, it’s dirty, it’s big, it’s polluted, and that is all true. For almost the whole trip, my parents have been telling me about India, and how crowded and different it is; but we arrived in Kerala (Cochin), and it was green, pretty, and clean. While there, we went on a beautiful 2 day house boating trip on the southern India river canals (called the Kerala backwaters) and after that we visited the tea plantations (which were even greener).…and then we went to Delhi.

In Delhi, we saw dogs and cows searching piles of garbage on the streets for food. Cows were everywhere! Cows just wandering the streets with cars avoiding them, nobody cared. There were three lanes on the road with six cars across! The vehicles are honking their horns non-stop, forcing us to cover our ears several times to avoid breaking our eardrums. Our first morning in Delhi, my dad and I wanted to go out for a morning run, when it wasn’t too hot yet (33 degrees C was a cool temperature), because it’s usually 43 – 45 degrees C in the afternoon. We got out of our hotel and looked down the road, but we couldn’t see the end of it because of the ‘smoke’ obscuring the view. The air didn’t smell of fire smoke, so we asked a local and they said it was pollution. Gross. We decided not to do our run because we didn’t want the pollution in our lungs.

One of my favourite things to do here is ride in a tuk-tuk: a sun protected motor tricycle. The tuk-tuks were everywhere, more than the cars. Tuk-tuks are very loud and are the biggest polluters. The drivers of the tuk-tuks know that in the tourists’ countries, they pay a lot more money for a taxi than they do in India, so when we ask for a tuk-tuk driver to take us 1 km, they say: “300 rupees”, which is 6 Canadian dollars. But, if a local asked to go the same 1 km, the driver would say: “40 rupees”. We always bargain them down to a reasonable(ish) price, which is still more than a local would pay. 

After Delhi, we went by train to Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal. While waiting for our train, we sat in the station and observed the locals’ favourite thing to do on the train: throw garbage out the window. That part was disgusting, but when we got on the train, it was clean and comfortable (and air conditioned). The next day we went to the Taj Mahal. It was amazing. Unfortunately for us, they were cleaning the big towers around the main building (called minarets), so scaffolding was blocking some of the view, but it was still beautiful. 

Khajuraho was a very nice place, with amazing temples from a thousand years ago that are preserved extremely well. The temples are completely covered with hundreds of detailed sculptures on the outside, and it was all chiseled by hand. We toured the temples with a guide, and he showed us how to meditate inside of the temples. I didn’t really like meditating, but I think my parents liked it. 

Varanasi is the place where Hindus come to die to stop the reincarnation process. To do so, most bodies are cremated and then put in the river, but some bodies are just wrapped in cloth and put in the river whole. The reason they are put in the river is because the Ganges River is the most holy river in all of India. Every night, thousands of candles are ‘donated’ to the river for a big (and loud) ceremony of chanting and bells. One night we attended the ceremony on land in the massive crowd, and another night in a boat on the river, where we set off candles with a New Zealand family (but the wind blew all of our candles upside-down). 

Our hotel (Alka Hotel) was in the ‘old city’ part of Varanasi, which is a no cars zone. It’s a maze of alleyways that are too small to fit cars and are filled with cows, dogs, small shops, and temples. Our hotel had a Ganges River view, so we saw all of the boats going by. We saw the burning Ghats, which is the place where the dead bodies are cremated in open bon-fires and the ashes of the bodies are thrown into the river. We couldn’t take pictures on land (to be respectful to the dead), but we could take pictures from the boat. Despite the fact that it is the dirtiest water I have ever seen, the locals bathe and wash themselves in it and drink it as well (mmm… dead body flavoured water!). Weirdly, people also throw their garbage in the river, which is a strange way to reward the river of its holiness. 

After our five nights in Varanasi, we were sad to leave and go back to Delhi. When back in Delhi, we went to a modern temple (unlike the old temples in Khajuraho). The temple was much, much bigger, and all of the carvings were made with modern, mechanical tools, yet it was all still very impressive. Also in the temple, we saw a display of Swaminaryan’s life (a boy who had no fear, and walked 12 000 km by foot without shoes in India), and the display was done by animatronics. It was cool, but I think that animatronics are really creepy. Part of the exhibit included a boat ride, and it felt like the ‘It’s a Small World’ ride in Disney World.

Today is our last day in India, and overnight we are flying to Vietnam, but before we leave, we are going to the toilet museum! I don’t know why or who thought of that, but we’ll see!

Click here to see the rest of the pictures from our world trip so far: Trip Photo Album

Travel and Exercise

Vern.

Myth:  You get more exercise when you travel than in your day-to-day routine at home.

To be fair, this depends in part on your daily activities back home.  Carolyn and I were both certain that being on the road, day-in, day-out, would be a huge calorie burner.  The reality has been somewhat different:  getting from point A to B often involves a bus, train or plane, which equates to sitting on our collective butts for hours on end.  City walking tours have been great, as have the odd trekking sections of our journey.  We’ve sought out bicycle excursions, only to be foiled by lack of child-sized bikes.  My morning runs are not always possible while on the road:  I’ve been thwarted by climate, pollution, city geography and wildlife.  (The open areas around our safari camps in Botswana, for example, were extremely enticing for a nice, long run.  Until our guide pointed out that lions are attracted to moving prey, and we could hear them around camp.  That was the end of that.)  Carolyn had only a few weeks’ gym membership when we lived in Peru briefly, and Cooper gets nowhere near the amount of daily physical activity that a twelve-year old requires.

So we have come up with a different strategy.  We are indulging in fitness avoidance training, otherwise known as getting F.A.T.  Getting F.A.T. has proved far easier than other forms of activity we’ve engaged in over the years.  I have further found that my diet of new, rich exotic foods meshes perfectly with this training regimen. 

Some of you may have reservations as to this approach, but it builds character.  Pounds of it.  The end goal is to lose all remaining doubt and become uncommonly tough travelers.  (This is also known as L.A.R.D.B.U.T.T.)

At our current rate, in our remaining months on the road we are sure to continue getting F.A.T., which will result in L.A.R.D.B.U.T.T. for each of us.  Don’t look too closely at the pictures.