When the Going Gets Weird, the Weird Turn Pro. in Hanoi

More on Hanoi soon but firstly let's get down to what makes its food scene truly unique - it gets weird, real weird.

Dog meat is a special occasion dish, cat is the healthy option, semi developed duck foetuses are a breakfast item and pigeon,

frog

and eel soup are comparatively quite normal.

Snail soup is a much loved breakfast choice.

And snails fished out of their shells, using a pointy little metal implement, get dunked in a fish sauce, kumquat, chilli, ginger and kaffir lime concoction for a tasty pre-dinner snack.

Even drinks get a bit weird. Take a raw egg, whip it and pour it over the top of your coffee for a ca phe trung - a speciality of Hanoi.

But that's not the half of it. Over a thousand years ago a man rescued the king's daughter from a king cobra and rejected the king's offer of half of his land instead requesting that his village be recognised as the snake village of Vietnam, given snakes were the village's bread and butter. To this day snakes are still the village's bread and butter with 80% of it still involved in the farming, capturing and serving of the reptilian delicacy.

After reading too many articles and watching episode upon episode about the experience that awaits you in Le Mat village it was the one key goal of our time in Hanoi. We arrived at The Hung Snake Restaurant for lunch and what ensued was one hell of a strange affair.

Thuy met us out the front of the restaurant and immediately pointed out the finger his dad had lost to a cobra bite. His dad then promptly fished out a cobra from one of their little hidey holes whilst Nicola did the calculations as to whether a dash up the stairs or just streaking down the road was her best method of escape.

Thuy then took us upstairs to watch our selected cobra meet it's fate. First the still beating heart was cut out, its blood poured into a cup and off came the head (still snapping and writhing around in the bucket). Then the stomach was expertly extracted and the bile drained into a bottle of rice wine. What was left of our little pal was then taken out into the kitchen.

WARNING: the video is a wee bit graphic (but that's why you should want to watch it)

It was then time for a couple of pre-lunch aperitifs. As the man, the still quivering heart was all mine. Make me strong.

Then it was a shot each of the blood mixed with rice wine and then about four shots of the bile with rice wine. Better than they sound but really that's not hard is it.

Then came course after course of snake-centric dishes.

In no particular order or preference was egg and snake soup, snake congee, boiled snake, grilled snake, sauteed snake, crushed snake bones with rice crackers, snake spring rolls, snake bits wrapped in la-lot leaves, snake offal with pineapple and sticky rice infused with snake fat. The bones and offal were the picks of the bunch.

Shots of rice wine aged with an entire king cobra (venom and all) and some sort of root kept the weirdness going.

After lunch we went down into the kitchen to play with a bamboo snake and marvel at how normal fishing a snake out of a bag of thirty was to Thuy. 

It was an experience for the ages and one the grand kids will be sure to hear about. Hopefully we'll be back for a king cobra one day. Until then we'll feast on some pretty bizarre, sort of twisted memories.

At least we didn't have dog meat hey mums...

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I See a White Chicken and I Want It Painted Black - Sa Pa

Another overnight train and again it was worth it. 

We arrived in Sa Pa to 360 degree views of stunning emerald green rice terraces, went on a life changing trek through various hill tribes and soaked our weary bones in one of the region's famous herbal baths.

CORRECTION. We saw f all for four days due to persistent mist/clouds that you could literally watch roll past your window, rain a bit heavier than a drizzle fell for about 72 hours straight and it was cold. So f*cking cold. 

We're told there's a nice view there.

The temperature got up near 8°C a couple of times and we remarked on how much "warmer" it felt. Travelling with just a single pack we are not prepared for this kind of weather, we're hardly prepared for temperatures below 20 let alone close to zero. Oh yeah, and it snowed. In Vietnam it snowed. 

So the trek was off and we instead had to drink red wine and stay warm in our room. It was a challenging few days.

This was our view for five minutes.

And this is what we could see for the rest of our time in Sa Pa, minus five minutes.

There is, however, always one saving grace in Vietnam - food. We ventured away from the tourist zone (shock horror) and found a strip of simple restaurants roasting whole suckling pigs and a range of skewered meats and veggies. Most importantly, they had ga den on the menu - the elusive black chicken. Despite attempts by the waitress to point us in the direction of the normal chicken we were presented with this little baby.

Super moist and fatty, a little bit gamey and 100% delicious. The bird was all it's clucked up to be.

And finally, we may have inadvertently had dog sausage. We picked a sausage off the rack and what came out cost about four times what you'd expect to pay for a sausage, had a strange astringency to it and Nicola now howls at the moon before going to sleep... Woof woof.

Saigon for Christmas, Welcome to Viet Nom!

One of the harsh realities of travel is that places change and quite often it's not for the best, at least not for us.

We were in Saigon two and a half years ago and whilst we were only staying 100 meters from one of the city's main attractions - Ben Thanh Market - we were still able to find a cheap beer in a dingy dive bar and an even cheaper soup close by. However unfortunately for us (but fortunately for the polo/loafer types) that dive bar now has a sign, a menu in English, staff wearing uniforms and it's now normal for foreigners to stop and eat there whereas before we got looks of check out those guys, they're out there!

Those tiny centers of sanitation that previously existed have now expanded and connected and the centre is now clean enough for the people that thought it was too grimy before and not dirty enough for the people who once loved it for what is was.

Our first 24 hours was spent revisiting some old favourites from last time around:

Banh Xeo

The Lunch Lady

Duck Congee

It was at that point that we realised that maybe we'd changed a bit too and would have to push outside of what we knew and loved from last time.

In amongst the following little beauties we also accumulated a couple of good food related anecdotes.

Goi Du Du

Banh Beo

Banh Da Xuc Hen

Bun Bo Hue

Our Christmas lunch of half a suckling pig and some pumpkin flowers cooked in a veggie patch full of garlic also included a plate of conical shelled snails served in a coconut and lemongrass sauce. 

We spent the first half of the plate trying to work out which end to suck the snails from and then when we'd finally worked that out, spent the next half trying to get over the trail of stringy snail slime that pulled out of the shell like melted cheese on pizza. Mmmm, yum yum....

We searched far and wide for deep fried Elephant Ear Fish with rice paper rolls in Chau Doc only to receive strange looks and laughs. We'd even downloaded a photo to our phone and were marching in between restaurants pointing to it maybe just a bit too exuberantly. We finally found it in Saigon and would've been pleased enough with the dish but this was dinner and a show.

Our waitress took it upon herself to individually create and wrap each roll for us until it got to a point where it was just plain uncomfortable but then took great pleasure in ripping the head off the fish and placing it in the empty Saigon Export vase. Home decorators take note. Not only does it look great but it keeps the house smelling fresh and fishy.

And having spoken about it for far too long, after a couple of beers I determined it was time to have Hot Vin Lon - the semi developed duck foetus that is so highly prized in this part of the world. We sat down and I ordered through Nicola trying to say, "You just get one and I'll have a little bit". Wrong. Nice try but we're in this together.

It wasn't really that weird to be honest. You break a small hole in the top and suck out the eggy broth, break away some more of the shell and eat the yolk (which consumes most of the space within the shell) and then nibble on your tiny duck foetus - the minuscule rubbery breast and crunchy skull remind you of what you're eating. We've worked out that next time we need to have older Hot Vit Lon as there wasn't enough foetus about our duck foetus. Job half done.

Other highlights were the banging Christmas Eve party that that our hotel put on.

Heading back to our first beer stop in Saigon from last time - the opulent Rex Hotel - and aside from realising that it had also changed for the worse we had to pay about $22 for two beers. That's half our daily budget and approximately 1000% on what you pay in a restaurant down at pleb level. But it was all worth it for the photo.

My Christmas miracle - watching a pair of Hornbills fly past our window. I've spent almost a week in the jungle since we hit SE Asia and seen four Hornbills total flying in the distance. I shouldn't have bothered. I should've just looked out my window in f*cking Saigon and watch them fly right through the dead centre of the city.

And stopping for beers as the rain bucketed down.

The lowlight of Saigon was the War Remnants Museum. Aside from dealing with the masses making comments such as this, "Don't bother reading anything hunny, just look at the pictures." - because sh*t, you wouldn't want to learn anything would you - the museum is a lesson in the lengths people will go to to get what they want. The stories that were fabricated to brainwash the world and the methods that were used to force the desired outcome left us both, literally, speechless. 

The Vietnamese sometimes get a bad rap with some people saying that they're too hard and all they want to do is juice you for every cent you're worth. Spend a few minutes surveying the photos of the innocent victims whose lives have been ruined by Agent Orange and Napalm and you'll soon reach the conclusion that the Vietnamese people could be the biggest arseh*oles on the planet and they'd have just reason to be so.

And that was Saigon. A mixture of disappointment, new finds, great noms, too many techno Christmas tunes and sadness.

Mae Hong Son According to Nicola

There are two reasons as to why my heart is no longer whole since leaving the incredible Mae Hong Son - a beautiful town in the North West of Thailand, super close to the Burmese boarder.

The first is simply because it is my favourite place in Thailand and the feeling of bliss that it instilled in me was unprecedented. We arrived after two days of rafting and were looking forward to a shower and a bed. We stumbled upon our best accommodation so far - a simple bungalow in a loving family's backyard, surrounded by the neighbours' banana and coconut trees. 

It had a fridge. Our excitement was barely containable (after being on the road for so long it really is the small things that get me excited... A fridge is one of those things. As is sawtooth coriander, but that's another story!)

Sitting outside on our patio in the sweltering heat we decided it was beer time, so the errand boy was sent off to procure the goods. He returned with this bounty... A bottle of Thai rice whiskey costing $3, some fried crickets for $1 and three Chan cigars costing $0.15. 

We would sit each evening afternoon (who am I kidding!) with booze and snacks and prepare for the gecko wars that would soon commence. As soon as the sun started to disappear I'd turn on our outside light, proclaim 'I am the Gecko Queen' and watch my 10 or so faithful followers crawl out of the ceiling and get in place for their feast.

Watching geckos fight each other is nasty business - they bite the skin on each others face and then don't let go. They pull at eye sockets, forehead skin, neck fat, anything they can get a hold of. At the same time they make a horrible hissing sound and arch their backs off the ceiling exorcist style. We were much happier when they were hunting giant moth men instead of each other!

The food in Mae Hong Son is also delicious... As if I'm going to fall in love with a place that doesn't keep my stomach satisfied! From traditional Mae Hong Son style curry and stir fried ferns, to chicken head skewers, to snack size bowls of noodles in tomato broth, this place had me covered.

Add in the day and night time views around the lake,

the simple pleasure of feeding the fish in said lake,

and the stunningly kind and friendly people, and you've got yourself a pretty fekking awesome life.

The second reason why I could quite literally be missing a piece of this vital organ thanks to Mae Hong Son is because of this orgasmic bastard.

This delightful morsel is called Khao Kan Jin and is rice and blood steamed in a banana leaf. A typical Northern Thai snack, I'd been dying to try it and was stoked to have correctly identified and bought it. So much so the next night I went back for more. Half way through the second helping I remembered reading that out this way they do a second version of it which uses raw blood mixed with the already steamed rice. At the same time I also recalled that when picking my banana leaf parcels there were bright green ones and mucky yellow ones - indicating that they had probably been steamed.

I'd been going for the bright green. I'd been consuming and feeding my husband raw pig blood. Oops. Ironic in a way because we'd discussed it a few days earlier and decided not to hunt out the raw blood version because we were probably pushing our guts and immune system too far as it was. So fingers crossed there's no little piggy parasite men currently nomming my heart.

In the interest of full disclosure, if presented with another parcel of this right now I would gobble it down before you could say 'tapeworm!'