Thursday 29 January 2015

The Bantayan Diet

Sometimes a place is appreciated just that little bit more when getting there involves a life threatening leap from one boat to another in seas that are hardly fit for a big boat let alone the little vessel that came out to transfer us to the shore of 'main land' Cebu. 

I watched in horror from a couple of people deep as Nicola dangled over the edge of the big boat, hesitated and then jumped across to the small boat as it shifted out of reach. She hovered for an age between the boats and I think we both thought she was going for a swim. Sh*t Nix, the tablet's on your back for god's sake. She managed to walk on water and made it on.

I can confirm that she squealed. Naturally it was my fault as I wasn't there to offer any "words of wisdom". Apparently I have those.

Anyway, Bantayan, that death defying leap plus two other boat trips, a bus and a cyclo took us 40 kilometres as the crow flies to land on our next island paradise. This one even better than the last. 



But what about the Bantayan Diet I hear you ask?

Forget the Paleo diet, vegan, vego, Atkins, I Quit Sugar*, South Beach, whatever. No, no, no, this is no fad diet. The Bantayan Diet (as certified by myself, Dr Brimson) is the one for you. Coconuts, mangoes, roast pork and 1L San Mig's are the four cornerstones of my diet. 



Not only will you look great down the beach, it also tastes great and is scientifically proven to contain no calories, and is sugar, fat and alcohol free.

I mean look at the guy, don't you want to look like that?


When you do drag yourself away from your cottage's view, hanging out with Coconut Joe and really committing to that diet...


...you get to laze about on a blinding white beach like this (that's your exercise component).


Check out this endorsement from Nicola Brimson.


Another satisfied customer...

*take note Corinne, you've been doing it wrong

Monday 26 January 2015

Threshing Around in Malapascua

In what's almost a new record for us, four buses, three flights, two taxis, two metro rides and two boat trips landed us on Malapascua Island, the tropical island of your 9-5 dreams.

What is Malapascua good for?

Magical sunsets.


Beer in 1 litre bottles.


Sunshine.


Friendly beach dogs.


And diving. HEAPS of diving. On a couple of dives I saw five white tip reef sharks sleeping in a cave, sea snakes, a pygmy seahorse, innumerable lionfish and scorpionfish, juvenile moray eels, gigantic starfish,  a stonefish, clownfish protecting their miniscule young and heaps more that I didn't recognise.

Oh yeah, and on one dive I saw these guys.


Monad Shoal off Malapascua is a cleaning station that Thresher Sharks visit in the early hours of the morning looking for obliging smaller fish to clean them of bacteria. It's the only place in the world where you're pretty much guaranteed to see them and it's one hell of a surreal experience. 

We sat on the bottom for a few minutes and were about to move to another spot before two cruised by and then the two in the video proudly swum past close enough that I wish I could've paused my life at that moment and admire them for a few seconds longer. I'll take what I can get though...

Thursday 22 January 2015

Leaving Vietnam, so Hanoi-ing

Hanoi is a love it or hate it kind of city. We met people along the way that couldn't think of anything worse than another minute in the place. It's fast paced, intimidating and doesn't wait for anyone. We fell in love at first bite (and first bia hoi).

Bia hoi. Oh my what a beverage. The direct translation to English is 'fresh beer' as it's beer that's brewed the night before and served fresh the following morning. During that time it reaches a strength of 3-4% and at just 45 cents for the branded bia hoi (you truly taste the difference from the cheap stuff sold in the tourist area) it's impossible to walk past a bia hoi joint and not stop for a couple, which in Hanoi is a bookable offence anyway. 


You don't even have to use the excuse 'it's five somewhere in the world' to have one with most places having a cluster of regulars draining the freshest kegs from early in the morning. We've visited many places with strong beer cultures but Hanoi's just about takes the cake. There's no pub squash or pre-mixes here it's beer all the way and you down it like there's no tomorrow. If you need an extra kick you call over the communal bamboo tobacco bong or order a bottle of Viet vodka.


Of course no post on Vietnam would be complete without a mouthwatering set of food photos.

There were these.

Bun Ca - crispy river fish soup


Bun Moc - a clean pork broth with pork balls


Duck Hotpot - shared with a sewer rat by our feet


Bun Bo Nam Bo - beef noodles in a sweet peanutty sauce


Hahn Cuon - super delicate rice flour wontons with pork


And then there were these.

Dau Phu - deep fried tofu that's beyond crispy on the outside and light and fluffy on the inside


Bun Cha - a classic Hanoi dish of pork served in a sweet oily broth that you then add your noodles and greens to and dunk your crispy spring rolls in


Pho Ga - served from a simple little street kitchen on Hang Dieu with more pots on the go than stools. This is the benchmark by which all chicken pho should be measured and all chicken soups, broths, anything for that matter. This pho was dinner three out of five nights in Hanoi


Tang Yuan - glutinous rice balls filled with black sesame or mung bean paste that swim in a potent sweet ginger soup. Only a hundred metres up from the pho ga lady, sat in a semi circle around the serving pot, you would get presented with the night's encore 


In between bia hoi, ca phe and food stops we'd just swan around the city taking in the sights and the smells, the weirdness and the intensity, and what is by far the best Asian city we've been to and possibly the best city we've been to period. 

Coffee, beer, food and weird. All four boxes get emphatically ticked. Most of all it's the people and their no bullsh*t approach to life that we love getting swept into. 

Normally we're ready to leave a city and country in search of the next adventure. However leaving Hanoi and Vietnam has us feeling very hollow. Nicola shed a couple of tears the night before we left, such is the love we have for Vietnam. And that's a first for a woman that's the dry eye in the house when there's not a dry eye left in the house.

Monday 19 January 2015

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...

For more videos check out our Instagram - @brimnix

Wednesday 14 January 2015

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.

Thursday 8 January 2015

Ha Long Bay in Pictures

Local Vietnamese legend declares that many centuries ago a family of dragons flew down and deposited a couple of thousand huge rocks off its north eastern coast line to protect the country from the constant threat of invading Chinese ships. Those dragons saved the day for the Vietnamese with many of the ships meeting their demise within the dense network of islands that the dragons created.

Now in present day the Vietnamese are still very thankful for those dragons as every day hundreds of tourists pump thousands of dollars into the economy coming to see this true wonder of the natural world.

It's hard to put into words and capture in photos what it's like cruising through Ha Long Bay but hopefully these photos begin to do it a little bit of justice.



















We had a v memorable few days kayaking around the islands, sleeping in rooms with views that are second to none, chowing down on seriously fresh seafood and even braving a night swim despite water temps that took your breath (and balls) away.

For anyone that's interested, we went with Vega Travel who's based in Ha Noi and come very highly recommended.