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.

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

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.

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.

Hue, Where Every Day's a Sunday

People come to Hue to visit the former imperial city or the Nguyen emperors' opulent but decaying royal tombs. We found it to be a good city to just be.

The incessant drizzle and multiple layer worthy temps were quite conducive to sauntering between street side ca phe, nestled in with the men playing Chinese checkers, to a beer or some cracking local food.

The fussy emperors are to thank for Hue's food scene where Bun Bo (Pho's lesser known, spicier sibling), clams, sticky, gelatinous rice flour dishes and trai va (a fig that's unique to the region) are but a few of the stars.

Load up that Bun Bo

Com Hen - a real "huzzah" moment

Banh Nam - mmm, so appetising

The trai va at play with Nem Lui

Now might be a good time for me to justify why our posts have become quite food-centric again. Eating is never just eating in Vietnam. It's a science and an art form.

Many Vietnamese dishes incorporate five taste senses: spicy, sour, bitter, salty and sweet which then correspond to five organs: the gall bladder, small intestine, large intestine, stomach, and urinary bladder. These all also correspond to a balancing of five elements: metal, wood, earth, fire and water.

There's consideration given to five types of nutrients: powder, water or liquid, mineral elements, protein and fat and, of course, five different colours: white, green, yellow, red and black.

And don't forget the five senses: the arrangement of the food attracts the eyes, spices are detected on the tongue, sounds come from a crunch component, herbal aromas stimulate the nose and even touch is perceived when eating something with your hands.

This may all just sound like food wankery but next time you sit down to a Vietnamese feed remember a bit more thought has gone into it than your cheap cut of meat and potatoes in front of the telly on a weeknight.

We wandered around the outside of the Citadel as the throngs of tourists and $6 entry fee (geez that sounds cheap) were enough to deter us. We got enough value watching the men fish in the surrounding moat alongside a couple of Kingfishers and trying to spy whatever else was living in the water.

We also rang in the New Year in Hue. Where last year was spent downing shots of Palinka and a dodgy bottle of "champagne" whilst watching youths run amok, lighting fireworks around the Octogon (link) this one was a little more sedate drinking beers with locals who thought us cheers-ing with 'mot, hai, ba, YOOO!!' was novel until they clicked it was our New Year's Eve. From then it was all "Happy New Year! Happy New Year! Cheer!! Cheer!!" in between trying to ascertain whether Nicola was spoken for or not. It was a different kind of NYE celebration at the least.

NYE celebration dinner was a plate of snails with lemongrass and garlic as, outside of chicken and fish, oc (snails) was the only word Nix recognised on the menu.

We did (sort of) have the intention to see some of Hue's sights but after a couple of hours walking the streets we soon realised it was our kind of place to do SFA and just be part of a city where every day feels like it's Sunday. The real culture of a city or town is always in its bars and street stalls, not the tourist sites. Werd.