Two Margaritas

My arrival in Hanoi was not as smooth as I might have liked. My flight from Danang was delayed by three hours. The hotel who had promised to pick me up from the airport didn’t show. I arrived at the hotel at 11pm and they didn’t have a room for me. They did, however, have a room at their ‘sister’ hotel. The sister hotel was being renovated such that whilst water and power were in dubious supply, loud drilling noise and dust were in constant supply. And I had to fight for the privilege of leaving the next morning. I re-established myself eventually but my good humour was rattled.

Every guide to Saigon speaks of the wooonderful colonial hotels which have just faaaabulous interiors and bars which don’t just serve drinks, but are historically significant in and of themselves. Having installed myself just down the road from the Rex, apparently famous for having hosted American brass during the war, I betook myself to the rooftop cocktail bar for a drink, well-earned, in my opinion, and a snack. I found, to my disappointment, that the heyday of the Rex had passed. I should have known: any bar in Vietnam which has bratwurst on the bar snacks menu is a little suspect. The sound of ice against cocktail shaker cheered me no end and I could have drunk fourteen more margaritas but still… even with a fibreglass elephant in the background, this was not the post-colonial drink of my dreams.

Fast forward to my last night in Saigon. I had a plan and that plan was to eat at a swanky Vietnamese haute cuisine type number. Everything else in Saigon is shut on a Monday night and so was dinner option number one. Fortunately, I had been tramping around town all day and so had scoped out the B-List. Somehow, and I fear this is not entirely to my credit, I wound up spending my last night in South East Asia on a Tex-Mex jamboree. Plenty of time for breakfast pho and swanky Viet-lunch tomorrow.

Anyway, La Cantina screamed Tourist! Expat! Margarita! When I arrived, I was the only one in the restaurant upstairs. Orange couches, no small talk. My entirely excellent margarita arrived fast and so did tortilla chips and loads of salsa loaded with onion and garlic. I had a pang of Newtown nostalgia when the baby burrito, all cheese and beans, hit the table with a hearty, wholesome, leaden thump. Is Guzman y Gomez licensed yet? And why not? All that place needs is a few more tables and readily available Coronas and margaritas. Back to HCMC. I had vetoed sushi as a dinner option earlier in the evening on the grounds that raw fish on the eve of a long haul flight is not a good idea. This sensible approach fell by the wayside when I was faced with ceviche on the menu. Glorious, glorious, ceviche! And jalapenos, in this land of birds-eye chillies! Of course this warranted another margarita. Note that the martini glass full of ceviche is smaller than the margarita glass full of margarita.

I got excited by my coaster and took a picture of it. Instead of treating me like the crackpot who takes photos of coasters, as she would have been entitled to, the waitress brought me a box of coasters to go. Splendid.

As I soaked up my margarita, I realised that there is a nexus between Tex-Mex food and Vietnamese food. The marvellous combination of lime, tomato, coriander, onion and chilli (with or without coconut) shared by the two cuisines mandates all culinary intersections. Whensoever I should make my way to Mexico, I pledge to eat Vietnamese food. And drink margaritas.

Best non-smoking ad ever

Ho Chi Minh City, where the air you inhale tastes like daisies.

Choose your own epitaph

My arrival in the narrow land of my birth is, all of a sudden, imminent. I hit the tarmac of Britannia on the 11th of July, as a matter of fact and I am muchly looking forward to some interaction with my long lost human peers. I am also, however, eagerly awaiting the chance to renew my relationships with the dogs of this world. Since my arrival in Asia, I have been a little reluctant to get too friendly with the local canine population, mutts and mongrels the lot of them. My reluctance can be explained in one word: rabies. I was ambushed when cycling near Chiang Saen in the north of Thailand by a pack of overfriendly dogs. It was close to twilight but I’m sure there was a little frothing going on in the glistening fang area. Certainly, maniacal rays glinted from bloodshot eyes. Numerous encounters of this ilk have rattled me.

It is the human tragedy that we cannot, except in extreme circumstances, determine the means by which our mortal mosquito coil will burn out. It is of course possible to take some steps to reduce the likelihood of certain modes of exit. Preventative health. Stopping smoking will cut down the chances of lung cancer and emphysema, for instance. (Here, the nicotine-free author pauses to inhale deeply, clearly, and not a little self-righteously.) Similarly, avoiding getting bitten by rabid dogs will reduce your chances of dying a frothy, painful and extremely undignified death.

Lord knows I have availed myself of many opportunities to act in an undignified fashion. But to die in such a fashion? Jamais! Imagine if one of my poor grief-stricken little sisters had to hack into this blog (no need right now) and post a notice reading: ‘The Pike Family regrets to inform you that Catriona was bitten by a Rottweiler poodle cross outside the Post Office in Hanoi. Unfortunately, this dog was rabid and so, briefly, was Catriona. She died as she lived. Etc.’ Would you even believe this? Nice girl, died of rabies. Shame, really. Would you think of me and guiltily swallow a sad snicker every time your egregiously hungover self started to intone on the curative powers of the hair of the dog that bit you? Would you be able to think of me as anything but a rabid feminist/gourmand/partisan of the mangosteen/lush/bookworm? Would this bring me posthumous gravitas? No! I would be forced to whimper like a kicked cur in the corner of the dingiest doghouse the sky has to offer in perpetual bloody purgatory. And of course all the rumours propagated by that bloody Alighieri about purgatory would turn out to be true if I happened to shuffle through the gates with a dog bite on my calf and froth still settling on my chin.
I do know that there is a widely available rabies shot which, if administered within two hours of a nip, will ward off doom. I would still rather avoid this. As far as I am concerned, lining up for a rabies shot is tantamount to an extremely overfamiliar slow dance with death. My death-drive has been weakened by the heat. Rabies is my primary concern, but mange and all manner of fleas are also on my mind, as are good old-fashioned dog-bites. I have felt sorely compromised in withholding demonstrations of my love because, to generalise, the dogs of South East Asia are not showered with affection. The pampered pug-uglies and yapping pedigrees of Rushcutter’s Bay are not what the proverbial they mean when they talk about being treated like a dog. The dogs around these parts are much put upon – deprived and forlorn and neglected. Their insecurities are understandable. After all, you can order dog for dinner. If you pat at them, they snap. If you throw a stick and there’s more than one dog around, you’ll start a fight. If you make silly barking noises at them, they (and their owners) look at you like you’re off your rocker and then snap.

Whilst I understand that the British Isles are not 100% rabies free, I think the odds swing a little better in my favour over that side of the world. Once I clear the pack of sniffer corgis at Heathrow, I’ll be accosting the first British Bulldog I see. I might even have to go to a park and impersonate a barmy Brit for an afternoon, talking to the dogs and ignoring their owners. I suppose too the change of scene will allow me to befriend chickens – similarly off limits for the last few months. Not being a poultry fancier, this is less exciting.

More pedestriana

Put your best leg forward when you cross the road in Hanoi.
That’s because this is what a break in the traffic looks like.
In ridiculously picturesque Hoi An, on the other hand, it more a case of the blind leading the blind.
So picturesque is Hoi An, as a matter of fact, that even the signs warning the hapless away from death by electrocution have a certain charm.

Pho fur or Faux Pho?

As prefaced a few days ago, I took the PHO CHALLENGE in Hanoi a few days ago. How far can you go on three bowls of pho (and a pain aux raisins)? The answer is, a long, long way. In the past, I have, I confess, been a little reticent about ordering pho because I have had pronunciation issues. Is it ph-oh, as in, ‘I wish that little pho and pho over there would quieten down’? Is it ph-urr, as in, ‘Egad, sir, that is a devilish pho you cast on my good reputation’? Or, again, ph-ah, as in, ‘Do, re, mi, pho, so, la, ti, do’? These vowel sounds, I can now inform you, are open too wide to pass muster. My friends, I summon the schwa and exhort you all to engage in the great Australian sport of vowel squashing. To get a fabulous bowl of noodle soup, call for ph-er, rhymes with, the, as in ‘She was askin’ pho trouble.’

Onwards then. Pho is reason to sing the praises of a good chicken stock. As I’ve been eating alone, I’ve been humming small songs of tribute to the stockpot. All the pho stocks I’ve eaten have been chicken-based with plenty of onion thrown in. The best have had lots of star anise and coriander root and ginger added to the mix and have brought tears to my eyes. Basic pho involves poaching rice noodles in stock and chucking them in a bowl with some sort of protein and some chopped spring onions, dredging the lot with stock and serving it all up. Good pho has poached bean shoots, lots and lots of coriander and garlic chives, a bowl of greens on the side and plenty of lime wedges.

Breakfast pho ga
Chicken pho for breakfast at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant. This was the pho of the day, even if there were no accompanying greens. Aromatic stock,plenty of herbs, excellent condiments (pickled garlic…) and good squishy noodles. It provided me with the fortitude necessary to admire the lines of the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum.
Ah, totalitarian architecture.

Lunch pho

I perched on the pavement and had tofu pho for lunch. I ordered this with extra tomato and it arrived with a bowl full of intriguingly bitter greenery. Alas, the tofu pho wasn’t much chop. The stock tasted of chicken bones and tomato soup out of a can, the tofu resembled upholstery foam in texture, taste, and appearance, and the noodles were overcooked. This is a shame because the best pho I have eaten in my entire life was a tofu and tomato number.
I ate this at the markets in Sapa, in the mountains in the north of Vietnam. I didn’t need to wait to see the chook being hauled out of the stock-pot as I was slurping away to know that there was nothing vegetarian about this soup. If you look closely, you can see the plateful of innards I could have elected to have in my soup. This is the Ur-pho (try saying that out loud). Freshly fried tofu, handfuls of greenery, outstanding stock. Oh my, would that word could wield the matter. I fumble for superlatives. How good was it? Firstly, it was a little chilly in Sapa and as I started to eat, steam fogged up my glasses. The glasses went; the eyelashes did not bat. Secondly, this bowl of soup has twice figured in my dreams.

Dinner pho bo
I moved to pho with brisket at another hole-in-the-wall. This was good, workaday pho. A strong stock, decent noodles, lots of herbs, and no weird bits hanging off the slices of brisket. I suspect that one encounters a truly excellent beef pho if one braves more weird cuts of meat. There were crowds outside a pho bo joint down the road. I joined them until I got to the menu and had an attack of squeamishness when I realised that I had arrived in offal central. Specials included beef heart, lots of intestines, beef penis and testicles (way beyond my budget), beef liver… Had I not had a sixteen hour train trip ahead of me, I might have discovered a cache of culinary courage. Instead, I wriggled out of the queue and grazed in slightly more mundane pastures.

Still alive

This is what boats on Ha Long Bay look like in the rain.

Scenic, non?

I came into contact with a generally very accurate adage regarding cruises when I was a naÔve lass at Wesley College: You can run, but you can’t hide. This little nugget of wisdom was administered to first year girls, aka freshettes, by senior boys, and usually accompanied by a schooner of goon and the words ‘Scull, freshette.’ Fortunately, my experience of cruising on Ha Long Bay involved neither running nor hiding but far more wholesome pursuits like lounging and kayaking and eating crab.

Here's proof that I haven’t grown an extra head and that the one I have isn’t in danger of being blown off. C’est moi, windswept on Ha Long Bay.

On this day in 2007

Today...

... I went to view the embalmed corpse of Ho Chi Minh, as one does in Hanoi. Habitual may it well be to shuffle through the mausoleum housing the mortal remains of the father of the nation, I find this nonetheless a very strange activity.
... the sun shone on Hanoi, rain bucketed down on Hanoi.
... I discovered that traffic collisions are the number one cause of child mortality in Vietnam. This is not a surprise.
... I leave Hanoi on a sleeper train bound for Hue.
... I turned down a marriage proposal from a dwarf. If the proposal was not a serious one, it was certainly delivered in earnest.
... is Franz Kafka's birthday.
... I went to the Vietnamese Ethnological Museum and wondered why there was a couple having their wedding photographs taken in the exhibition halls and the gardens.
... I ate pho for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Herpetophiles rejoice, gourmets lament

Not only did I survive two days on a not-so-leaky boat on Ha Long Bay, subsequent to the below, I found myself companions prepared to banquent on snake in Hanoi. I found companions, we made a rendez-vous, I failed to make it. Naps and navigational ineptitude have thwarted my good intentions many times in the past and this time, they arose like a hissing cobra to keep me from my destination. Should you be reading this, Leon, Cathy, - brave souls - I apologise.

As already stated, I'm not eating snake on my own. Unless I happen upon another willing party before I leave Hanoi this evening, I'm going to content myself with a far more modest gastronomic investigation. Pho for breakfast, lunch and dinner. What happens?

Rhapsody in pho to come.

Revelation

I became transfixed by a woman making strange white steamed things on a hotplate outside a café in Hanoi and stumbled in to eat dinner. My only doubt was the large bowl of chopped gristle sitting on the counter-top amongst other ingredients. Pro-culinary risk as I am, I remain somewhat averse to gristle. There was no menu in English but pinned to the wall was a review of another café which makes what I now know are called banh cuon, rice flour pancakes. Using my best sign language, I ordered a plateful, hopefully sans gristle.

Calling these pancakes is a bit of a misnomer, I think, as there are no eggs or butter involves and hence nothing cakey to write home about. Banh cuon are more like flat noodles made from fresh rice-flour batter, enriched, I discovered, with ground alabaster. They are filled with minced pork cooked with cinnamon and star anise and onion, topped with holy basil, Vietnamese mint (surprise!) deep-fried, and served with a sharp sour dipping sauce and chilli. Delightful. Clouds filled with ambrosia.

These strike me as a superior version of one of the staples of yum cha, the big steamed rice noodle rolls filled with prawns or minced veggies. Along with prawn gowgees and mango pancakes, these are the default foundation of the yum cha Pike, beloved for their reliably stodgy slipperiness. A fine point of reference, but one convincingly trumped by banh cuon.

Potential hissy fit

One of my most trusted cadres has strongly advised me to eat a cobra in Hanoi. Apparently the consumption of the cobra is feted with much ritual splendour. The bile is extracted and drunk with a shot of whiskey, if I recall correctly. I can manage almost anything on my own, but I do not think I can manage to participate in the ceremonial eating of a snake all by myself. So adamantly and carefully worded have the injunctions to eat a snake in Hanoi been that I wonder whether admission into some secret society might be at stake. In other words, I need a witness as well as an accomplice. I’m out of Hanoi for a few days and then will pass through for just a few more on my way south. Somehow, I need to mix with my peers on the tourist circuit and find a reasonable dinner partner. As to whether it will be possible to find such a one (or two or three) from a random sample of the general public, my expectations are quite low. Managing to board a plane to the same destination does not, in my opinion, automatically represent common ground sufficient to justify sharing a meal. The challenge is to find someone who passes the reasonable person test AND is amenable to the idea of eating reptiles. Alternatively, if anybody knows of a reasonable person who will be in Hanoi on Monday or Tuesday and might want to eat some snake with me, let me know. Brief character reference required.

How far out of the loop am I really?

Has Britney died? Or has the ghost of her innocence finally passed to the other side?

Thrillseeking

Being a pedestrian in Hanoi is an extreme sport. There’s a whole lot of traffic and not a whole lot of stopping. This sign, which I photographed in a little town in Scotland, would be laughed off the street in Hanoi.
Pedestrians beware, more like it. I’m proud of being an expert jaywalker. As a non-driver, I consider jaywalking to be a kind of political statement. Crossing when the lights are red, darting out into four lanes of traffic, throwing a spanner into the works at peak hour, that’s what sticking it to the man is all about. And besides, it’s an adrenaline rush. Living on the edge, it’s where you feel most alive. Right on. Yeah right. Etc.

The stakes are raised in Hanoi. There’s no cause for pedestrians to disseminate anarchy in traffic as the roads are entirely and fabulously chaotic. There are motorbikes. There are bicycles. There are people balancing baskets of fruit and chickens and snake beans. There are four wheel drives. It’s a maelstrom out there but happily it’s a fury-free maelstrom. Where’s the road rage? I’ve been honked and tooted a couple of times but neither fists nor curses have been hurled in my direction.

Nevertheless, there are many new challenges for the jaywalker schooled on the streets of Sydney. The William St Dash, one of the moves I perfected during my apprenticeship, has no place in hardcore Hanoi, nor does the Late Night Bolt Oblivious. The Macleay St Eyeball – the establishment of stern eye contact with a lily-livered driver who will not, experience tells me, dare to run down prey glaring them in the face – does have some application but only on streets where there are relatively few vehicles. What is generally needed is a slow, meditative and detached approach. Make like a feather in the breeze and float across the road. Make like a lost sheep and bleat your way through.

Pedestrian life is challenging but there are some support structures in place. There are nominal pedestrian crossings all over the place and they are marked by a fantastic variety of signs. These seem to have a negligible impact on the movement of traffic but they do serve to raise the spirits of the pedestrian community significantly.

a) Man of the city
Bowler-hatted and upbeat.

b) Disjointed chappie on the way homeRough night, what-ho.

c) Feral childrenEvacuees from Enid Blyton-land on the lam, armed with lashings of cocoa and a tuckbox full of ginger biscuits. Jolly old Nursie.

d) Loopity loop
Here, the mind and body split is clearly illustrated. My own feeling is that the mind of the Hanoi pedestrian must reside resolutely in her body in order to keep both intact.

e) When in doubt…
…Run.

f) Dapper hatter
Cruise it.

Solutions to higher education crisis

One of the things that Ezra Pound admired about Confucian societies was their respect for scholars and their long-term maintenance of civic order and stability via a set of clearly delineated ethical relationships. And the elder worship. He would have loved Van Mieu, the Temple of Literature in Hanoi. Mandarins-in-training started fronting up to study the Confucian canon, government administration, and poetry in 1076 and kept doing so until the late eighteenth century.

The name of every person who passed the Royal Exams, the Confucian doctorate, between 1442 and 1779 was inscribed on a stele which in its turn was mounted on the back of a blue stone tortoise.
Having your dissertation lodged in the Australian Digital Thesis Repository is one thing. Being held aloft by a tortoise would be something else.
The 82 steles are on display in a courtyard around the Well of Heavenly Clarity.
The clarity of the Well is obviously figurative rather than actual. To walk to the next courtyard, the Sanctuary of the Sage, you need to pass through the Gate of the Great Synthesis. I am certain I dreamed of a Well of Heavenly Clarity during the course of my thesis and had I known that one existed I probably would have jumped on a plane to Hanoi so that I could take a dip. As for the Gate of the Great Synthesis… it would have also been comforting to know that this existed somewhere in concrete form.

Anyway, Pound thought that an orderly state should be sternly governed and led by wise, obdurate, educated men. There isn’t a whole lot of overlap between my vision of the perfect state and Pound’s but I think we would both endorse the following statement, inscribed on the first stele of doctorates at Van Mieu:
Virtuous and talented men are state sustaining elements: the strength and prosperity of a state depends on its stable vitality and it becomes weaker as such vitality fails. That is why all the saint emperors and clear-sighted kings didn’t fail in seeing to the training of men of talent and the employment of literati to develop this vitality.
Why am I, a would-be member of the literati, brimful of vitality, virtuous to a fault, resigned to a life of unemployment and vagrancy? Because there’s not enough Confucianism in higher education policy. First step, funding to resurrect the tertiary sector: jobs for post-docs and ECRs of the rank of literati and dilettanti. Second step, a Well of Heavenly Clarity in every Australian university by 2010!

Hanoi Fly Girls Rock the Vote

By the lake in Hanoi the Fury. If propaganda must be posted, let it be brightly coloured, I say.