Vietnamese Food
Trip Start
Nov 16, 2007
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10
20
Trip End
Jan 14, 2008
Chau Doc,
Vietnam
Thursday, December 6, 2007
We weren't able to drink the tap water anywhere on this trip (since Japan), which is pretty unusual for us ... reminds me of traveling in Mexico as a kid. We bought a neat gadget called a "Steri-pen" that sterilizes drinking water using UV light. It's quick and easy, saves on plastic bottles, and I only got sick one time briefly. I still don't know if it was the hot HOT Cambodian peppers or something else.
The meals in Viet Nam were very inexpensive, even at posh restaurants
Green mango salad - delicious!
. We paid between $7 and $23 (for both of us) for all of our meals, including beer. Of course, $7 = 112,000 Vietnamese dong (VND), so it was very difficult to remember or figure out how much things cost. Keeping track of many different currencies was pretty tough - while we were there it was approximately 117 Yen:$1; 16,000 VND; 4,000 Cambodian Riel; 40 Bhutanese Ngultrum (tied to Indian Rupee value); and 33 Thai Bhat. I relied heavily on Bernd, for whom mental arithmetic and memory of numbers is second nature. I felt like a total idiot half the time. Other than in Bhutan, where the locals are very poor but they cater to wealthy tourists (can't blame them, we were happy to contribute to the local economy) and Japan, everything in SE Asia was very reasonable and often dirt cheap.The Vietnamese really like their beer and make some pretty good varieties - all light lagers, but fairly tasty. We also enjoyed lots of fresh coconut, mango, watermelon, pineapple, and mandarin/orange juice and shakes, smoothies, ice cream, etc. Yum ... we'll miss those. Bernd also enjoyed the Vietnamese coffee; I can't handle the caffeine in regular coffee, so had to go without most of the time, as even the fancy hotels and restaurants rarely served decaf. Tea was always available and good.
We saw some amazing things that people eat in Viet Nam, meaning they eat almost anything and everything. One problem is fishermen using electric shock to kill fish
Pho at 6 AM
. It's illegal, but they still do it. Many fishermen have moved to Cambodia and fish are disappearing. Vietnamese eat bats, horse, dogs, snakes, rats, insects, and many other grosser animals. They also eat every part of each animal. I'm not sure where they get the dogs, as there are millions of them everywhere - tolerated and/or loved as pets. One day in the Mekong delta, our guide stopped to buy rat meat - a delicacy his uncle loves. He quickly pointed out that these are rice paddy "vegetarian" rats - they would NEVER eat dirty city rats. We had no idea these would be live rats that they selected, killed, skinned, and gutted on the spot ... in ~3 minutes flat. Whew. He invited us to try some at a restaurant, but I couldn't quite bring myself to do it. (I'm generally pretty adventurous and tried guinea pig in Peru, but didn't care for it.) We did have horsemeat once, which was quite good.
