Ho Chi Minh City (Day 2) and Da Nang

(Alfred: In real time, we have just finished our five days in Hoi An so Ruairi is falling further and further behind in this blog. So it may be more a question of highlights only, and a la Premier Soccer Saturday on Network 2 rather than Match of the Day, if you get my drift. Oh, and in case you hadn't figured it out yet, this computer doesn't do accents - in Vietnam of all countries!!)

Day Two in Ho Chi Minh City was still part of the recuperation process. But we did walk a lot and saw a lot of things, as well as practising our road-crossing skills. But first ... our first Vietnamese breakfast! (Alfred: Probably a good point to mention that if you are not into food, I suspect this blog is not for you. As I personally don't eat you can rely on my contributions to avoid this topic - for the most part - so maybe just stick to the sections in italics. Just a suggestion ....). Giant buffet containing fruit, various fried rice and noodle dishes, rice porridge (come back Irish porridge, all is forgiven - this looked vile), spicy breakfast soup (which subsequently became our favourite breakfast dish), eggs cooked as you wanted them, the usual bread, croissants, bacon, sausage etc. And so on. A very welcome introduction to Vietnam!

We wandered around for a few hours, eventually ending up at the river where we sat at a tourist-trap cafe: I ate a sausage which cost me 20,000VND (75c) - an horrific price here! Martine amused herself with Birds' Nest, a white fungus health/energy drink (I kid you not) which had a small amount of real birds' nest in it (Alfred: The truth and nothing but the truth .... but not the whole truth. 0.1% of the contents was birds' nest. 'Small' he says ...). She has also developed a taste for Vietnamese cakes made - as far as I can tell - from the foam used to stuff cheap furniture that has been dyed various implausible colours (the foam has been dyed, that is, not the furniture). 

Eventually we fled into a restaurant, as much to escape the noise as anything. And here we had our first real culinary experience as this was a Chinese restaurant that served real Dim Sum. And it was fabulous! (Alfred: Yes, a posh restaurant but one that served its beer in 330ml cans. Strange ...). Then off we set again, taking in an impressive skyscraper (whose visitor deck we decided to skip in the end) and a Hindu temple dedicated to the goddess Mariamman who is associated with floods and smallpox. And then back to the hotel where we continued our (mostly futile) quest of trying to combine the technologies of my Kindle, my Android phone, Martine's new iPad and the camera.

Dinner was to be in the hotel's restaurant .. or so we thought. People eat early in Vietnam but we hadn't realised how early. Down we went a little after 9.30 and ordered a pile of food. The waiter smiled, took our order and muttered something incomprehensible that included the words 'room service' before bringing us our beers. Then, bang on ten, he told us the restaurant was closing and the food would be brought to our room!

And so it was and it was gorgeous!  Five spice pork with noodles (very good), crab and asparagus soup (good but a bit like what I would have had at home), seafood noodle soup with prawns (amazing) and squid (a little rubbery) and ... water spinach. Now we have no idea what this plant is called back at home but it is absolutely gorgeous, like a cross between spinach and asparagus, possibly the best food we have discovered since we got here (Alfred: And that is really saying something. And, if anyone had bothered asking me, I could have told them the plant is Ipomoea aquatica, also known as Water Morning Glory. But no one ever does ). And it had the most amazing fresh herb with it with a strong taste that was faintly anise-like to me (later turned out to be Thai basil). So it was a great night - I always feel getting room service food is a really decadent thing to do, so it felt like the holiday had really started!

Off to Da Nang the next morning. (Alfred: By the way, any of you - especially those not interested in food - hoping to regale yourselves with stories of chaotic airports, crazy and dishonest taxi drivers, and other similar travel-related mishaps and anecdotes, sorry: so far (Day Eight) every single aspect of travel by air, car, minibus and boat has gone absolutely flawlessly, punctually and without a hitch. And if anyone from Ryanair is reading, or any European airline for that matter, have a look at VietJet's way of doing things! We especially liked the way the stewardess gave a special separate safety talk to those of us in the emergency rows, including an admonition that if we thought something was wrong, we were NOT to open the emergency doors until told to do so by the staff!! One has to wonder what particular incident prompted that addition to the routine! ). The Domestic Terminal in HCMC was very posh and absolutely huge! They had interesting stuff for sale too - loads of fresh fruit (Martine bought what she thought was a custard apple but it turned out to be what is called a milk apple and VERY messy to eat!!), the usual duty free and a wide range of jade, birds' nests and some kind of what looked like dried chillis that were incredibly expensive (I mean hundreds or even thousands of euro) - if anyone can recognise them from the rather blurred photo below we would love to know what they are!

Da Nang is not a great tourist destination so it was a good look at a fairly typical Vietnamese city. The hotel, the An Nam, was lovely: the staff had enough English to cope but not much more than that, the room was lovely, bathroom clean and bed exceedingly comfortable and huge (Alfred: Actually, I'm going to butt in here on this one. So far all the beds have been huge. This in a country of - let's be honest - quite diminutive people. At first we thought it was because they had overestimated the size of foreigners but this hotel in Da Nang is probably as much for Vietnamese as it is for tourists. So the only answer is that the Vietnamese believe you need to be pampered from time to time. We can so relate to these people!). The only thing is that the windows were all sealed shut! (Alfred: Or maybe they kick like crazy when they sleep?)

We wandered around a bit but had no real experiences worth repeating until we eventually decided to eat in a street cafe. Now that was an adventure ... but it will have to wait for the next episode. 

Can't do captions due to ... never mind. Photos are:

1.  Wierd blurred expensive somethings in airport

2.  HCMC streetscene outside restaurant on first night (from previous blog entry)

3.  Inside restaurant (from previous blog entry)

4.  Diminutive waitress (from previous blog entry)

5.  Cocktail list in Da Nang (or maybe I am just behind the times in cocktail titles).