Wednesday dawned bright an early, helped along by the roosters, dogs, motor-boats and other early risers…
“pork belly” rice cake
Breakfast was amazing, especially when contrasted with yesterday’s! We had fresh baguette and homemade wild strawberry jam (except me, and I had a great pho style noodle soup), “pork belly” rice cake, which has layers of various consistencies of sticky rice to resemble pork belly, tapioca dumplings, gorgeous little lady finger bananas and green tea and coffee with condensed milk. Amaaazing!
Floating market
We left the lovely Mrs Ten and her family, and took the boat across to see the Floating Market. Unfortunately, it was a lot smaller than we had anticipated, with only a few boats there selling a small variety of fruits and vegetables. The big sellers seemed to be pineapples and sweet potatoes at this point, with the occasional coconut or other vegies.
Herb garden
It was interesting to see these boats though. As well as stringing the washing up across the deck, most had a small herb pot or two somewhere on the boat – obviously fresh herbs are so very important!
Rice paper factory
The next stop was to hop off the boat at a small town to visit a rice-paper factory (literally a sweatshop – really hot and sticky, with people working there for 12 hours a day on the same thing, either cooking the paper, stacking it, counting it, packing it… makes teaching seem very exciting and slack!)
Fish sauce vats
Our next visit was to see the fish sauce factory – ohhhhh stinky. They ferment the fish in great vats in order to get the signature taste of Vietnam… I’m happy to buy it in a nice sealed bottle, after smelling that!
It smelled… aromatic!!
The last stop in the village was at a place which made various sweets – coconut toffee, puffed rice mixed with caramel, black sesame and nut toffee, and a few more, They had a couple of pet snakes here as well, but we weren’t offered a cuddle. T assured me they weren’t just being grown to be pickled in the snake wine!
Coconut toffee
The puffed rice was a pretty amazing process – one guy throws a bowl of rice into a huge wok filled with hot clean black river silt, mixed with a bit of oil, over a very hot fire, and stirs it around until the rice has puffed like popcorn!
Puffed rice
We had a bit of a shopping binge here, with lots of great stuff like coconut wood utensils, the various sweets made in the factory (R bought a pack of the durian flavoured puffed rice snack, of course, while I stuck with the coconut toffees)
Coconut juice
Then it was back on the boat to drink coconuts and head back to meet our bus to drive back to Saigon. By then the cough which had started in the morning had developed into a nice head cold, and I was downing cold’n’flu.
I still had enough stamina to hit the markets with the group when we got back to Saigon, but they were a bit of a disappointment. There were about five shops repeated ad nauseum throughout the markets, with overpriced stuff, much more expensive than elsewhere we’d been. Mental note – next time, buy the souvenir-y stuff in Hoi An or Hanoi!
Last cooking class
Next up was our last cooking class. This was the class that we actually made all of our dishes, rather than just one or two, even though everything was already prepared and cut up for us. We started by making squid salad, then claypot lemongrass fish, then the instructing chef made a “light egg soup”, with tomato and egg and chicken stock.
It was all pretty tasty, but the kitchen was incredibly hot. Given I was already not feeling great, I was completely dead by the end of the night! Instead of joining the others for a celebratory end-of-tour drinks, I had to return to the hotel to sleep. The head cold had seriously taken hold! It seems that I made the right decision though – the group said that where they’d gone, the Rex, was incredibly expensive.
Obligatory cat picture, taken on the way back to the bus
By Thursday morning I’d decided that I was cursed in South East Asia – just like in Cambodia in December, I’d gotten sick! Today was our moving day to the Intercontinental, and basically all I did all day was sleep and down Codral. Feeling a bit better now, so I’m hoping for our second last day tomorrow I’ll be back on track. I have to say, the Intercontinental is worth the price hike – the room is lovely (and we had an upgrade), we can use the executive lounge for evening canapés and drinks, and they gave us a fruit basket and a gift on arrival. Plus there’s a real-sized bathtub!
The view from our room at the Intercontinental
Two Weeks Away 