Boots in the Oven

Easy Riders, Dalat

Before we arrived in Vietnam, I'd been dreaming about doing a tour with the Easy Riders. This blog post from Surrounded by the Sound, which I read pretty early into our trip last year, really clinched it for me. Get out in the countryside! See the people going about their daily lives! Get away from all those other lame-o tourists too afraid to see the REAL 'Nam!

Well... just before we arrived in Đà Lạt, we started doing some research. Turns out these trips, if you want to do an overnight, run in the neighborhood of $120-$150 per couple per day, depending on where you want to go and a few other factors. Not including food. This in a place where you can get a really nice hotel room for $25 a night and rent a scooter for an additional $10. The math just didn't make any sense to us. 

On top of that, after our arrival in Dalat, we saw what a glut there was in the market. Dudes wearing "Easy Riders" jackets loiter in front of all the tourist hotels, plucking at your sleeve as you walk by. They pretty much all offer the same basic itineraries, so this previously untrodden tourist-free wonderpath has become pretty well trampled down.

But I was not prepared to let the dream die. So Logan found (it wasn't too hard - he was hanging out in front of the hotel and was BY FAR the nicest guy Logan chatted with) a really delightful guy named Châu Thiệt, or Ted, who took us on a wide-ranging day trip for $22 each.

Logan rode with Ted, while I rode with Ted's friend.

Rachel frustrated by Logan and Ted's superior hog riding skilz.

First stop: Linh Phuoc, the Dragon Pagoda, where their big white Buddha was recently painted gold.

This particular pagoda is famed far and wide for the quality of their bells; temples all over the region place orders here to be filled. The process was very cool to see, as the molds for the bronze bells are all carved by hand!

Ted showed us that once the bells are completed and installed, people write prayers and supplications and stick them inside - from the booming toll straight to Buddha's ear.  

Were you wondering why it's called the Dragon Pagoda?  Supercool dragons, of course!  With carlight eyes and beer-bottle bodies!

That's my kinda dragon. Rowr!

Ted also showed Logan that tiger's claw flowers make a wonderful ersatz moustache, if yours is just taking too long to grow in.  LOVE THIS PHOTO.  Logan's so patient.

Well sort of patient...

We also got to learn a lot about silk production, from worm all the way to woven fabric!  Intellectually, I was always aware of the fact that silk is spun from silkworm cocoons, but seeing the process was completely fascinating and perhaps worth the trip on its own.

First, we went by a place that gets the silkworms and feeds them on mulberry leaves until they begin to spin.

The cocoons and hard working larvae are kept on these frames in the sun - we could get right up and poke 'em!  which Logan did.

More of a caress if you ask me. -L

I gotta say, the silkworm larvae are not the sexiest beasts in the animal kingdom.

After their cocoon is completely spun, the frames are broken down and the pupae are taken to a nearby factory.  They're then dumped into hot water, which kills them (the catepillars are apparently then sold as food in Vietnam!) and begins to break down the silk fibers so they can be spun.

Many of these women were handling 15 or 20 cocoons at a time, threading them onto the bobbins that spun silk thread ceaselessly over their heads.

In a corner of the factory, one woman was working with the larger cocoons that are made when two larvae spin a cocoon together. This makes a much thicker silk filament.

The strands these women produce are then woven into thread, some of which is made into raw silk fabric for export. Some have patterns woven into them by an honest to goodness Jacquard loom, which uses actual punch cards I've never seen outside of a museum (Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, specifically - our post here)! The racket these looms make is deafening and a bit hypnotic.

And then! Off to the waterfalls! Where we did lots of clambering and managed to mostly not injure ourselves one little bit.

The happy couple at Elephant Falls:

Just above Elephat Falls is a pagoda with very nice grounds you can explore. Dalat is famous for being one of the cooler spots in Vietnam, due to its altitude (this is why so many veggies and flowers can be grown here), so wandering outside was very pleasant.

Plus, this pagoda has the best happy Buddha ever!

The navel of the gods.

It's interesting to see how offerings left in temples differ. In some places, you'll see older-style stuff like fruit and rice, but more and more often there are boxes of cookies and pyramids of soda cans.

Last stop (after a very full day!) Dalat's train station, built in 1938 in a local Art Deco-ish style.

The only service currently running from this station is a short tourist jaunt - it doesn't actually connect to any of the main lines anymore. Turns out it was bombed. A lot. And the tracks haven't been repaired since the war.  So now it's pretty quiet, with a souvenir shop and a few old train models. It's a popular place for wedding portraits.

Our one-day trip with Ted and company was great. He was really personable, telling lots of stories about the surrounding areas and his life in Vietnam - he was in the South Vietnamese army and was in a reeducation camp after the war. Talk about good times. I would definitely recommend him if you're looking to do an Easy Rider style tour of Da Lat.

Here's Ted's contact info:

tel. 063. 38 34 157 mobile 0914 031 620

ted_easyrider (at) yahoo (dot) com (don't want him to get spammed on our account!)

He also will run the multi-day tours, if you're interested (and the math works for you).

Dalat Eating: Top 4

Food in Dalat (or Đà Lạt) was quite a surprise. The town is in the highlands and is home to a lot of ethnic minority Vietnamese. Both of these were new to me, so I guess coming across a bunch of new dishes should have been expected. Regardless, I was extremely pleased.

In Dalat, in general, stick to the street food. Most of the restaurants we saw wanted to sell us nachos alfredo or fettuccine burgers or something equally blech-worthy. There are no shortages of adorable roadside and market eateries, so I implore you to take full advantage.

Also, Dalat is a vegetarian heaven. We didn't make much use of it (for no particular reason), but there aren't many towns around that can boast such a high percentage of meatless dining options. I'm really not sure why; I'm guessing it has something to do with monks.

But down to business. If you find yourself in Dalat, these are the four places that I wouldn't miss grabbing a bite at.

1. Bánh Tráng Nướng from this Adorable Lady on Nguyễn Văn Trỗi St.

Bánh tráng nướng are large sheets of rice paper grilled over smoldering coals and topped with all sorts of delightful goodies. I'm sure any day now some jackass will start marketing it as Vietnamese Pizza.

Almost always you'll get an egg, either chicken or quail, cracked on top. Pork, beef, scallions, chili, pounded shrimp, mayo, and Laughing Cow cheese are all viable options as well.

A lot of places fold the bánh tráng in half, but this lady gives you your own set of scissors (along with some chili dipping sauce) so you can dismember it to your personal taste.

I'm pretty sure she only sticks around until lunch, so after 3 or 4 pm her tiny red stools may have disappeared.

61 Nguyễn Văn Trỗi, Ward 2, Da Lat

2. Bánh Căn from Bánh Căn Quỳnh Thanh

Bánh căn are super cool looking rice cakes grilled in little terracotta half dome molds. Often a quail egg is broken inside, then the lids are put on until they cook through. Once unveiled, the two halves are united to form one light, fluffy ball of crisp goodness.

They're usually eaten by themselves dipped in a light fish sauce, but you can also get them like we did with a side of bánh lọc and a steamed rice flour dumpling stuffed with minced pork and mushroom. On the side came the dipping sauce with two of the softest, most tender meatballs I've ever had.

I'm pretty sure this lady is around until 7pm or so but I wouldn't bet anything too valuable on it.

53 Nguyễn Văn Trỗi, Ward 2, Da Lat (just to the left of the pet store)

3. Food Stalls at Chợ Đà Lạt

On the second floor of the large central market you can find all kinds of impressive offerings. The vendors are a little pushy, but take your time and do some perusing. See what's busy (duh) and gather up an assortment of dishes.

We picked some roll-you-own spring rolls, a bowl of bun nem nướng (grilled sausage on vermicelli), and an order of surprisingly tasty bánh khoái.

Chợ Đà Lạt- It's the huge market in the center of town. You can't miss it.

4. Everything at Quán Ăn Cu Đức.

Quán Ăn Cu Đức is the only real sit-down place I'm gonna recommend, but it's a doozy. This highland style eatery specializes in a wide range of meats and vegetables that you grill yourself on an inverted roof tile.

While insanely popular it is in no way geared to western tourists. The staff are friendly but don't expect a lick of English and don't be surprised if you become an object of interest for the surrounding tables.

We had the cá sấu nướng ngói (crocodile with okra and eggplant marinated in turmeric and chili) and the somewhat less exotic but possibly even better tasting bò nướng ngói (house specialty beef filet).

With the meats you get all sorts of nifty accoutrements like green chili and lime dipping sauce, roasted peanuts, a massive sesame rice cracker, seasoned salt, and a very interesting pickled palm fruit that I'm still trying to figure out the name for.

Anybody know these things are called?

Hands down my favorite dish though was the đậu bắp luộc. It translates as just 'boiled okra', but at Quán Ăn Cu Đức they serve it with a clay pot of bubbling fish caramel mixed with some sort of chopped nut.

That's the sauce in the back right.

I can not describe the ground-shaking deliciousness. I'm pretty sure this was one of my favorite dishes we've had the whole trip. Which is why it makes me extra sad that I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS!!! Ghawr! Knash! Friggit!

If you can send me a recipe, I'll give you France.

Quán Ăn Cu Đức - 6A Nguyễn Lương Bằng, Ward 2, Đà Lạt.

You can check out part of their menu here (in Vietnamese, but Google Translate helps a bit)

So there you have it folks. Plenty of eating stops to keep you busy in the temperate oasis of Dalat. Don't blow it.

Welcome to Đà Lạt

Đà Lạt, or Dalat, is a town in the highlands about 7 hours away from Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon).  Its altitude means that the weather is lovely and springlike year-round, which is perfect for springtime vegetables and flowers - very different from the tropical heat of the surrounding countryside.  

We knew our bus from Nha Trang had to be getting close to Dalat when we saw all the greenhouses.  Entire hillsides were covered with them. It's kinda creepy.

Inside these greenhouses?  Flowers!  Mainly for the domestic market, though some are exported to Japan, Australia, the US, and Europe.

Looks like these mums are just about ready to go.

Individully wrapped for your convenience.

Because of Dalat's climate, there are fruits and vegetables growing in great quantity here that you just don't see elsewhere in the country. A trip to chợ Đà Lạt, the Dalat market, highlighted this for us.

Gorgeous long-stemmed globe artichokes were everywhere! Oh, how I longed for a steamer basket and some lemon butter...

The Vietnamese word for artichoke is Atisô (there's a touch of the French influence for you) and the most popular way to consume it seems to be as trà atisô - artichoke tea. Dried artichoke is sold all over the town, and the tea is supposed to be good for your skin and liver function. 

We were also surprised by the number of berries at the Dalat market. You just don't see many blackberries and strawberries in other traditional markets in southern Vietnam, but here, piles of them were everywhere and shops sold fresh strawberry concentrate, great for adding to your soda.

Of course, we were most definitely still in Vietnam, so there were the more usual tropical fruits. And chickens, both live and pre-killed for ease of use.

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An odd tableau.

I love Vietnamese markets.  The sights, the smells, the sounds, the bustling...

Dalat is also known for other agricultural products uncommon in the rest of the country.  For instance, grapes for wine are grown here (there's that French legacy again!), as well as... COFFEE!  Dalat grows the country's finest, and we were lucky to be there when many of the coffee bushes were in bloom. I've never seen coffee flowers before - they smell delightfully energizing.

(Here I am with Ted, our Easy Rider guide - more about that trip later.)

You may have heard of kopi luwak, or weasel coffee. In Vietnam, it's called cà phê Chồn.  This is coffee that's been processed by a weasel (more specifically, a civet), by which I mean the weasel eats the coffee berry, digests the fruity flesh surrounding the bean, and then poops out the undigested coffee bean. After a thorough cleaning and roasting, this coffee is said to have a stronger and more piquant aroma and flavor, and commands astronomically high prices compared to your regular cup o'joe.

The reality of the life of the poor weasel (Chồn) was pretty depressing. We visited a place that makes cà phê Chồn, and their civets were kept in small cages with wide slats for their excrement to fall through.  They danced back and forth and tried to hide from our prying eyes; but there was nowhere to go.

Here's the unproccessed civet poop, full of coffee:

Apparently there are now chemical means to simulate the flavor of weasel coffee, and supposedly some places don't treat their weasels like this, but I'll definitely remember those eyes the next time I see a $50 cuppa civet coffee on a menu. Avoid please.

On a happier note - vegetables, growing green on fertile fields!  (On a followup misanthropic note, apparently these terraces aren't too stable and sometimes collapse.  Why can't I keep on the sunny side of this post?)

Besides wine, Dalat also makes rice spirits - we stopped by a still to have a taste.  Mmmm, burns the nose-hairs. Strong stuff.

Looking for other attractions in Dalat (besides eating their mindblowing streetfood, also coming up in another post)?  Well, it's a haven for domestic tourism, also because of the climate, so there are hilariously tacky attractions geared towards honeymooners like the Valley of Love, which we skipped.

We did make it to Hang Nga, the "Crazy House."  You may be wondering how the house got its name...

The Crazy House is the pet project (and money pit, apparently) of a daughter of one of Dalat's most prominent families.  For a few thousand dong, you can tour the place, taking its winding staircases up and over buildings and teetering on foot-wide paths that soar over rooftops. 

Or, for like $70 a night, you can stay there and have tourists peeking in on your hotel room starting at 7 every morning. No thanks.

Here's one guest room, with an organic-looking staircase reaching up to the second-floor bed.

Many of the rooms are animal-themed, you lucky hotel guests you, though I don't know how well I'd sleep with this huge bird looming inches from my bed. I mean, what in the actual hell is going on here?

Dalat was great. What a strange collection of attractions! In the next couple of posts, we'll show you the places to eat in town and discuss whether or not you should take a motorcycle trip with the ubiquitous Easy Rider gangs. Stay tuned next week, same bat-time, same bat-worldwideweb address!

Nha Trang: At Least There's One Reason to Go.

The best thing about Nha Trang was getting there. The train ride from Huế headed south, especially the first few hours, is one of the most beautiful we've ever been on. The tracks hug the coast as little villages, hidden coves, and secret fishing spots zoetrope past the windows.

Verdant tropical forests plunge down steep hills pulling up just shy of miles of white sand for your viewing enjoyment. It really is a rather pleasant way to spend the day.

It was slightly dampened by our crazy cabin mate who kept climbing into my bunk or sitting on our bags or just generally making an annoying ass of himself. But it's amazing what you can get used to with a little Mekong whiskey and a couple of 'involuntary' elbow spasms.

The second best thing about Nha Trang is the amazing amount of drugs and prostitutes you can get offered in just a few short minutes. The night we arrived I left to procure some dinner banh mi and in four short blocks I had no less than seven dudes on scooters try to sell me marijuana, cocaine, heroin, pretty-girl, young-girl, special-massage, ladyboy, and big-big boom-boom. It was tempting but I didn't want my sandwiches to get cold.

Nha Trang from our window.

You may be getting to sense that Nha Trang wasn't our favorite place and I commend you on your perceptiveness.

It's a huge mid-market beach town aimed at tour groups and flocks of Russians. The food scene is grim and the broad strips of sand, while certainly pretty, lack shade, privacy, and character. It was just a stop over so we were only there for one day. No harm no foul I suppose.

This inflatable playground did look pretty kickass though.

In a pleasant surprise twist, our one meal out ended up being rather excellent. The girl at the front desk, for reasons unknown to me, actually recommend a real honest-to-goodness Vietnamese restaurant well outside the tourist zone. God bless her.

After a short cab ride we pulled up in front of Nhà Hàng Bình Minh. The folks inside were friendly, but English, either written or spoken, isn't something that comes with the territory. This is a spy-on-other-tables-and-point kind of establishment. Or you could speak Vietnamese I guess.

By far the coolest thing about Nhà Hàng Bình Minh is the astonishing array of condiments that get put on the table. I'd been dying to try some of the many fermented sauces that we'd been seeing in buckets, bottles, jars, and tubs in all the markets, and I finally got my chance.

Clockwise starting with the black pool on the left: soy sauce; sweet fermented shrimp sauce; pickled daikon and carrot; fish paste with tiny fish; chili sauce; crab paste; fish sauce with chili; plain chili; fish paste with garlic; lime and green chili in the center.

All of them were delicious; rich, intense flavors that highlighted the essence of the main ingredient- the crab paste was scuttling crab, the fish paste was zippy minnows, the shrimp tail-fanned its way across your taste buds, etc. A real treat.

Along with the condiments (which were the stars of the show in my opinion) we had some lovely đậu bắp luộc, blanched okra.

Bò Lúc Lắc or shaking beef,

and some crab spring rolls. Not bad but not as good as the ones in Hanoi.

We also got brought a little dish of the most perfectly white, tiny eggplants. They're served raw and make a fab mouth cooler and palate refresher. Also great to dip in the various pastes.

If you find yourself in Nha Trang and aren't in the market for blow and boom-boom (I'm not judging here), definitely make your way over to Nhà Hàng Bình Minh and get your ferment on.

Nhà Hàng Bình Minh
64 Hoàng Văn Thụ, Thành phố, Nha Trang - Khánh Hòa
phone: (058) 821 861

Huế: Touring the Perfume River

WARNING WARNING WARNING This post contains a pair of the most adorable puppies I've ever seen.  Be careful when you scroll down - I wouldn't want you to cut yourself on the razor's edge of cuddliness!

As far as I can tell, the Perfume River of Huế has no particular odor, good or bad.  And we spent a day on it, so I feel like I should probably have been able to tell.

First, a word of caution. The dragon boats that ply the Perfume River are sort of a racket.  Daily prices are pretty reasonable, but once you're stuck on board, the proprietors will probably try to pad their profits by employing the hard sell. There'll be a table or a sheet spread out on the floor stocked with the same touristy stuff you see all over Huế (and Vietnam, for that matter); bookmarks, small mass-produced ceramics, poor-quality art, dolls wearing the traditional áo dài - but at a hefty markup to ensnare those who haven't done price research.

It was not fun to repeatedly turn down their offers.

Once we were aboard, our first stop was in the middle of the river next to the Dong Ba Market, where one of the women hopped out to get some provisions for the day.  (There was a cooler on board stocked with water and sodas to buy, and we were served lunch, too.)

Then, off to Thiên Mụ Pagoda!  This is the Phước Duyên Tower, which was built in 1844.

The most harrowing bit of visiting the pagoda is seeing the car the monk Thích Quảng Đức took to his self-immolation in Saigon in 1963.  You can actually see this 1956 Austin in the background of the famous pictures taken of the scene.

And back on the river!  There were lots of small boats dredging for clams, probably to make the city's famed Cơm Hến (see this post).

Emperor Tự Đức's tomb was in a sprawling area with beautiful gardens and a large pond.  Apparently he wasn't much of a ruler, so he'd come here to write poetry and stare at the grounds.

Hon Chen Temple, our next stop (we were moving at a pretty fast clip).

And, as promised.

OMGPUPPEEZ.  Fighting over a coconut.  My heart exploded and little weepy tears of joy ran down my face.

Also, I don't know if you knew this, but In Vietnam, it's traditional for each puppy to be given a chicken when it's born to act as a guardian and cleanup crew.  I desperately want this to be true.

BONUS ADORABLENESS: Water buffalo edition!  Adult water buffalos are big and stinky and have very hard heads, but it turns out the young ones look pretty huggable.  I didn't get close enough to find out or get trampled though.

And then our boat quietly and quickly plied the waters back to Huế, while we studiously avoided buying anything except a soda. I really didn't like being trapped on the water getting the repeated pitch and sob story... but I guess you gotsta make your monies while you can.

Next up: Nha Trang!  Which we didn't care for, but at least we ate good.