Posted on August 17, 2007
Filed Under Travel Musings, Vietnam, SE Asia Trip | 2 Comments
Vietnam is blessed with such amazing fresh ingredients, as is evidenced in the delicious food everywhere. But it hasn’t rubbed off on their cocktails. You only have to look at a fruit-shake stand menu to see what amazing things they could cook up with the addition of a little rum (there are even dirt-cheap local spirits that approximate rum, vodka and whisky.) But every place we go seems to have the same cocktail list, copied from a hard rock cafe, circa 1991.
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Posted on August 16, 2007
Filed Under Travel Musings, Vietnam, SE Asia Trip | 1 Comment
The pigs are sick here in Vietnam. We know this because our favorite meat - pork - is unavailable in restaurants and street stalls. We’ve been told this by about a half dozen restaurants or stalls so far. It shows how close the food here is to the supply. In the West I’m sure there would be new supply lines opened up overnight so we wouldn’t have to live without our bacon butties or cochinita pibil.
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Posted on August 14, 2007
Filed Under Travel Musings, Vietnam, SE Asia Trip | 4 Comments
After a week, we decided to leave bustling Hanoi for more peaceful environs. Our destination was Hue, Vietnam’s capital and imperial city during 18th through early 20th centuries. We had planned to take the train (”The Reunification Express”) from Hanoi to Hue since the overnight journey is supposed to be one of the travel highlights of Vietnam. However, a Typhoon hit the central coast and flooded the train tracks, forcing the railways to cancel all trains. We happened to be in the Hanoi train station when the announcement was made to this effect, and the ensuing chaos was something else! Luckily we had other travel avenues open in the form of Vietnam Airways.
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Posted on August 4, 2007
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We’re traveling with three guide books for SE Asia. The Rough Guide to SE Asia (Aug 2005), Lonely Planet SE Asia on a Shoestring (March 2006) and SE Asia, the Graphic Guide (2003.)
Each has their strengths and their weaknesses, and they are all out of date. I’m convinced the guidebook is in a slow state of decline.
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