A Phileas Fogg-style travelogue of my Vietnamese Vacation. I'd like to thank my sponsors, Japan Airlines, and their questionable taste in in-flight entertainment (Matt Demon at his least plausible, and therefore most enjoyable, as an Afghani platoon offysaah), and special mention must go to my puntastic seven-year-old Lonely Planet ("Get More For Your Dong, In Old Saigon!"). I couldn't have done it without you guys.
Enough pleasantries, on with the show! Fourteen bitesized nuggets from 14 days in the land of Communism, Cocktail Hour and crap coffee:
1) Cracking open what seemed like a perfectly innocent hard-boiled egg, only to find a partially formed chicken fetus inside. It's a delicacy, you racist philistine.
2) Faux fishing and philosophising off the back of a Junk in Halong Bay (bait is sooo overrated), followed by a night under the stars, and waking to huge imposing rocks, mere metres away. The Romance of the occasion was slightly marred by the kidney-dismantling cough I inherited from this venture. I've been hacking away like a consumptive Victorian heroine ever since.
3) Getting my first tattoo: a moustache/goatee combo, worked in finest blue biro, by this Welshman
4) Fanny's Ice Cream Parlour. Delicious, soothing, creamy goodness in cinnamon, ginger, pineapple and coconut flavour, and an endless double entendre-inducing moniker. What more can you want.
5) The moral dilemma that arose from enjoying politically incorrect cocktails on the beach. Agent Orange, anyone? I kept trying to order "a vodka & passionfruit, please", but the barman was having none of it. Spent the rest of the afternoon devising further bad taste concoctions for the menu. No one could top my grenadine-based "Khymer Rouge".
6) Seeing the long tail of a rat disappearing behind the scenery of the Neanderthal Man exhibit at the History Museum. Is it part of the diorama, I wondered, as I stood, for several minutes, transfixed before the glass case, praying it would loop round again, proving its animatronic credentials. No.
Incidentally, the PC term is not "third world country" but "developing nation".
7) Witnessing a man buying a carrier bag of live, wet snakes in the street market, to take home for his dinner. Right next to the Frog Stall, where a heaving mass of my least favourite amphibians, wrapped in wire-thin elastic, pulsated as one, merging together in a multi limbed, many eyed mound of slime and pestilence. I openly clutched myself, my insides pulverising in fear and repulsion, while the sulky twentysomething sitting cross-legged behind her stall give a contempuous toss of her pony tail, offering no apology for her Table of Horror.
See also: Live chickens, bound and gagged, lying on the roadside in piles, or else stuffed into tiny cages. Tanks of swimming turtles, deep-fried spiders and many other animals/sea monsters/single-celled organisms never intended for human consumption.
8) Attempting to read Heart of Darkness under flickering neon striplights in a rowdy yoof hostel, with Lady Gaga competing with Marlowe for claim to my inner monologue. The horror. The horror.
9) Discovering, the hard way, that you can't drink the water in Vietnam. (Picture withheld.) Better off sticking to "bia hoi" the piss weak local brew, at a shocking 40p a pint. You really do get what you pay for. Avoid the atrocious coffee. Almost sauce-like in viscosity, it's 80% sugar and 400% burnt coffee bean. It improves little over ice. Perplexingly, this is Vietnam's third most popular export (Gary Glitter is a close fourth).
The only thing more despicable than the coffee was the War Memorial Museum, documenting what is known locally, and somewhat delightfully, as The American War. Terribly harrowing photographs depicting the after effects of my favorite new cocktail.
10) Stalking Japanese tourists at every available opportunity, following them down the road and into cafes to hear their staccato tones and mobile phone conversations, and revelling in the comforting familiarity of "Hai! Onegaishimasu!"
11) Asking an ex-pat why he had picked Hoi An to set up his beach-side bookshop, four years ago. "Because the doctors have given me five years to live," he deadpanned. I hastily bought a book to distract him from the devastating mental maths written all over my face. It would have been churlish not to.
12) Having my dinner interrupted at 10 minute intervals to admire/pet/fawn over and at one point hold the waitress's encephalitic baby.
13) Pressing my be-flip-flopped foot down firmly into wet tarmac before being ushered onto the back of a motorbike and out into the jaws of death by my hotel manager. I lather-rinse-repeated, but a tingling, burning sensation persisted for the rest of the evening.
14) Sitting in the cafe of Saigon Domestic Airport, overcome by one of my rare, biannual bursts of creativity, and trying desperately to channel it into a short story in the style of Katherine Mansfield, while two post-adolescent boys at the neighbouring table openly gawped and photographed me. At least now I know how Jordan feels, when she's trying to coordinate the next Dickensian plot twist in her latest tome, over a tepid cappuccino between flights at Stansted.
Disclaimer: thanks to Jon and Daniela for the pics, and for proving that troo friends are those that find you when you're drunk and sprawled on the kerb, and take you to a reputable tailor, and those that take really unflattering photos of you.
Mwah!
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