Cambodian and Vietnam Pics

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Tarik and Jui out NagaWorld Casino.

Tarik putting on his pink Mickey Mouse helmet before getting a moto ride to the soup lady.

Me drinking Che a dessert drink filled with many types of sweet beans, tapioca, pomegranate and coconut cream.

Our Mekong River guide pulling a full bird out of a jar of Snake Wine.

Me holding a 50 lb python.

Delicious pineapple!

Chicken feet for dinner.

SaPa

Tarik crossing over Silver Falls.

Betty.

The agricultural terraces that surround SaPa on every open bit of hillside.

Houng Lein Mountains around SaPa.

SaPa.

1 week left

Vietnam is cool.  I really like it.  The south and north are very different.  We were in Saigon for 3 days and went to a couple of war museums.  The propaganda there against the US and our "foreign aggression and imperialism" was intense.  It seems that everyone in the country forgot that the South didn't want to be part of the North when the war started.  We haven't really experienced any open dislike towards us but the Vietnamese in general don't seem to be as open to foreigners as the Cambodians and Thais were.  Unless they're trying to sell you something there completely ignore you, cut you in line and honk a lot at you on the motorbikes.  That's the other thing: the motorbikes here are way more intense.  You can barely cross the street and even then you just start walking very slowly and hold out you hand and they will avoid you.  You can't wait for a break in trafic because there hardly ever is one!  It's very intimidating at first, though I'm used to it now.

The food in Vietnam is very good, though a lot of it is just soup.  Even when you don't think you're ordering soup, you get soup.  Tarik saw a show on TV before we left about "the soup lady" in Saigon so we spent a morning searching for her.  We wandered for a while in the area we knew she was in and finally a woman who spoke no English but clearly knew what we were looking for started yelling and pointing.  We followed her directions and found it.  It was totally worth it.  She had a small roadside stand where she boiled 3 large vats of soup with unknown meats in it.  We didn't order anything she just pointed us to a table and gave us each a bowl and a plate of spring rolls.  It was delicious, we think there was a beef sausage and duck meat in the noodle soup.

The next day we did an overnight in the Mekong River Delta.  We took boat rides all around the river and the small canals through the area.  The tour brought us to a coconut candy making "factory," a rice wine "distillery," a honey bee "farm" and many small towns along the river.  The river itself was brown with silt and provide the most fertile soil in southeast asia. That is where a huge percentage of exported rice to the world is grown.  That night for dinner we attempt to get some bbq chicken from an authentic Vietnamese food stall.  We ended up with chicken feet!  They looked gross and didn't really have any meat on them.  They didn't taste like anything other than the chilli sause they were bbq with and most what was edible on them was skin and cartiledge.  We paid and then went to get pizza afterwards.

The following morning we went to a large floating market that was full of houseboats with people buying and selling fruits and vegetables.  I ate one of the most delicious pineapples I've ever had.  Then I watched a woman kill, gut and scale 3 fish in about 45 seconds. 

Saigon itself feels like the first real city we've been to.  It has a financial part of town and its economy is not based on tourism.  Bangkok was like this but we mostly only saw the touristy parts.  We flew up to Hanoi in the north, bypassing many awesome sounding beach towns on the way up the coast.  We went straight to the train station to buy a ticket to the mountain town of SaPa.  Unfortunately there were no more sleeper cabins available, so we had standard bus-like seats for this 9 hour overnight train.  It was miserable.  The a/c in our cabin wasn't really working (every other cabin was nice and cool) and we sat right next to a sliding door which didn't stay shut and banged open and close every time the tarin turned.  I knew it wouldn't be comfortable so I drank a bit hoping it would help me sleep, which it did except that when we arrived at 4 AM I was hungover and had to sit in the rear of a minibus as it bounced and turned it's way for an hour and a half up the mountains to Sapa.

It was totally worth it now that we're here though.  This town is awesome!  It's a small French-style town near the China border.  There is lots of hiking and mountain villages around.  We went to the market yesterday where the villagers were selling all sorts of handmade goods.  Then we went for a hike up the closest mountain.  Unfortunately it's always cloudy so the mountains in the distance are hard to see but that is offset by the fact that the low clouds are constantly moving and moving quickly.  This gives the scenery a different feel every 10 minutes or so because you can seee new things in the distance and others are hidden.  Today we rented motorbikes and drove around the winding mountain roads.  We hiked up to a huge waterfall and drove over a pass to see some distant villages inthe valleys.  It was all incredibly beautiful and I wish we didn't have to leave tomorrow.

Ok that was long enough. I'm going to try to upload some pictures now as well.

Cambodian and a few Vietnamese Brews

First off: I totally forgot to write about the Cambodian kareoke that seems to be on tv's everywhere even sometime when you can't hear the music.  It was on in restaurants, loud bars, in stores, even on the bus rides!  And the best part was the music videos that go with the songs.  Each one went as follows.  A man looking lonely sitting on a beach or looking at himself in a mirror.  Then he sees the girl he likes.  He sneaks up behind her and surprises her.  Together they go to look at some statue of something - usually the girl hides behind a dragon and the guy doesn't know where she is, then she jumps out.  They laugh. They almost kiss, something interrupts them and then they hug and run down the beach.  SCENE.  Hilarious.  Hours of that on the bus is very entertaining.

Anyway, to more important things like beer:

Cambodia:
Angkor:  It's everywhere!  Almost every bar has banners for it and sells it for $.50 - $.75 draught.  It's very drinkable.  Like a Bud Light.  Refreshing but not too much taste going on.

Anchor:  I'm convinced that this is exactly the same as Angkor.  But not in the same way that Coors light and Keystone Light are the same.  These two taste exactly the same and sell for the same price.  Why would the company do that?  Also, sometimes I'd order an Angkor and get an Anchor because they sound the same.  ABV: ~4.5%

Klang:  Has a white can with a gray elephant on the front.  Looks like a terrible beer.  Tastes like nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  I could only tell that I was drinking a carbonated liquid, could haev been any liquid.  I wasn't going to get one but Tarik surprised me with one the last night in PP because he wanted me to try it.  ABV: 6%

BeerLaos:  Surprisingly good.  I guess the people of Laos only have 1 beer to drink so they make it good (supposedly Laos governemtn doesn't allow other beers into the country).  Dark and foamy.  A nice dark lager.  ABV: 6.3%

Phnom Penh:  Surprisingly good for a can that looked like the label was faded and falling off.  A lighter lager that pretty sweet.  Went down well when we were watching Bruno.  ABV: 5.5%

Vietnam:
333:  Liek drinking a warm Chang.  Awful.  Enough said.  ABV: 6.2%

Saigon: Really good drinkable beer.  Actually, I think this reaction was just because I drank it right after I drank a 333.  But it was drinkable.  Like a nice cold PBR.  The first one out of the 30.  Also it came in a half liter bottle which is always nice.  ABV: 4.6%


There's a good selection of beer here including Coors Light, Budweiser (but not Light), Carlsberg, and Heineken.  Will have to try them all!

Headed to the Mekong River Delta tomorrow morning for an overnight trip to see the countryside, floating villages and markets, and who knows what else.  Will blog about that and Saigon when I get back.