What's different: Food and drink

Fried spring rolls with the special dipping sauce

As the end of our time in Vietnam approaches I thought I would put together some of the differences I have noticed between life in Australia and Vietnam. The first one is on food and drink.

While living in Hanoi, I have heard this saying a couple of times from two completely different sources - "Vietnamese eat anything with four legs, except the table". They also eat things with two legs and no legs at all. The more unusual foods that many eateries sell include turtle, dog, ostrich, buffalo and coconut worms. Eel, duck, snails, frogs, chicken, beef and pork are very common.

Peanuts with bia hoi

They love garlic and they love chilli. their diet consists of a much broader range of fruits and vegetables than we eat in Australia. Dried meats accompanied with aniseed flavoured leaves. Blokes will sit back and enjoy sliced cucumber with a beer. Peanuts are served almost always with beer. But here the peanuts are boiled, not roasted. They come out of their shells quite soft, almost mushy, but once you get used to it they are excellent.

There are very few pubs here as we know it, but restaurants and cafes are where you can buy beer. The local beer here is called Bia Hoi, which means "fresh beer", naturally brewed and consumed very quickly after brewing. It is quite low alcohol compared to Aussie beer and it is possible to drink 15 glasses of beer and still be quite coherent.

Food is served progressively. So when you order you almost never get your entire order in one serving. People take ages to eat their food compared to us. They drink beer, eat a little, have a cigarette, then nibble a bit more. People don't care if the food goes cold. Chop sticks lend themselves to eating slowly as it is hard to pick up huge amounts of food in one go like you can with a spoon. Knives are almost never used as all meat is cut up for you when it is served. As plates arrive on the table people almost invariably share their order and split the bill at the end. So a smorgasbord style of eating is the norm, whereas in Australia everyone gets their own plate, and compared to Vietnam, Aussies eat their food as fast as possible.

Our neighbours sharing a banquet with us for lunch

People chew their food with their mouth open and it is a little difficult at first to listen to this. People eat their food from small bowls after taking what they need from the selection on the table, but unlike Australia, they lift the bowl to the mouth and scoop in the food, whereas the Aussie way is to leave the plate on the table and lift the food to the mouth.

Meat market

Another thing that is a bit hard to get used to is the food markets that sell meat that is not refrigerated. Walking through the markets with the smell of meat when it is 35 degrees and flies buzzing around is a little off putting. We did buy meat from here a couple of times and never did get sick.

Our favourite tea lady

There are many old ladies here that sell green tea on the side of the road. Unlike in Aus., tea and coffee are drunk cold, and often with ice. I guess you need to, when most of the time the weather is so hot.

What you almost never see here is bread or dairy products. Having said that though, we lived in Hanoi in the same block as the Australian Embassy. There are many embassies near where we lived and all sorts of foods  could be bought from a supermarket nearby.

We did buy bread from here and were even able to buy Vegemite to have on toast for breakfast. After being away from home for a long time the familiar things seem to taste so much nicer.

Sa Pa

One of the villages in Sa Pa

Kim reckoned that Sa Pa was her favourite place in all of Vietnam, so with that sort of wrap we had to go there. Sa Pa, or Sapa is pronounced "sar par" or "sappa" depending on how posh you are. Sa Pa is located well inland from Hanoi and is very close to the Chinese border. It is the home of the  Hmong, Dao (Yao), Giay, Pho Lu, and Tay minority peoples of Vietnam.  Sa Pa is high up in the mountains and is therefore much cooler than Hanoi. For the first time in ages we started to feel cold. It was probably got down to 20 degrees Celcius, brrrr! ;-) Sa Pa is very beautiful too, you can  picture vivid green rice terraces on the misty mountains. As a result of this beauty, it is a favourite place for tourists to visit, and unfortunately the local culture has adapted to the tourist influence only too well.

Kim at the train station

We started off with an overnight train journey, arriving at the station at about 7:30 pm. We walked across numerous railway tracks to wait on our platform until we were shown our cabin. We had to share with a couple from Vietnam that spoke no English. An hour or so after the train leaves they turn the lights off and you try to sleep. But after becoming accustomed to having very late nights and with the rocking and noise of the train, getting to sleep proved very difficult, even though we could stretch out on a bed each. Maybe I got a couple of hours sleep, because at about 6:30 in the morning some really awful music gets played to wake people up and half an hour later we arrive at the railway station. We get our stuff and walk out and it feels cool and it is starting to rain. Outside the station we see a sign with our name on it and then wait for some others to join us before being bundled into a mini-bus with another 12-15 people for another one hour drive to the village of Sa Pa.

At Sa Pa we wait for another hour for our guide to arrive in a hotel lobby. There are young children running around making heaps of noise while their parents seem oblivious. But we are both pretty tired and somehow manage to get a little bit of sleep before our guide arrives. Our guide was a female, maybe in her late 20's or early thirties dressed in traditional hand made and embroidered clothing and gum boots. We leave the hotel and start our maybe 15 km walk through roads and bush tracks in the countryside. We are joined by maybe another 4 women also dressed in traditional clothing, gumboots and with large round baskets on their backs and they seem quite friendly and talkative. They ask the usual questions, where are you from, how old are you, do you have children ... I ask them what the baskets are for and they don't say much at all. They all spoke the best English of any group of people that we have met so far.

Tony getting the hard sell

We walk along a road, up a hill and then start to walk through the countryside on some tracks. Once the track gets a bit steep or slippery the ladies grab your hand and give assistance. Its all very nice. Except the ladies seem to lead you through the steepest  and slipperiest sections so that you really do need their assistance. Once or twice I had to ask them to move so that I could walk through the easy sections. 

3 purses, thanks, what I always wanted

When we had lunch we were basically get mobbed by heaps of them trying to sell you stuff. Of course you say no thanks, but that seems to encourage them more. You tell them you don't want and they just ask how much you pay. They drive you insane with their persistence, so you make them an offer just to get rid of them. What ever you say is never enough, so they try to talk you up. In the end I bought about 5 handbags, pillow cases and purses. As you can imagine I really "needed" these things, or more-so, needed not to be crowded and pestered. This happened at least another two or three times at Sa Pa, and in the end they are ruining the experience for tourists with the relentless selling. Either that or tourists will start becoming very rude to them so that they go away. This is a real pity.

The view from our home-stay looking through some drying corn

We finally arrived at our accommodation which was a "home stay" with some of the locals in one of the villages. It was really nice, peaceful and relaxing. We had a good outlook to the mountains and other village houses in the distance. There was another another Australian family staying with us. They had two young sons who were enjoying having a few fights and learning to make pop-guns from bamboo with the locals. The father ran a sheep farm and winery in Victoria and the mother taught psychology but as an online teacher. We got on pretty well with them.

At tea time the locals prepared as huge meal with plates of different meats, vegetables, fried rice and tofu. One of the local ladies there brought some rice whiskey which she shared liberally with us. Their guide was a local woman that told us of the customs in the village. The classic tale is how people go about getting married. The potential bride is kidnapped by the potential groom and has to go and live with the groom's family for a few days. If she likes the family then she can agree to marry if she wants to. It sounds like fun really, tradition dictates that the groom needs to be accompanied by females too so there isn't really any violence involved. This particular woman had been kidnapped six times by six different blokes before she decided who to marry. In the end she was getting used to being kidnapped, so she said to her kidnappers, "ok, I'm coming" rather than going through the ritualistic dragging, because as she said, the next day you feel all sore.

The view from the waterfall with some of the tourists

The following day we walked out, this time up the side of a mountain and through a bamboo forest. Along the way we stopped at a huge waterfall. It was pretty spectacular, except for maybe another hundred tourists there. We finished the walk at a village and were transported in a van back into Sa Pa, where we were taken to a hotel and were given a room to have a shower and relax a while before going out to walk around the town of Sa Pa. Here there were plenty of women, in traditional clothes, wearing gumboots and carrying big round baskets, but we did not buy off anyone as by now we had learned to say no, and really mean no.

Down town Sa Pa

We caught the train back in the night and got lots more sleep this time. At the train station we were met by taxi drivers wanting extortionate amounts of money to travel back to our room. But we told them that we knew prices and not to bother us and kept walking until we found another taxi driver asleep in his car. But this one was the from the reputable Hanoi taxis, and we got home for about 1/6th the price of what we were to be charged at the train station.

We starting to know the prices and the scams and how to avoid them and begginning to feel like locals now.