First the food then the excitement and lastly the challenge.
Breakfast (img 15 and 16) fruit of outstanding quality. Vietnam exports the less good stuff and it shows. The papaya is perfect, maybe better than perfect. Goes down like food of the Gods. The Viet stuff is a wonderful mixuture of sweet, spicy, sour and hot- yin yang tastes.
This trip was advertised as a culinary one and so far it has surpsassed even my hopes. On the road we stopped at local eateries where the tour operator had planned well ahead. Each eaterie is a family endevor. A place on the road where the family lives and works and cooks and catches fresh fish and prepares it to perfection. Quite a bit of the final cooking is done at the table. Lotws of fresh cooked veggies, fish caught and hour a go.
Each meal has had about 2-3 times the amount of food we can eat. The guides explain that the food is very good, fresh and very cheap. Lunch for five might run $5 even with the excess and the drinks.
The eating is constraIined by the heat and humidity. It is basically too hot to eat much. Taste each, or most of the dishes and then just have to stop.
The bike ride from Saigon (the inner city name) is challenging. The roads are very crowded, the motor bikes, bikes and lorries are moving in all directions. No real respect for any set of rules of the road. Accidents are not uncommon and are dealt with locally. Locals take care of the medical and then negotiate with the parties over who pays what to whom. The police come but they play a lessor role.
Just as in the commerce the social conventions are very much Darwinian with a very Confucian overlay. Respect is important and real. Negotiatioins are had but fair and always seem to end well, even when the look aggressive. The evening cyclo ride took five minutes to negotiate, seemed heated and looked uncomfortable but apparently was not. The negiation amount was small to us. The two drivers would take me to an internet cafe, wait and then take Trang and I back to the hotel, about a twenty minute ride. Total time over an hour. Price ended up at $2.50 for the two drivers. The were, in effect, negotiating over 20%. Overtripped at less than a $1 for the two of them. Trang said wrong to give any more!
So, why was I at a Internet place? My GPRS signal, data that is, has ceased to work. Someplace out of Saigon we have become too rural. So I am putting this together as a notepad item and will send it when connectivity resumes. Toady or two weeks, who knows.
The excitement is the biking in the trafic and heat. Oftentimes a bit too much. Maybe we will hit the ideallic rural Vietnam I picture but clearly no sign of it as yet. The road is almost. Continuous home-buisiness. One gets space on the road, which is in terrible condition making the ride very hard and rough, then a layer of brown dirt, with some litter (less than China) and the about 15 feet of concret store front for chairs, putting out of goods, whatever. Then the store and upstairs living. Sometimes three stories very narrow.
My Tho is just a another city with about 400K people who are supposed to be much more relaxed than Saigon. Hard to see it except maybe in the dinner service this evening. Preparations and service of real beauty and charm. Whole crispy fist, served vertical and fileted using chopstics in one hand. And that was just the first dish.
Off to bed to face the heat, humidity and, hopefully a bit more rural biking. After 50 plus miles of the same commerceI am ready to see
Some variation.
BTW. Did not mention the livestock on the road. Cows (or something similar) chickens, pigs, geese, oxen? And of course dogs. Too hot for any of them to chase the bikers. Many rice paddies as to be expected. The cab get three rice crops here versus the north which gets only two.
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