It's May 2018. Our family of four who has a combined age of 76 is wandering the streets of Ho Chi Minh City (HMC), the capital of Vietnam that has been free for just over 73 years. In the free world, we are 3 years senior to Vietnam.
Four days is short. Especially if you are visiting Vietnam, that's rich in stories. Four days were all we had to experience the stories of Vietnam.
It has been a while since our HMC trip. In theory, Vietnam should now be deep down in our memory bank. Still, the encounters from the Viet trip constantly come up in our conversations. Especially, when we visit the Pho Places, or Vietnamese restaurants, which there are aplenty in Sydney.
We will go back to Vietnam for sure so we can add more to our list of stories. But for now, here are a few encounters from our Viet Trip Part One.
Encounter ONE: Red salute welcome
The wonders of Vietnam started to entertain us from the moment we landed at the International airport. A thin small lady in a military uniform at the Customs and Border Protection counter was the first Viet that we got to meet.We expected a friendly smile and a welcome to Vietnam greeting. We got none of that from Minh - the name tag that was neatly pinned to her uniform announced her identity.
She was probably 5 feet tall and weighed a maximum of 50 kg but we could feel her strong presence. She spoke not a single word to any of us not even to my little boys who usually evoke a friendly chatter even from the serious most policemen. She orchestrated all our movements from behind the counter just through her gaze.
The wall behind Minh had the blood-red flag of Vietnam with the yellow star in the middle. There was another version of the red flag next to it featuring a sickle and a hammer. From between the flags, a few old photos stared at us. All men. Like Minh, all were thin but had the gaze that resonated power. Comrades from the past - I told myself.
It didn't take me long to see the similarities between the international airport in Vietnam and a Communist Party Office in my little town in the state of Kerala. By the way, my birthplace is quite significant in the history of Communism.
My previous Manager was Russian and I worked with a number of colleagues who hailed from mainland China. Most of them were truly red and proud of their communist heritage. Believe it or not, there were occasions when I chest pumped in front of them saying I come from the state that elected the first communist government in the world.
Minh and the Communist red that surrounded her woke up the comrade in me.
Lal Salam Ho Chi Minh.
Encounter TWO: Blind crossing
Just like any other trip we did our homework and read as much as we could about HMC before we boarded the flight from Sydney. One common comment that caught my eye across all the travel blogs was the mention of the Viet traffic and how different and at times difficult it is for a traveller. We took it with a pinch (large portion in fact) of salt. From our experience, we know that for most of the travel blogs "traveller = a westerner".Born and bred on Indian roads HMC streets should be a cake walk - we winked at each other.
How wrong we were.
As soon as we got out of the airport David, our Airbnb host who came to pick us up handed out to us two wonderful tips that stayed gold throughout our trip.
Tip No 1: "More than 90% of Vietnamese don't understand English." and
Tip No 2: "Call Grab (equivalent to an Uber) whenever you want to move around in the city."
We didn't understand the significance of David's advice at that time. By the way, David is the English name of our host. Even though he mentioned it to me I forgot his Viet name.
We duly got into the Grab taxi, a Toyota Kluger that David got for us. David told us that he has to wait for another guest and cannot accompany us to our accommodation. He instructed the driver in Vietnamese and waved us goodbye.
As soon as I got in the car, I started my typical ice-breaker with the driver and started talking about the good weather of the day. He responded back straightaway in Vietnamese. The only word that registered in my brain was 'English'. "I do not know English" I translated what I thought he was saying.
On a number of occasions during our trip, we took the challenge and hit the streets on our foot, the 4 big and the 4 little feet all together hand in hand. We stuck to the instructions from the travel blogs. "Just close your eyes and ignore the traffic and think that they don't exist and cross the road - you should be fine." The traffic flew on like the stream, the stones that we were moved in our own way. The stream of traffic fond a way around us and continued to flow.
Life is normal.
Verbatim I am copying and pasting the advice that worked for us here. "When crossing the road at HMC just do it (cross the road that is) and don't even think about looking at the oncoming traffic. You should just be fine."
Encounter THREE: Viet cocktail
Don't you worry. I am not going to talk about another of those drinking adventure. After all, we were on a family trip.It's the cultural cocktail that is Vietnam. I mentioned the communist paraphernalia that we saw at the airport. It followed us all the way through the trip. The blood-red flags were everywhere. Even next to the symbols of the bourgeois world, which surprisingly co-existed as normal. We saw Burberry and Starbucks with red flags of the oppressed standing up proudly next to the neon-lit storefronts.
Starbucks coffee shops were a surprise for us. Not just the brand but the number of shops that we saw at HMC. We counted at least 10 of them on our short trip from the airport to our accommodation.
Apparently it's the French, who occupied at some point, that shaped the breakfast tastes of the city. And the American coffee shop chain, that is Starbucks, is baking in the glory of that taste that still lingers on.
It's not just the coffee culture that the French bought in. They also intruded the Viet kitchen and changed the shape of many a local dishes. The most popular and widely known of this french connection is 'Banh Mi'. The French + Viet collaboration that resulted in the pork sandwich.
As picked up from a foody blog Banh Mi is an airy baguette, inside which you can see sour pickled daikon and carrot, crisp cilantro, spicy chilis, and a cool sliver of cucumber surrounding any number of protein options, from sweet minced pork to fatty pate to sardines. It sounds complicated. But let me vouch for it - it's delicious.
Vietnamese pork roll is so popular in Sydney. You can see at least one of those pork roll joints, mostly one room shops, in most of the streets in Sydney. On days when I don't take my lunch to work, Banh Mi has been, is, and will be my work lunch. But the one (in fact many) that we had while on the streets of Ho Chi Minh was something out of this world.
It won't be an understatement if we plan a trip to Vietnam just to have the Banh Mi - the French connection.
Encounter FOUR: Pho
Since I touched food I cannot go any further without talking about Pho. The Vietnamese noodle soup.I was introduced to noodle soup in the very early stages of my Australian life by a number of local Aussies. Living all my life in India, the noodles that I am exposed to are the instant noodle packets, especially one that comes in that ugly yellow packaging branded Magi. I hated it with a passion. Add to this a different dish, the soup, which I only heard of as an appetiser that you get when you visit an upmarket restaurant in an Indian city.
To begin with, the combination of noodle and a soup never really excited me and I avoided having it on the few occasions when I was offered the concoction. I was even surprised that people were having it as the single main course for their lunch and dinner. When going out with the team for a meal I played safe and stuck with any rice dishes that I could find on the menu. I didn't know at that time what I was missing out on.
It was a chance encounter when I tried a noodle soup for the first time and I was blown away. It was a clear noodle soup, meaning the soup part of the dish is so watery you will feel that its a dish that's still getting prepared, wherein they are soaking noodles in water to then cook afterwards. It only lasted until I had that first spoonful of the soup. I was blown away with the taste that hit me.
Pho is a Vietnamese street food that is now popular across the world, thanks to a number of restaurant chains that started the pho revolution. The soup consists of broth, rice noodles called bánh phở, a few herbs, and meat, primarily made with either beef or chicken.
While in HMC, at least one of our meal every day was Pho. We tried a variety of Pho in a variety of settings. A street vendor gave us a bowl of pho that we tasted, literally sitting down on the street. We were in restaurants wherein the menu was as thick as a dictionary with so many pages, we just picked a pho from the photo that was next to a number and called out to the waiter. "Number one thirty-seven please." We were never disappointed. In fact, we were quite proud of our method of choosing the best dish from the menu.
After trying out a few different Phos we asked our local host David for a recommendation. We asked him where do the locals go for a good treat of Pho. He gave us an address which we promptly copied over from Whats app to the Grab app and in five minutes our ride was ready waiting to pick the 4 of us.
We got dropped off in a quiet street. The restaurant looked different, maybe because of all the trees that were surrounding it. It was uncharacteristically quiet and elegant for a Vietnamese restaurant that we came across until then. When we stepped in there were 3 waitresses, who as a group asked us in sign language where we wanted to sit. I looked around. There were plenty of empty seats inside the restaurant and there were a lot more empty tables outside. The time was 6 pm. Maybe it's too early for a dinner for the local Viets. I pointed to a corner table outside, under one of the large trees.
A waitress escorted us to the table and dropped us with 2 large volumes of the menu BOOK, so we can devour a round of literature before the Pho treat. We were pleasantly surprised. The thickness of the menu was all but its hardbound cover, the menu was just 2 pages long. Page 1 had a list of 6 beverages and page 2 a list of 5 types of Pho.
I have come across this in the past. When the restaurant is super confident of a dish it's offering they focus just on that one and not dish out anything else. A lot of people find it audacious to ignore the profit that they could gain by selling other stuff. But the restaurant could slowly transform into a specialist in that one dish. So I assumed, this place that we are in now is the Pho Specialist at HMC.
They truly were the specialists. I still can recreate the tingle in my tongue just by recalling the Pho that we had at the Pho Specialist at HMC.
In 4 days, we had at least 10 Phos. Never from the same place. After the trip, we are now a true pho convert. These days, every time we want to eat out in Sydney we search for a Pho place. Mind you there are plenty of Pho joints in Sydney. War-torn Vietnam forced a lot of locals to migrate to Aussie land. Along with the Viets came the Pho.
Nowadays when we want to eat out we ask each other "Should we Pho out?"
Encounter FIVE: Two-wheel king
A sea of ants carrying on its shoulders a dead insect. The walk is long. But the ants are on the march. There is excitement in each of their steps. The insect is moving around in all directions. Can the dead move? In fact, it's the ants taking the turn to shoulder the weight and share the love.Did it sound like an excerpt from a badly written biology paper?
It was me watching the HMC traffic. Two-wheelers, scooters and mopeds, form the sea of ants in the streets of HMC. Cars that are outnumbered at one to a million (at least that's what it felt like) are the dead insects that I was referring to, which gets pushed around by the antsies.
As soon as we hit the HMC streets in the car that we got into from the Airport I noticed that we were an exception on the road. On the road we saw very few vehicles that had more than 2 wheels. We were floating on in a sea of scooters and mopeds.
Scooter. Yes, the diet version of a motorbike. To the westerners, I am referring to vehicles that are in the genre of Vespa.
There were scooters with up to 5 passengers clinging on to the expert rider. We saw a scooter wherein the rider was busy balancing a table on his head it felt like he was just resting his hands on the handlebar and scooter was taking him wherever it felt like.
I am a veteran motorbike rider who learned to ride in the chaos of renowned Indian traffic. But this was the next level.
On our trip from the Airport, every few meters we released a family gasp as the car close shaved a scooter. Soon we started breathing exclusively in gasps.
Once my mind got accustomed to the scooter sea that we were in I started scanning the streets. Close to 60% of the shops that I saw were either selling scooter or a repair shop with a line of scooters standing up on their bare bones.
It felt like there were more scooters than people in HMC. In my entire stay, I only saw maybe, 5 motorbikes.
Well, those were some of our encounters from Viet visit 1.
Prior to the trip, I had 2 images of Vietnam etched in mind. The photo of the Napalm girl and the heroic American propaganda movie Rambo, shot with Viet in the background.
Now, for me, Vietnam is a bowl of Pho that rides in on a moped.
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