It’s 380km from Hanoi to Sa Pa near the Chinese border. The trains are as slow as trams making it an overnight trip in a sleeper to possibly the cloudiest place in Vietnam. We arrive in driving rain and hail. One travel guide tells us that the sun shines fro 60 days a year here. That’s right, for the remaining 300 odd days it’s cloudy. Somehow in six years this town has grown from only eight hotels to 233. There’s […]
Month: May 2006
Michelin and Vietnam
Well why wouldn’t there be a connection between Michelin and Vietnam? After all it was the French who colonised Indochina from 1883 to the 1950s. Ho Chi Minh – at the time just plain old Nguyễn Sinh Cun – trained as a pastry chef with Escoffier in the Carlton Hotel in London. Later he moved to Paris and founded the French Communist Party. And it was the French who trained the Vietnamese to make wonderful baguettes, paté and coffee (believe […]
Home and blogging again
I’m meant to live in the edgy side of Melbourne in St Kilda. Drunks, drug addicts street walkers. That’s saying nothing of the so-called actors and artists who hang around in the cafés all day. But everything seems very quiet and dull since returning from Vietnam. Apologies for lack of blog entries but finding a recent version of Internet Explorer was hit and miss. Now I’m home I can tell the full story.
Eating on fried fish street
Stay in the old quarter in Hanoi. Learn to love the congestion, the buzz and honking of motor scooters. Ah, and the smells. Two stroke, food and incense. This is the place where the action is. Life is lived and transacted on the street or at least without leaving the motorcycle saddle. It is a place where street names have a meaning. Hang Gad is chicken, Hang Hahn is onion. Hang Ruoi is clam worms. And the stretch between Hang […]