Happy New Year!

Today, New Year's Eve, we went to temple, like good pretend Buddhists. Specifically we went to Wat Phra Sing in Chiang Mai, which is having a full-fledged temple festival for the days around the changing of the year. Around the various temple buildings were stalls selling flowers, candles, and other offerings, and alongside the main temple there was a fair with clothes, knickknacks, and a bunch of food stalls.

Inside the main temple building there were many special types of New Year's blessings on offer. We chose a little banana leaf basket filled with spices, flowers, little bags of water and so on, with a little flag on which to write your New Year's wishes. We followed all the others in carefully inscribing our wishes, then bringing the basket up to place in front of the statues of Buddha where we knelt and prayed. Finally, we went to place the basket on one of the large trays holding the offerings. We weren't sure what the significance of the different trays was, so we went for the one that had a picture of an elephant above it. We didn't miss the essential step of posing for a photo while placing the basket! Then we went to the food fair and snacked on sweet sticky rice grilled in bamboo. All Chiang Mai seems to be gearing up for a huge party, even though the Thai New Year is officially celebrated in April with a big waterfight that we are sorry to be missing.

On the other side of the temple was a garden peppered with bilingual sayings on wooden signs. This one seemed especially appropriate for the season.

Happy New Year!

This one's for my sister

Kittehs need to nap in Thailand, too. This one's sleeping between the legs of a large, ominous statue of a gentleman in a frock coat at Wat Pho, Bangkok.

Last ca phe sua da of 2009

The last of many delicious iced coffees in Vietnam - and maybe the best, too. In our host's "secret" favourite cafe in Phu Nhuan district, HCMC.

My Balinese neighbour

Friendly local gecko helps me out with the taboo watermelon accompanying my balcony breakfast.

If only I had had video to show you the titanic head-shaking struggle it went through to break off a piece that filled its little jaw, before the strategic retreat to nom it.

Imperial cuisine

Lotus seed dessert soup in Hue, Vietnam.

Limestone looms

Karst rock formations loom out of the waters of Halong Bay, which we traversed in a sumptuous junk for an afternoon sail.

Fusion Mozaic

Detail of a mozaic depicting the four seasons, from a tomb of an emperor in Hue, Vietnam.

The whole effect was stunning, a large open room with this huge wall to wall mozaic. I especially loved that the rivers were made with bits of smashed blue-and-white Viet crockery.

Strange fruit (vu sua)

One of the many, many delights of exploring Vietnam with Vietnamese people was getting the Fruit Tour of Vietnam. I think I tried ten fruits that were totally new to me, besides luxuriating in some I'd tasted before but never as good as these (though I have to say I think I prefer Hawaiian pineapple.)

Pictured here, vu sua or milk apple (nearly every new fruit I tried in Vietnam was called something apple, except all the ones that grew on some kind of palm).

Everything is edible but the skin and the big black seeds, though the texture changes through the fruit, also depending on ripeness. Some parts were chewy and others soft and jellylike. I found it tasted like a combination of young coconut and lychee, and the opaque milky juice was also delicious.

p.s. Pardon the lack of Viet diacritics - I hate to omit them but it's too complicated to figure out how on a Thai keyboard.

Chalk and cheese

Photo: Banana flower salad, served in a banana flower segment, in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

By now in my travels I've visited five South-east Asian nations, and I can certainly see many threads tying the region together, from the ancient monuments to what I saw dubbed "Hindu-Buddhism", to fried rice and fish sauce. But amidst the commonalities, there are many distinctions as well.

A few days after arriving in Thailand, I laugh at my foolish former self that could ever have confused the sound of Thai and Vietnamese. Even though I hardly know any words of Thai, there is this really evident "Thai-ness" to the sound of it that wouldn't let me mistake it for anything else, although I'm not able to pin it down. (I hear Lao is hardly differentiable from Thai so I'll wait to be tested by that).

Likewise, when I had my first bite of an eggplant salad in Bangkok, the flavours cried out "THAI!", but I'd be hard-pressed to say why. The dressing was clearly composed of lime juice, fish sauce, rau ram, dried shrimp, chile, sugar - all of which could just as easily belong in Vietnam. But in the way they were put together, in the proportions and the cooking technique, there was no doubt where the salad came from.

I'm looking forward to many more such distinctive moments....

I think I'm in love

This naughty little water buffalo is eating corn that was meant for humans! And eating them one whole ear at a mouthful, at that.

But how could you be mad at him when he is so cute and happy? And so calm that I could come right next to him without him stirring at all.

Banh mi

The bread in Vietnam is absolutely delicious. French colonialism brought the baguette to the region, and the locals improved upon it to make it their own, adding some rice flour to the wheat, adjusting the recipe to the local climate.

We ate banh mi for breakfast on many of our Saigon mornings, often with op la! (exclamation mark all mine), a name that makes me happy just to hear it. It means fried egg, and is another legacy from the French 'au plat'.

Our amazing host also taught us the secret Vietnamese way to toast banh mi, when it needs a bit of a lift or just when you want it to be extra crisp. Most Viet homes don't have ovens, since grilling and frying are much more pleasant and practical in the heat and humidity. And even if you had a toaster, you can't really fit a baguette into one, especially the fat round Viet variety.

So instead you toast it on the stovetop - in a pot. Sounds crazy, but it made the most delicious crisp crust with a soft, warm inside, as if it had just come out of the oven.

To make it, you put a large pot over medium-high heat, then put the baguette in on a plate, then put on a tight-fitting lid. You're basically steaming it without water. Apparently leaving it there for 10-15 minutes gives the best results, but even 5 minutes made it really tasty. We are anxious to get home and experiment to see what this method does to other kinds of bread!

Lunch in a leaf

Heat, humidity, strong sun. Prawns from the river, vegetables from the alluvial plain, noodles formed into delicate vermicelli from rice grown in paddies. Lunch in My Tho.

Water Hyacinth

Water hyacinth is just one more of the many edible plants that grow rampant across SEA. We were told that no one bothers to cultivate it, since you can just go pick it for free whenever you want.

We sampled a blossom culled from one of the Nine Dragons (Cuu Long) of the Mekong Delta - a mild taste, but pleasant enough, and the real thing much more beautiful than the photo.

More from the floating market

A customer at Cai Rang heads home, where she'll sell the produce she's picked up wholesale.

The fertile Mekong Delta region is famous all over Vietnam for its richness, for its three annual crops of rice, and for its fruit, the best we tasted.

Floating markets

Photo: A market vendor pulls up to our boat to sell us banana sweets at the Cai Rang market, Can Tho, Vietnam.

Ever since I first read about them I've dreamed of the floating markets of South-East Asia, so finally arriving at one of them was an epoch in the trip!

Indeed it was as bright, colourful, and crowded as we expected, though we arrived toward the end of the market. It is mostly for wholesale, and you can tell the product being sold by the fruit or vegetable tied to the masthead!

We didn't get to completely fulfill my dream, which was to eat noodle soup from a boat (our hosts were dubious about the hygiene), but we did get gorgeous sticky-rice packets wrapped in banana leaves and steamed. The filling was a sweet combination of bean and banana, the latter turning pink from the heat and the whole thing a lovely sticky treat. Ngon!

Trappings of a culinary culture

Photo: Rice paper wrappers on a bed of herbs, My Tho, Vietnam.

Once I was sitting around with some friends and we were joking about our cultural heritages. Mostly my French-Jewish friend and I were commiserating with each other that our ethnicities predisposed us to depression. To lighten the mood, our Vietnamese friend piped up with: "You can tell I'm Vietnamese because I like to wrap things in lettuce and dip them in sauce!"

I'm not sure what, if anything, this says about "the Vietnamese psyche", but these delicious roll-your-own options are certainly characteristic of the cuisine. Everywhere we went in southern Vietnam, anyhow, every meal was accompanied by a vast and generous pile of foliage, with just the right combination of herbs and greens for each dish.

Besides lettuce and mustard greens, we often were given these transparent rice wrappers to contain various foods. So thin and delicate they don't need to be dampened, the papers held together noodles, meats, herbs, and sauce without spilling, yet melted into the mouth. Ngon (delicious)!

Longan

While in Vietnam I got the expert fruit tour, and got to try at least 8 new fruits I had never heard of before.

I'd had longan before, but I'd never seen it on the tree, as here in someone's garden in My Tho, in the Mekong Delta.

Three essential Vietnamese skills

Photo: This auntie, already proficient in all three skills and more, hacks away at a segment of a "water coconut" to accompany a sumptuous lunch in My Tho, Vietnam.

1. The peremptory wave that halts the torrential flow of motorbikes long enough to let you cross the street.

2. The right angle to tip your rice bowl to your mouth in order to scoop the last bits of food in with your chopsticks.

And for the old ladies and those who aspire to be them:

3. The friendly, yet firm slap on the shoulder that punctuates any discussion and especially victory in a little debate. Bonus points for making every conversation sound like an argument when really it's a friendly discussion, and for the proper cackle of Ha! Ha! Ha! when you are proven right about something.

Tamarind crab

After a long hard struggle we managed to escape the same-y food of the guided tour long enough for this delicious seafood lunch in the outskirts of Halong City.

The tamarind crab pictured here wasn't the best crab I'd ever had, its flesh a little stringy, but the tamarind sauce is a brilliant invention, sour, chile-hot, pleasantly sticky, and pairing beautifully with the richness of the crab meat.

Ngon!

Sacred monkey forest

It's not easy being a parent of twins, whether you're a human or a monkey. I saw the mommy monkey desperately hanging onto each twin by the tail as they tried to dash in different directions with all their strength. When one escaped, the daddy monkey jumped in to prevent disaster, and the little family snuggled together for awhile, oblivious to the giant tourists standing right next to them.

In the Sacred Monkey Forest, Ubud, Bali.

Going to the Mausoleum

Pictured: NOT the mausoleum, but a view of an Angkorian temple.

Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum was an interesting rock and hard place in our tour of Vietnam.

It wasn't on our itinerary, in fact had been carefully kept off our itinerary, yet the very stubborn tour guide we were landed with in Hanoi was very insistent that we should go. We tried to be diplomatic and eventually pled exhaustion and the need for a late start that morning. And then after all that discussion, he brought us to the site anyhow and made us stand and take pictures while he told us things about the complicated embalming process that keeps the founding father's body intact (against his own express wishes). I am sure you will all be relieved to hear that the technology is being transferred from Russia to Vietnam so that he will no longer have to fly to Moscow for maintenance each year as in the past, but can instead be cared for at home. Embalming is a rather strange thing.

Going to the mausoleum used to have a different connotation though - apparently it used to be a commonly used expression for going to the loo. But one has to be careful about using it that way now, we were told.

As for us, we've evolved our own. Apparently the little kids growing up with my friend's mother used to use a decrepit governor's mansion for a loo while they were busy playing, and the expression stuck. "Going to the governor's mansion" has rather a nicer ring to it than going to see a man about a horse, at least.

An chay

Photo: hu tieu chay at a food stall in Can Tho, Vietnam.

I'm a bit fascinated by what I've seen of Vietnamese attitudes to vegetarianism.

On one hand, Vietnam is a historically Buddhist country with a very strong culinary tradition of vegetarian cooking. On the other hand, it can be really hard to find examples of the vegetarian food, as restaurants tend to be very fishy and meaty.

From what I gather, while monks and some few laypeople are strict vegans (eschewing even onion and garlic - imagine Viet food with no fried onion, let alone nuoc mam!), most Viet Buddhists happily eat all manner of living creatures. But it's quite common to fast (eat vegan) on the 1st and 15th of the lunar calendar, so every homecook knows how to prepare a wealth of traditional vegetarian dishes. Otherwise, your best bet is to find one of the vegetarian eateries - they aren't as common as you'd hope, but once you find one you can eat pretty much anything in the huge Vietnamese repertoire in a tasty vegan version.

I've been lucky enough to be staying in a Saigon home and eating homecooking for nearly half my time in the country, including quite a few veggie dishes. One night recently, an auntie prepared vegetarian bun rieu for us. The original version is a spicy tomato and oniony crab soup with rice vermicelli. Soy replaces the crab, and we got to observe the traditional way it's prepared. First you soak soybeans for a long time until they're soft, then rub their skins off. They're pureed and strained into two grades, creamy and frothy (the whey-like part). The latter is curdled (using tamarind as the curdling agent!) to make this really nice light grainy tofu that elegantly replaces the chewy crab floating at the top of the bowl.

The auntie who made the soup has actually been eating vegan for a few months for religious reasons, but despite turning out plenty of food for the visiting fish-and-chip-ocrite, she is surprisingly ununderstanding about my breed of vegetarianism. She told my friend that I should "practice" eating meat! I found this contrast surprising and amusing, but in the end it makes sense. Vegetarianism in Vietnam is traditionally a matter of religion, not taste, and when times are hard, you have to eat what you can get!

In Vietnam, what you get is liable to be delicious.

Compliment of the day

Said the tout who snagged us for her riverboat tour of the Mekong Delta, of me:

"She has a very gentle smile, just like a Vietnamese girl."

A village on stilts

Houses on stilts in the flood plain around Tonle Sap Lake, Cambodia.

Cambodian folk dance

Feet in a Cambodian folk dance.

Cambodian breakfast

Sadly blurry, but a delicious part of the buffet at our fancy hotel in Siem Reap.

Cold rice vermicelli, coconut curry, fresh cucumber, peanuts, banana flower, beansprouts and herbs.

Ricefields of Bali

Rice cultivation in the town of Ubud (Pengosekan). I did yoga at a studio that overlooked these fields.

Congee

More highlights of the breakfast buffet in Siem Reap.