Beyond the Killing Fields: Cambodia's heart and soul

For most people, Cambodia is Angkor Wat.

But the country has so much more to offer than that. The Khmer Rouge genocide happened during our lifetimes, making the Killing Fields every bit as poignant if not more than the sunrise over Angkor Wat.

It's impossible not to be impressed by the resilience of people who grew up without parents or grandparents. You could easily understand if Cambodia were filled with angry militants. But somehow peace has prevailed.

Most of the people in Cambodia speak English and are trying to be players in the global economy and community. These are dirt poor people who don't have running water, but they manage to squeeze every ounce out of their education. Families depend on tourism and philanthropy for the very basic necessities. Even the village water pumps are donated by charities. If you go through the villages near Siem Reap (Angkor) you will see a sign on almost every water pump that says who donated it, and a flag representing their country. Many schools and orphanages bear the name of an NGO so that even the kids who are forced to sell trinkets to tourists can study and have greater opportunities than their parents. The international community is helping Cambodia get its feet back on the ground in formal and indirect ways both. Remarkably there is no resentment about it on the part of the Khmer people and no self-pity either. You will never mock Angelina Jolie again when you visit Cambodia.

Phnom Penh has a chill Bohemian vibe with killer colonial and Khmer traditional architecture. Residents are not destroying their city for a quick and easy buck. And almost all the vendors touting to tourists are totally cool. They don't look at you like "You have money and I don't so therefore YOU BUY NOW!" Even the tuk-tuk drivers are laid-back. What a contrast with Vietnam! In Cambodia I felt human again, my heart wide open.

The Mai Linh Express bus from Saigon to Phnom Penh lasts about 7 hours including the border crossing. That’s about 2 hours longer than they claim but it was a smooth ride. Our bus was peopled with other peculiar passengers including a couple traveling on Cuban passports, and a Vietnamese-Australian family.

Cambodian customs and immigration was uneventful. The bus company holds your passport the whole time and they even save you trouble by filling in your forms. You just need to pay the $24 for the visa, in whatever currency you’ve got or combinations thereof.

Overall I wasn't crazy about Vietnam, but we enjoyed our 7 weeks. It was an interesting, educational experience.

A few things about Vietnam surprised us. For instance, toilets are very clean. Even at dinky roadside restaurants, the toilets were fine. They are usually Western-style commodes with seats and toilet paper. No squatters. I like squatters in theory, but they do tend to get slippery, dirty, and buggy if not cleaned regularly.

Besides the toilets, just about everything else in Vietnam is a 3^rd world classic. The traffic was heinous, as chaotic as India’s and with more motorcycles. At least in India you know to wait for a break because otherwise you will get hit. In Vietnam to cross the street you have to wade out into the traffic and trust that the drivers will go around you. Usually they do, sometimes they most certainly don’t which is why I got hit by a motorbike in Saigon.

We traveled from the north (Hanoi) to the south (Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City) and stopped at only five towns along the way. Because we stayed up to 2 weeks in each place, Josh and I get a lot of feel for the pace and style of everyday life in these towns, more so than just passing through. It was really nice to establish ourselves somewhere even for just that short time and become “temporary regulars” at coffee shops. Our only short stays were in Nha Trang (4 nights) and Dalat (3 nights). Everywhere else we stayed long enough to receive hotel discounts.

In Dalat we splurged on the Ana Mandara Resort and Spa. Dalat is a mountain town, and there isn’t much to do there anyway so we figured that this would be the best place for a relaxing retreat. This is a very busy time of year for our business and Josh was really getting burned out. So I found this deal on Agoda. Agoda is a must if you are traveling in Asia, it’s basically a Priceline/Hotwire/Venere for Asia and their prices tend to be better than other booking engines. Dalat was where we visited the coffee plantations.

My personal favorite place that we visited in Vietnam was Mui Ne. Mui Ne is a very small town near a larger town called Phan Thiet. Between Mui Ne and Phan Thiet is a beach strip, literally only one road that has only hotels and restaurants. It sounds lame but it turned out to be the most peaceful spot of the whole trip because of the chilled out surfer vibe. Not wave surfing but wind and kite surfing. Every day around noon when the winds start to pick up, hundreds of surfers at varying levels of expertise come out to play and practice.

It’s a long, long beach with soft sand. You can’t really swim in the South China Sea there because it’s rough. But the breeze keeps the air so cool that you can lay out all day (as I did) and not sweat. The eye candy is great, all the surfers many of whom do tricks in the air, and the novices learning. Their first lesson is literally flying a kite for 2 hours—that’s it! They don’t even get to surf until the 3^rd lesson.

Just as with all good surfer towns, there are plenty of places to drink beer including one brewpub down the end of the road that is a branch of Vietnamese brewpub chain Hoa Vien. We rode bicycles from the hotel, it took about 20 minutes. Unfortunately, the beer wasn’t so great so we didn’t go back. But on the way out we rode past two signs that said “Live Beer!” I immediately knew that would mean fresh beer, and the next day we checked that out. Turns out the Russian microbrewery Fifth Ocean launched a brewery branch in Saigon just three weeks earlier. We had the Fifth Ocean (Pyatiy Okean in Russian) a few times after that. There is a large Russian contingency of both tourists and expats in the southern part of Vietnam.

Saigon was great, it surpassed our expectations. Just as Hanoi let us down, Saigon inspired us. Saigon is totally different from Hanoi, and it seems most people like Hanoi better for some weird reason. Saigon is bigger, and seems to have better urban planning. There is more green space, more traffic lights, better flow of traffic and pedestrians, more sidewalks, more restaurants, more bars, and more amenities in general. The food was better and the people friendlier than they were in Hanoi. Hanoi has more brewpubs (and better ones) but that’s the only tick on its side of the chart.

One thing I liked about Saigon is all the history of the American War (that’s what Americans call the Vietnam War). The War Remnants museum in town has great exhibitions on Agent Orange showing how babies were still being born with deformities in the late 1990s.

The day-trip to the Cu Chi tunnels shows how the Viet Cong dealt their decisive blow. That’s also where you can wreak some innocent havoc on targets at the shooting range. They have M16s, AK-47, and more. It was $10 for a round of AK-47 bullets and worth every dong. We also visited the Holy See of a Vietnamese syncretic cultish religion called Cao Dai. The Cao Dai symbol is the Illuminati eye in the triangle.

Given my fascination with such things, I really enjoyed that temple, and we even arrived on time to see the noon mass/chanting ceremony. Visitors are permitted to observe from the 2nd floor and take pictures.

Vietnamese Coffee

These are robusta coffee cherries, on the tree, outside of Dalat. Vietnam is the second-largest exporter of coffee in the world, behind Brazil. Around Dalat they grow robusta; to the north around Buon Me Thuot they grow arabica. The government owns the land and leases it to farmers. The coffee trees live to about 20 years and take 3-4 years to bear fruit. The French brought coffee to Vietnam, but the Vietnamese have taken to the bean in a huge way.

Once the cherries are picked they are dried in the sun for 4-5 days. The cheap coffee is roasted with the husk on, the good stuff is run through a machine first to remove the husk. The husks are used for fertilizer, fuel or free range chicken feed.

Most Vietnamese roasters are tiny. In order to differentiate their product, they will sprinkle the beans with a small amount of flavouring - could be chocolate, vanilla, chicory or other. This gives each Vietnamese coffee its own distinct character. The most prized variety is Ca Phe Chon, which is the near-famous weasel coffee. In Dalat it goes for 10,000 dong for 100gm; it is about three times that price in Saigon.

The Vietnamese coffee experience begins with tea. Of course, condensed milk is used. The Vietnamese do not like black coffee. They like black coffee shops, however. They have a thing for sitting in near pitch black coffee shops at night, quietly sipping cups and having conversation. Daytime coffee shops are more convivial. As for me, I love the rich, chocolatey, earthy character of a great Vietnamese coffee.

Some Nha Trang Notes

Nha Trang is Vietnam's premier beach town. It's scenic, surrounded by mountains and islands in the sea. It's got a sizeable population and a (perhaps poorly deserved) reputation for good nightlife. All things considered, we really liked Nha Trang (all things = bad weather). We came during the rainy season and we got what we paid for. Lots of clouds, hardly any sun, and some rain. One day at the brewpub we rented a few of their lounge chairs on the beach, but it was already clouded over.

So maybe we didn’t really “do” Nha Trang. We stayed just 4 nights, part of that’s because our room wasn’t super comfy and we ended up spending all our time in the brewpub anyway. Our hotel was a small family-run establishment called Ha Van, a typical mid-range with an LCD TV, good air-con, and some half-assed fixtures you can expect from low wage contractors. $25/night. It was an okay place for 4 nights but would not have wanted to stay much longer.

There was no nightlife to be seen, heard, or experienced. The few nightclubs around are inside hotels and I can only imagine the caliber of music they were playing based on what was pumping out of the low-grade sound systems at the backpacker bars. We probably could have gotten a tip on a fun place to go, but were working a lot at the time and knowing Josh he would have declined to go out anyway. I’m from Miami, and have pretty high standards for these things!

Never mind, the Louisiane Brewhouse was the highlight of Nha Trang. It’s a brewpub with a private stretch of sandy beach, a large swimming pool, billiards, cabanas, and on-site masseurs. With all that you’d expect some snooty or overpriced arrangement, but it’s neither nor. The service is friendly, and the pool is free to use. If you want a lounge chair on the beach it's $1.50. House beers are 35000 dong, about $2 a pint. They don't even carry third-party beers! Unfortunately they nail you on the brewery tour. It’s 180,000 dong ($10) per person. We didn’t take the tour.

The beer was good at Lousiane. The dunkel/dark lager is the best one—full-on lip-smacking chocolate malts and mocha. The pilsner and the seasonal “crystal” are both well hopped and session-friendly. The house character is a delicate, soft palate. They're moreish.

Nha Trang has a mellow vibe. We expected a brash, loud, obnoxious seedy seaside town but it’s not that at all. The local vendors seemed friendlier than anywhere we had been in Vietnam before that, and we ate some decent street food including seafood grilled before our eyes. Clams on the half shell with peanuts, garlic, and chili and an order of squids. Total for both about $6. We were overcharged. Once or twice we paid the locals’ price without having to bicker--such as the ban xeo (seafood pancake) at 50 cents for 3 pancakes. Not getting ripped off is pretty remarkable in Vietnam.

Something to be Thankful For

Cramped into the tiny beds on the sleeper bus – well, one of us was cramped anyway – we cruised south, with the next three legs of the journey pretty much set.

We probably liked our first week in Hoi An better. The weather was brilliant, the hotel room as large as any we’ve had. We rode our bikes to the beach, drank bia hoi and chilled out in the UNESCO old town, a former trading post not unlike Melaka, which we visited last month.

I awoke at the start of our second week to pounding 4am rain. And so it was that winter announced its arrival to Hoi An. The rain came in the door and window and covered the floor. Even once we’d got that mopped up, we had a week of progressively cooler weather in front of us. I’m talking mid teens here –cold! We would see tourists still with board shorts and T-shirts and wonder if they were just stubborn or if they simply did not expect such weather in tropical southeast Asia and therefore didn’t have anything warmer. I know we weren’t expecting such weather.

The sleeper bus is full of foreigners, with a handful of locals, almost like a little backpacker slumber party. It’s strange riding through places at night, so devoid of life. We wonder what we might be missing blowing through these spots. Probably not much, but you never know.

We’re well on our way now. I think after six months on the road we’ve started to settle into our lifestyle. There is – to me anyway – a much greater sense of being a nomad. We like to take our time everywhere we go. I’m curious how that will play out in the next couple of months. We’ll be making more stops, all the while trying to maximize our happiness.

To that end, we’ve allowed a splurge – holidays in Hong Kong. We bought the ticket the other day. That city has been near the top of both of our lists for a while. As excited as we are, though, we have a few other things to take care of first.

All we know is that we’re headed south, with any luck away from the grey, rainy weather. It’s getting a bit tedious really. We rented a motorbike to ride into Da Nang to visit the brewpub. Of course it started raining. But armed with cheap plastic ponchos, hats and everything else we could think of, we managed to stay dry. Trying to get back out of the city in the rain, dark and Friday evening rush hour was another pleasure cruise altogether.
But all’s well that ends well and aside from doing a few extra loops around some of the roundabouts in the interest of safety, we were soon back at home.

We made some hot chocolate and flipped on the foreign news networks. We’ve seen BBC World, CNN International, Deutsche Weld, NHK, the French one, the Korean one and even the Australian one. So answer me this – where’s the CBC when you need it? Seriously, I want a Canucks game. Pick a Sunday morning and I’m there. I’m so hurtin’ I’ll take a Leafs game. Shudder.

End rant.

I wish, when you are reading this, that you could smell the incense burning at every shop, hear the horns from every vehicle, feel the mist and sit on the little kiddie seats at the street stalls. There’s just so much that cannot be conveyed, even with blog posts and photographs. We roll through a place like My Son, a small temple complex built for Champa kings hundreds of years ago, and we can only seen ruins and remnants. But all that’s happened here, it’s just hard to capture. Kings came for spiritual guidance and contemplation. The Viet Cong used the temples as a hideout, resulting in them being bombed. The ways in which this stuff resonates is hard to explain. But that’s why we’re out here.

The sleeper bus bounces and jostles its way down Highway 1, the main north-south highway in this decidedly north-south country. I can’t really sleep. Just like with any other bus, I’m still crammed in, albeit in horizontal format. I only start to get some rest when we finally come to a rest stop.

A really long rest stop.

When I awake from my rather fitful, cramped slumber, we are again stopped. Or still stopped. Hard to tell – I wasn’t conscious. But we’re not moving and none of the other vehicles around us are moving either. A glimpse to my right and the winding mountain highway is filled with vehicles, none moving.

We were stuck for goodness knows how long. We only got bits and pieces of information. There was an accident, that much we know for sure. Up at the pass, maybe on one of the bends…

Something To Be Thankful For

Hi it’s me Sunshine. The sleeper buses in Vietnam use recliners. Their beds stretch out almost all the way back, and there are two bunk levels. Josh and I were on the lower level, side by side. Along with the foreigners, several Vietnamese were on the bus including a wrinkly old lady. It’s true, people like me and the wrinkly old lady fit in the bed quite well. People like Josh fit in up to their knees. His legs extended all the way to the toilet. In Josh’s words, “The person sitting on the john can give me a foot massage.” I’m not sure he’d really want that.

The berths are better than seats but still not comfortable. They give you blankets but it’s still a bus ride. Sleep came in fits. After one fit, I awoke with a bad dream.

Somebody was lying dead in the middle of the road. A motorcyclist, surrounded by splatters of his own blood. In the dream I kept thinking about how this was the first accident we saw on the trip, in spite of the lawless traffic. After all, we’ve rented motorcycles several times so far. It’s scary but we’ve never seen or experienced even a near-miss. The dream was proof that shit happens. And we don’t even know what happened.

So I go back to sleep, wondering what the dream means. The next time I wake up, I discover that the bus is stopped on the side of the road. I look out the window and there is a long line of buses and trucks ahead and all around us. Something must have happened. I start to drift back off to sleep after checking the time. It’s 7:15 AM. As I drift, I overhear someone saying in English that there was an accident up ahead.

Thankfully the weather was cool. The engine was off and there was no air conditioning and the toilet couldn’t be used. There was nothing for me to do but get more sleep. Each time I woke up, I’d look outside and we hadn’t moved. Many of the passengers were smoking outside. The clock ticked. 10:30, 11:30. I heard a guy talking on his cell phone (there’s service on the top of a mountain in Vietnam?). He was telling someone in Nha Trang that we were supposed to arrive at 6AM but that he would be late. I did the math. If we were supposed to arrive at 6AM and now it’s noon and we’re still not moving but we have another 90 kilometers to go, this probably means we were stopped on the side of the road for 8 hours. We arrived in Nha Trang after 2PM. Remarkably, the driver still pulled over at a rest stop for almost an hour before we arrived. At that point we had 80 kilometers to go. Wouldn’t you think he’d just power up and get to Nha Trang—why stop an hour before the destination?

Doesn’t matter. We made it. Late and tired, but safe. I shudder to think how bad that accident must have been to have halted hundreds of vehicles going in both directions over the mountain—and to have likely infected my dreams. Somebody went out with a flourish.

Random notes

For the past couple of weeks we’ve been holed up in Hoi An. It’s a nice place, quiet and with lots of things to do. Our room was big and cheap so we decided just to let it roll a while.

We ended up getting busy with work – freelancing comes in waves – and have stayed a long time now. We’re not quite sucked in, although we do know the real price of a bowl of noodles and know how to acquire homemade rice wine. We kind of wish we didn’t know that, all things considered.

To break things up, I shoehorned a cooking class into the schedule. I learned how to make pho, and how to fold banana leaves full of shrimp, and shred some salad. We did a tour of the market and a tour of the fields. In the fields we heard horns and drums. Apparently this was funeral music – it’s things like that you only learn from having a local guide. We came across some old palm branches on the ground. They were covering sprouts, and the guide says “It takes three days to grow sprouts. The Chinese have a chemical that makes it grow in 20 minutes. That’s why they die of cancer.”

The Vietnamese, being right beside China, you’d think would have a strong Chinese influence. Indeed, there seems to be some animosity on the part of the Vietnamese towards their northern neighbours. You can’t buy Chinese food, and that quip in the fields wasn’t the first we’ve heard.

What else?

Veg food. Veg food is a lifesaver in Vietnam for several reasons. One, the Vietnamese vegetarian restaurants are honest. They are Buddhist, and they walk the talk. Unlike traditional Vietnamese restaurants, they don’t overcharge white people, they make you feel at home, and they smile genuinely. Great vibe. We’ve found a place around the corner from us that has a veg buffet at lunch, and do vegetarian versions of cao lau and other Hoi An specialties. We’ve gone there almost every day since we’ve been in Hoi An and the lunch buffet is 50 cents up to $1 depending on what you want. The second reason why veg food is great in Vietnam is that it’s tasty. Traditional Vietnamese street food and small local restaurants tend to have limited menus with uninspired foods. Not so with the veg! More depth of flavor, more variety, more fun.

Vietnamese vegetarian is like the Chinese Buddhist vegetarian, in that they don’t rely on tofu and they incorporate a wealth of wheat gluten products made into different “meats.” The Vietnamese do a damn fine job with the “meats.” These offer a rich array of tastes and textures. The organ “meat” tastes so rich they could almost be mistaken for the real thing. Sometimes they will use a stick of lemongrass instead of a bone to boost flavor and offer interesting appearance. These meats often taste and feel a lot better than what they are attempting to imitate. Vegetarian chicken (white meat and drumstick), salmon steak, pork, beef, shrimp, squid, venison, kidney, deli meat, etc are each modeled, colored, seasoned, and textured to appear like those things. If I look hard enough I swear I could track down a veggie balut egg. A lot of people don’t “get” the veg meat thing but I do—it’s about cruelty-free varieties in taste, texture, and appearance. In Vietnam, Buddhists eat veg at least twice a month, on new moon and full but we noticed that the veg restaurants did good business all month long in both Hue and Hoi An. Usually we were the only foreigners.

So cheers to Vietnam for that. The Hoi An food is good stuff, some of it. I like cao lau (pronounced Koh Lau), a bowl full of sprouts, broth, greens, meat, pork cracklings and the eponymous, proprietary noodle. It’s not a soup but comes with a small bit of dark soya-based broth for moisture. Mi quang is another good meal in a bowl, based on a blander white noodle than cao lau. It’s got more broth than cao lau but still without being a soup. Its broth is bright yellow from turmeric and coconut. Josh is a cao lau guy, and Sun is a mi quang girl. Fried wontons are flat fried wontons, spread out and topped with a shrimp and pork mixture.

I’m dreading having to repack my bags. It’s a BIG task. My bag kills porters like beer kills brain cells. Sunshine’s bag glorps out over the pavement like an African bullfrog. We have a lot of stuff. But you’d be amazed what comes in handy. Leaving Germany I wondered what the point of my cold weather clothes was going to be? Try cold nights in Cappadocia, rain storms at the fig house and three weeks of cool, rainy weather in Vietnam.

While most things are permanent fixtures some things are more temporary. Toiletries in particular. Right now we have deodorant from Miami, soap from Turkey, toothpaste from India, shampoo from Germany, mouthwash from Malaysia, shaving cream from Thailand and at the end of my left arm I have Abu Dhabi toilet paper.

Then there’s the street vendors in Vietnam. They have some fantastic sales pitches. “You buy here!” “You buy something in my store!” “You buy this now!”

Awesome. I wonder what it actually says in the Vietnam Handbook of Selling to Westerners that convinces them that they are your customer, not the other way around. Or that commanding someone to buy something actually works.

We are heading south after Hoi An. To Nha Trang, which we’ve heard a lot of mixed reviews on. Will be interesting to see how we like it. We’ve finalized some of our travel plans for the future, including Angkor and Hong Kong. Ramble on!

Hue to Go

We left Hanoi in a dizzying flurry as I scrambled to get my work done before we had to leave for the airport. It was a mad scramble. We barely had time to hit the coffee shop. Vietnamese coffee, for those unfamiliar, is a small cup of very thick, almost extract-like stuff. It is sweetened with condensed milk. Most Vietnamese drink theirs over ice, but concerns about the quality of the tap water relegated us to warm coffee in the coffee shops. The backpacker places are okay, but we greatly preferred the vibe at the locals’ shops. But we mostly went to the local corner coffee. Sitting on the corner by the giant viney tree that has a mouse living in it, listening to the sounds of the songbirds and watching the world ride by on motorcycles is what it’s all about. We became regulars at the corner shop, such that we did not need to place an order, just merely sit down and they knew what we wanted.

We rode out to Hanoi airport, a little sad that the place didn’t work out. We found ways to make it more relaxed and enjoyable, but it was certainly not going to fit the bill for a two-month stand. A more complicated autumn awaits us, on the road, traveling the length of Vietnam.

We arrived in Hue after a short flight on a prop plane. I hate props. I don’t trust them very much.

We sensed the more laid back vibe immediately, much to our relief. Our hotel was friendly upon arrival and soon we were off to dinner. It was across the street, at a fairly uninteresting touristy place with the live ethnic band and things like that. We loved the beer-steamed crab though. So sweet and succulent, one of the best crabs I’ve ever had.

We then paid a visit to the DMZ. No, not the demilitarized zone, DMZ is a bar. A dive bar for expats and tourists, basically. Loud, crappy music downstairs so we sat upstairs. It was a very laid back scene. We investigated the town’s three indigenous beers - Hue Beer, Huda and Festival, the latter being the clear winner.

It started, slowly, to rain. On the way back to the hotel, it opened up for real, soaking us. Well, me, since Sun had brought her umbrella. It was the beginning of Typhoon Mirinae, which actually hit much further south, but spend two days lashing us with its tail. The next day, the rain was near legendary. We got a break long enough to get dinner and get back to DMZ. We sat on the upper balcony under the tin roof and the skies opened once again, pummeling down on the defenseless city. Winds were gusting and the power went out, but the show went on. Stay and drink in a dark bar or go outside in the middle of a tropical storm? Not a tough choice, really.

After two days of storm, a minor lull allowed us to take in the Citadel under drizzly skies. Hue was once an imperial capital of the Nguyen Dynasty, which lasted for 150 years or so, albeit half of them as a vassal to the French and later the Japanese. The Nguyen “Kaisers”, as we keep overhearing from German-speaking tour guides, left a handful of monuments, none more impressive than the sprawling citadel with its own forbidden city, modeled after the one in Beijing.

When the emperors died, they were interred at special tombs, which are park-like complexes devoted to their well-being in the afterlife. Each of these is an attraction unto itself. They’re a bit outside town, so we rented a scooter and went to visit.

We picked the wrong day. You see, even without a typhoon Hue in November is a wet place to be. The city gets 3.6 times the amount of rain in November as Vancouver does. And 2.7 times the amount that Miami gets in June, that city’s wettest month. Basically Hue combines the tropical storm downpours of Miami in June with the constant grey and showers of Vancouver in November. Rock on.

So we were armed for the rain. We had ponchos, like everyone else in Hue. We had one bag under the seat with plastic bags around our valuables. Sun kept her purse under the poncho. She had an umbrella as well and a hoodie too. I had my jacket, a spare shirt and a hat. We did our best, but it wasn’t enough. WE GOT SOAKED. The rain poured all day.

We saw the Minh Mang tomb – very peaceful and impressive grounds – but could not get the scooter through the mud road to the Kai Dinh tomb. We tried. I crashed through puddles and powered my way out of mud pits. But a dip in the road provided a mud pit too much for a mere scooter to handle. I gave it a go but realized it just wasn’t going to work. So we turned back. In town, we caught some sites, including a pagoda.

The Thien Mu Pagoda is on a pleasant grounds with Buddhist gardens. Monks and nuns chanted in one of the main buildings. On the grounds was also the car that took monk Quang Duc to Saigon, where he burned himself to death in protest against the government – an event best remembered by its iconic photograph.

Hue is a peaceful place, an easy place to spend time. There’s a day or two’s worth of tourist stuff to do, but for the most part we worked and relaxed, happy to get a taste of the Southeast Asia we love. We’ve eaten a lot of Buddhist food, which is strictly vegetarian. One place has a pretty good menu and we’ve gone back. We found a lunch place with simple, excellent food including the most complex example of bun bo Hue I’ve found – the city’s iconic noodle soup. It’s got beef, pork ball, congealed pig’s blood and the whole thing.

The clouds parted as we left for Hoi An…d’oh!