Street Soup

We left our hostel, map in hand, bundled in our fleece sweaters against the cool air of a Hanoi evening in late December. In a show of bravado, we struck out across the street. We jumped back in a panic. We froze for a moment on the curb, watched the scooters whiz by us, the drivers nonchalantly navigating the narrow, congested streets.

Eventually, we made it across that street, then another. Our destination was on the next corner, which was fantastic because Hanoi's lightening fast ribbons of scooter traffic were quickly turning me into a nervous wreck. But we'd made it, and there she was.

Tasty soups at Pho 24 

Perched on a small plastic stool behind a long, low table on the street corner was a middle-aged woman, her graying hair held back in a checkered headscarf, deftly chopping a whole chicken into bite-sized pieces with a thick-bladed machete. The table was loaded with soup ingredients and condiments - chicken parts (yum, feet?), slabs of beef, onions, garlic, noodles, vegetables, herbs, countless unlabeled bottles of sauce - all marinating in the perpetual dust of Hanoi's streets.

We plunked ourselves down on stools, pointed to the beef and said, "two?" holding up the appropriate number of fingers and smiling hopefully. Success! She conferred with the soup tureen boiling away beside her stool, tossed in the meat and veggies, and grinning, handed us two bowls of steaming 'pho bo' - Vietnamese beef noodle soup, which we devoured immediately.

I love pho, and nowhere does it better than a street stall in Hanoi. (Although the Pho 24 chain does a good job too!) This is a city where daily life is out on the sidewalks. Street food is king, storefronts spill right out to the curb. My other favourite experience here was the 'bia hoi,' or fresh beer, stored without preservatives in big kegs and doled out in mugs on corners. The beer line isn't carbonated, like it would be in Canada, and so the tube coming from the bottom of the keg is plugged with a cork - or, when business is good, with the bartender's thumb. Like all other street-side businesses, patrons perch on tiny plastic stools at tiny plastic tables.

My Dad is so proud of me.

We spent five days in Hanoi, mostly eating and drinking (I literally had pho for every meal for about three days. I regret nothing.) but we managed some tourist attractions as well. The military museum has a big display of both Russian and American military equipment that you're allowed to climb on, as well as one-sided displays on both the French and American wars. It wasn't the one side that we're used to hearing about back home, so it was interesting to dig through the propaganda to find a Vietnamese perspective.

The mausoleum: you cannot get closer than this from the front.
Immediately after this was taken, the guards yelled at us to back away.

I also got to see my very first embalmed communist leader! The body of revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh, or 'Uncle Ho,' is preserved in an enormous mausoleum in Hanoi. To see him, you must walk a half kilometre around and behind the mausoleum itself - by no means can you approach from the front across the parade square. You check your purse at one kiosk and your camera and cell phone at another. Then you walk single file along a thin red carpet into the marble building, under intense scrutiny by Vietnam's tallest military guards, all in spotless white uniforms. You do not talk, or linger, or put your hands in your pockets. Pictures are right out, thus the mandatory camera handover. Everyone shuffles slowly past the pale, waxy-skinned, serene Uncle Ho (who, by the way, wanted specifically to be cremated rather than embalmed and preserved), observes respectfully and emerges from the chilly mausoleum back into the daylight.

Cool, if slightly creepy.

We also checked out a few of the historic temples, and strolled around Hoan Kiem Lake in the old quarter. And then we ate. And ate and ate and ate.

S.

Fighting with Spiders, and Other Creature Stories

To wrap up my posts on the Philippines, I have a couple of stories.

Our first morning in El Nido, we were signed up to go an an island hopping tour that began at 8 am. When the alarm went off, Dan hit the 'off' button and drowsily stumbled out of bed. He turned on the bathroom light and then before entering, turned around, probably to tell me to get up. Instead, he froze.

He said, "Don't move."

Which scared the hell out of me, obviously, because I naturally assumed that immediately behind my head lurked a massive and ferocious monster poised to devour me whole - or something with a similar terror value. Then, in a squeaky whisper, he said, "THERE IS A GIANT SPIDER ON THE WALL!"

It's watching you...

I sat bolt upright and followed his stare: high in the corner of the room, a jet black spider with a leg-span larger than my palm and huge, glowing eyes was staring right back at Dan. Who backed out of the room to get help (after snapping a picture of course). I did not move. I'm proud of my reputation as a fearless lady, but I was not about to mess around with an enormous murder-spider.

Dan reappeared a moment later, followed by the receptionist. He looked at the spider, looked at us, paralyzed by fear, and grinned. He casually strolled over to the spider, reached up with his bare hand, and shooed it from the room - touching it in the process.

I'm sitting there thinking, this man deserves a medal of some kind. And maybe some antivenin, just in case the monster's fangs dripped on him. But he just says, "You don't need to worry. Not poisonous. That is a Filipino house spider!" And then he wanders off, chuckling to himself about the sissy tourists.

We managed to put it out of our minds for the rest of the day. But when we returned from our tour that evening, I bent down to rummage through my pack for something, and out from behind it scuttled - to my horror - another spider. But slightly smaller. Slightly.

Dan and I both jumped backwards in terror, but in a moment of either supreme bravery or extreme idiocy, I decided that for the sake of my pride, I couldn't call on reception again. Who knows why pride mattered at this point. But I mustered all of my self control, and I reached out (absolutely without touching it. I shudder at just the thought.) and began to shoo it towards the open window.

It ran below the window and under our bed. We left the room immediately to drink as much as we could afford and for the next several nights we upheld a ban on looking under the bed.

This is Dan's big mitt in the photo, so it is a sizable bug.

As for other insects, we saw some big cicadas and beetles and ants and the like, but the largest bug we saw was a giant grasshopper. He showed up on our bathroom door while we were hanging out in Sabang. I thought he was a bit cute, really.

The other story:

Dan was swimming in the waves at Sabang's beach on the second or third day we were there, and a local guy approached him. He said, "You shouldn't swim right now. One of the boats saw a crocodile!"

We didn't think much of it until, a few hours later, we were sitting on out porch and playing cards, and a couple of boys ran top speed past us on the beach, largely remarkable because as we were at the end of the beach, no one ever walked past. Let alone ran. A couple more ran by, and as we watched them go, we noticed something in the water way out behind them.

Something long and large and a bit lumpy.

So, we donned our sandals and climbed up the jagged rocks just past our little stretch of beach to get a better view. Turns out there WAS in fact a salt water crocodile lurking in the bay! Sadly, our pictures aren't worthy of putting up. But we got a couple views of his snout and his tail, and he was at least three, if not four, metres long.

As it turns out, although nearby Puerto Princesa has a commercial crocodile farm, wild crocs are almost unheard of around the Sabang area. So within twenty minutes of us scaling the rocks to check it out, half of Sabang's small population had raced down the beach and climbed up to get a look.

For the rest of the week, all of the locals employed in the tourist business denied the croc's presence until we told them that we'd seen it ourselves, because they were worried about the town gaining a reputation as unsafe. When we left a few days after the sighting, the local opinion was that it had probably swam up the river and into the mangroves in search of food.

And to cheer you up after the stories about scary creatures, here is a picture of a cute beach dog.

The jeepney: the best vehicle going. I think that tube either a snorkel or a gas line. Or both?

We went to the Philippines on a bit of a whim, and despite the crazy creatures, I am so glad that we did. The people are fantastic, always smiling and happy. The mangoes are the sweetest I have ever tasted. The landscape on Palawan is unbelievable. And they drive in jeepneys. Amazing. I'd go back in a heartbeat.

S.

Sabang - or, This Is My Happy Place.

The beach at Sabang drowns at high tide, the water sweeping greedily right up to the line of sentinel coconut palms that lean sleepily over the sand. At low tide, the beach is a wide graceful crescent of white sand, the flotsam raked away by the diligent staff of each little guesthouse or resort, the heavy thump and swish of the waves a slow, hypnotic beat. 









This is where, despite my better efforts and my previous protests (those of you who followed me through South America will remember my outrage here and here), I became a morning person. The electricity - and more specifically, the fan - only ran from 6 pm until 10:30 pm, so by 6:30 am each morning, at the latest, we both woke up in a hot sweat, desperate for a cold shower or a dip in the waves.



 




 We stayed for five nights in a little bamboo cottage on the beach, swimming (well, more fighting with the waves), drinking two-dollar-a-twixer sugarcane rum, reading, and playing cards. 

We had a single touristy day during which we trekked through the jungle for two hours to see the region's most famed attraction: a massive subterranean river, recently voted in as one of the world's new natural wonders of the world.

Although it’s a two hour drive from the Puerto Princesa City, tour companies in the city sign people up for one-day tours to Sabang to see the river, rather than encouraging tourism in Sabang itself. Sad for Sabang's potential for a tourist boom, amazing for that gloriously quiet beach.


The river was interesting. The guides use paddles rather than motors to take you through the
prescribed route, one-and-a-half kilometres down the river and back (the full river is just over eight kilometres long, so the only sound is the echo of the paddle slapping against water. The stalactites and stalagmites the guides pointed out to us were inevitably interpreted as either food items ('the mushroom,' 'the garlic') or as religious symbols ('the cathedral,' 'the face of Jesus'). It's a deliciously cool break from a sweltering afternoon. 

But better, really, was our week spent enjoying the slow life of Sabang, whiling away the days until out flight to Vietnam, where everything was about to get a lot more hectic.


S.