Flag of Vietnam.
We booked a walking food tour of Hanoi, Vietnam's capital.
Problem Solved
The guide asked straight away about any food restrictions. Apparently the company which organizes the tours has a list of places of each type of food. The guide of each group must select from these but decides which route and which restaurants according to the dietary restrictions of the diners.
Our set of foods went like this:
1 White rolled rice 'pancake' with lettuce and vegetable filling. Not new to me. I am not keen on other people handling my pancake to demonstrate how to roll it. (After six months of having a member of my family with low immunity after chemotherapy - we had to walk out of any restaurant where even the fork tines or inside of the glass was touched by a waiter.)
Our group includes a couple from Melbourne, Australia which has many Vietnamese restaurants. The couple are familiar with the Vietnamese rice paper spring roll, but are used to buying it ready-made, like sushi.
A really grotty little place. Disappointed.On to the next place. Will they all be like this? Yes.
2 Bread roll with minced chicken and tasty sauce.
Part of a chain.
Things are really looking up.
3 But the decor quickly goes down again. Upstairs, up spiral stairs, four-level place. Great minced pork in a soup with optional ground garlic.
I feel the need of a toilet. 'Next place,' says the guide, so, I presume, she has something in mind.
4 At the next little corner shop restaurant, before being served, rather than keeping people waiting at the end, I ask for the toilet at the start.
Our guide leads me across the road, down one of those filthy narrow alleys where people disappear to the back of buildings on motorbikes. We pass a room where a woman of about 110 years old sitting bent double on a darkened double bed counting money which I presume she is about to hide under the mattress.
I am reminded of the London of Dickens time. The word Kidnapped jumps into my mind. Can it get any worse? Yes.
My guide is hunting on her phone, either looking in google for a toilet or phoning for a friend. She asks somebody at the back.
The toilet is one of two darkened doors, askew, at the dark end. I glimpse a hole in the ground. No light.
'Is there a light?' I asked.
She asks.
The answer is: 'No light.'
I was very pleased because this was my excuse to leave.
'Is there a hotel nearby?' I asked.
'Yes.'
Back out of the unlit alleyway. Only a couple of shops away on the corner is a brightly lit hotel with a neon front and a spruced up man on reception.
She asks the receptionist for the toilet location and permission. He shows the way.
At the back, a toilet with pedestal seat, a light, a washbasin, even a soap dispenser. Under normal circumstances I would have given it only 3 out of 5. However, compared with a minus 5 toilet, it was good.
It turns out the guide knows the owner.
Why wasn't the tour of five eating places, ending with coffee, arranged with toilets in mind?
Back at the 'restaurant', because of the delay, our group has not had the guide to explain that the soup does not go onto the minced chicken and minced nuts, a kind of satay without the skewers. Very tasty.
4 Fruit
Across more side roads of motorcycles. We survive.
We reach the fruit caffe. Great, fruits we recognize such as mango and jackfruit with tiny black seeds (new to some of the others) plus a transparent cube of jelly, and tasteless green balls of something or other, solid jelly, and milk. Mostly fruit. Very refreshing.
Vietnam invention.
5 Egg Coffee
I imagined we would end at somewhere smart with proper toilets, the Vietnamese equivalent of a Starbucks, trying something new. We did try something new. Egg coffee.
But first we had to go upstairs, up filthy black stairs. Back to Dickens. At first I refused to go up the stairs. I did not want to hang onto the filthy grey stone banister which was far too low.
I would never run a tour like this in the UK or the USA. Or anywhere.
Up at least one level. I sent the others up first to report back to me.
The guide offered to take me somewhere else. No egg coffee. Just a drink.
I hear my friends. 'Come on up,' they said.
The upstairs room is filled with animated young people and long-haired older people perched on the usual backless low stools. It's like a student freshers night combined with alumni.
The egg coffee arrives looking terrific, with a pattern on top, like at Starbucks and the best coffee shops. You could have a passion fruit juice if you are afraid of being kept awake by coffee late at night.
I asked for decaffeinated coffee. This has either not yet reached Hanoi or not reached the guide's vocabulary.
The egg yolk mixed with sweetened condensed milk is underneath and you stir it together. The guide proudly tells us that this place is where it all started.
The owner used to work in one of the five star hotels. (I thought, what a pity their standards of decor and cleanliness never had any influence.) The owner started something uniquely Vietnamese, unique to Hanoi, which has now spread throughout the city. But it all started here.
Frankly, if they are so well-known, why can't they, or the national tourist board, spruce the place up a bit? You go to Warsaw\s old quarter which was razed in the war and it has all been built brand new.
I don't know what the fastidious Japanese think. I could not ask because none of them had come here.
I did not ask for a toilet. I asked to go home to my hotel. Yes, to the lovely Japanese-owned Sun Line Paon Hotel, which has brand new toilets with two water jets to clean you and gleaming white sinks with soap wrapped in little packets.
When you see the Hanoi streets festooned with electrical wires, and the paving stones up ended broken or missing, it should not be a surprise if some places are like that inside.
However, I was not expecting to be taken to a place like this on an organized tour filled with people from the UK, Australia and the USA.
Fine for hippy types who want to see the 'real' Asia.
For anybody with bad ankles, vertigo, or the least bit fastidious, sorry, not for you.
My companion loved the food tour. He sleeps in a tent on Everest, treks around volcanoes, rides motorbikes. he charges across the road through the motorbikes saying, 'they won't run you ove'r.
They might not run him over. But a car ran me over in 1984. He retorts, "because you were looking the wrong way."
So what of the food tour? I have told you the best and the worst of it, as I saw it. A picture tells a thousand words. I will add pictures shortly so you can judge for yourself.
Lastly, our hotel said we had to pay cash. But other people on our tour had paid with credit cards.
Travel Tips
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Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer. Please share links to your favourite posts.
Wine educator Trevor Sharot is pleased with his purchase. A passion fruit lassi.
