Down in the Stalls

Well another travel day with a short flight to Phu Quoc the island off the south coast of Vietnam.
Check out from the Grand hotel included the now usual hold up at Vietnam hotels while they check you haven’t run off with the pillows and sheets.
The Grand is somewhat of a misnomer as it is clearly living on past glories. This was the hotel that during the Vietnam war housed most of the war correspondents and each evening at 5 p.m. the Americans briefed the press on how the war was going. The briefings quickly became known as the Fantasy at Five briefing.
Apart from three floors of old rooms nothing remains of those days. The hotel is just another high rise of 20 floors. They do however take thieving seriously , so much so that in your room is a price list of everything that is there including the TV, all the bedcovers, the spoons, saucers and cups, the kettle, the desk ,all the lamps and the chairs. Quite how or why you would want the desk only they know but you aren’t released until the security guy reports that everything is still tied down.
The Villa Aria in Mui Ne did the same thing . Some Americans checking out before us had left their beach towels by the pool and were to be charged for them if they couldn’t go to the pool and find them. They were joking ( they hoped) that they were about to subjected to a cavity search next.
I have only come across this before in Delhi, India but it does seem to be becoming more the norm in Asia.The Delhi experience was a little more nasty as they held our passports and took the credit card away until three security guys who were sent to the room returned to the lobby.
With check out at noon and an afternoon flight there was time for a little retail therapy before the third degree.
Saigon is famous for cheap clothes and there are a few key shopping areas to be hit
Saigon Square 1 and it’s newer cousin Saigon Square 2 cover the clothes, shoes, handbags and all things North Face especially the rucksacks.
Saigon Square 2 near the Legend hotel is more spacious and you still barter for the stuff even where they say fixed price only.
I went there

Tons of Zara stuff, loads of Abercrombie and Fitch some fake, some seconds and all cheap before you barter. $40%-50% off is the goal to keep in mind but show no enthusiasm and walk away at least three times and wait to be dragged back. if they don’t hit another stall selling the same stuff.
If you want fake paintings go to Tran Phu Street where you can pick up any Old Master you want or they will do one for you.
Suitcases are best on Le Laa Street but there are great fakes everywhere and looking at the Kipling bags it would be hard to tell the difference.
The big old market in Saigon is the Ben Thanh Market. Certainly from the Grand it is an exciting walk as you cross several large roads all with cavalry charging motor bikes coming at you from every direction.
There are fashion stalls there packed in like sardines. But it more a real market for locals to shop .
There are spices.

Plenty of offal stalls

and fish stalls , this guy tried to get away by jumping out of his bucket but the owner found it and by now it is probably being served for someone’s lunch.

The meat stalls all conform to the latest EU directives on hygiene and display of meat directives

The airport is just 15 minutes from the downtown area and the cab was under £6 including a fee to enter the airport.
Check in was surprisingly easy given the reputation Vietnam Airlines seems to have with the on-line community , plenty of staff and they kept opening more check in counters as the crowd grew.
Very unlike Air Asia Thailand whose check in agents have discarded the uniform for jeans and seemingly are inputting your entire life history into the computer in triplicate .

Oh and I now have a new job selling coconuts. Let me just say this is back breaking work

 

Quite amusingly the guy whose business i borrowed for 2 minutes was a very small guy and he said to me “I’m so much smaller than you because I have had to carry this all my life and you haven’t !”

Within 2 mins that wooden spar was digging into my shoulder and the idea of walking miles trying to sell a few coconuts almost impossible to envisage. I tipped him well.

Almost Daylight Robbery

Our son arrived today so we set off around the sights again. It turned out to be quite an eventful morning. Luckily The Reunification Palace is closed on Sunday so once again I was spared crawling through tunnels and the rest of the sights are in easy walking distance of each other.

After the Opera House

 

and a visit to a photographic display of the two wars of independence firstly against the French then the “invaders ” from the USA which shows iconic pictures like this one of the Viet Cong entering Saigon

 

We decided to walk up to the parliament building halfway there a guy on a motor bike parked on the pavement started it as we approached him and began along the pavement. As he came towards us he smiled and we started to smile back. Then as he passed he lent over and grabbed Geraldine’s gold necklace. He clearly hadn’t tackled a girl from County Durham with Yorkshire blood before . People don’t steal things from them. She grabbed the necklace and hung on. He gave up and raced off down the road. She was left with long scratch marks on her neck but still hanging on to the necklace though the clasp broke.

Two years ago in Bang Saray in Thailand a couple of guys on a motor bike tried for her handbag. Again she hung on and I hung on to her. The pillion guy faced with falling off let go. They never learn do they.

We got to the parliament building and then retired for a medicinal beer

 

regulars will remember that the Vietnamese for 3 is ba and that the local beer is 333. With three of us at the table for the beer I was finally able to say ba, ba ba ba . Ah the joy !

Not many of you are old enough to remember the singer and disc jockey on Radio Luxembourg Sam Costa but I do. Now in Thailand there used to be a local beer called Koster and three in Thai is pronounced sam so again such delight in asking for ….

Little things please little minds, I know.

Finally farewell to David Coleman the great BBC commentator who died yesterday. Not many of you will know that he was a life long Wolverhampton Wanderers supporter as I am. The club owes him a big debt of gratitude as in the 1980’s he led the ” Save our Wolves” campaign as the club lurched for  financial crisis to financial crisis and looked like going under.

He was also famous for his gaffes which Private Eye the satirical magazine termed Colemanballs. One I loved was his remark when covering  the 1976 Montreal Olympics: “and there goes Juan Torena down the back straight, opening his legs and showing his class.” and another “That’s the fastest time ever run, but it’s not as fast as the world record.” Classics.

 

 

Thoughts while in Saigon

My daughter and son in law have arrived from Hong Kong and took us on a whistle stop trot around the sights of Saigon this morning. I’m not a great sightseer preferring to sit in places and watch the locals but it is good to get out and see parts of the city.

I managed the Cathedral, the Opera House on foot enjoying the hustle of the place and the challenge of getting across the roads while swarms of motorbikes, scouters and mopeds race around you. By the Post Office I was flagging but did manage to get the trusty old iPhone out and snap a picture

Now I don’t know how many people on trips to cities take a picture of a post office, not many, but clearly for some reason the French must have had a thing about building monster ones in their colonies. This one is a rather pleasant ex British Public School boy pink shirt colour don’t you think ? It is huge inside but mainly made up now of stalls selling tourist knick knacks.

The youngsters went on to the Reunification Palace where you can crawl into the tunnels used during the war against the USA. I ducked out of this and returned to the hotel.

Obviously here understandably the American side of things is not to the fore but as I dozed this afternoon I  thought of a few people we have met on this trip .

In Mui Ne we met a charming American couple form just outside Anchorage, Alaska in a place called Palmer where they have a B&B. Greg had always wanted to visit Vietnam and this was his trip of a lifetime as he achieved that goal. He told me that his father flew B52s during the Vietnam war . He was based in Louisiana  and did tours of duty over here at the height of the bombing campaign. He said his father never ever talked about his experiences nor the war and that he Greg regretted never having made him to open up about a war that so many veterans decided to ignore as did most of the USA.  Hence his trip here .

Just before the train yesterday pulled out from the station I went to take the photos and met a Vietnamese guy having a last cough and a drag before he was banned from smoking for 4 hours on the train. He told me he was from Dallas, Texas and had returned for the first time since leaving Vietnam 40 years ago. He clearly left with the Americans. He had originally  come from Mui Ne and so was visiting  his home town. how did you find it I asked. Full of Soviets he growled at me whilst drawing on his last cigarette . I didn’t like to tell him that that place is no more either and for a few more minutes he went on about how the soviets seem to have taken over the whole area.

My experience of the Vietnam war was secondhand apart from a brief frisson of excitement that Harold Wilson the British Prime minister might take Britain into the conflict. Being Royal Naval Reserve at my school we had visions of call up and off to the Far East. Reading Spycatcher by Peter Wright years later the book in which the head of the CIA counter intelligence unit told the ex MI5 author that Wilson was in fact a KGB agent, such a  policy decision was clearly unlikely.

A friend of mine working at Pan Am in New York was called up in 1969. Luckily he always said because his father was in the US Diplomat Corps he pulled strings to have him placed as liaison with the Australian troops on the ground in Vietnam. His father felt he had a better chance of survival as an officer than with his own American troops ( at least 230 American officers were killed by their own troops, and as many as 1,400 other officers’ deaths could not be explained). A few years later as we sat in his very nice family apartment on Central Park South he told me how he and the Aussies would sit in the jungle and firstly hear the Americans coming with transistor radios etc, then smell them with their cigarette smoke and aftershave and then see them as they walked inches away without seeing the fully camouflaged, odourless, jungle trained Aussies. Often sometime later they would find the bodies of the self same troops killed by the Vietcong.

He survived 2 years but again in the main he never talked about it.

I’m On The Train

For a long time the most used phrase on mobile phones and probably still is in the UK. We are sitting in First Class which seems to be against all the principles of an equalitarian state but then one thinks of the old adage all  men are equal but some are more equal than others.  Here’ the train station

it was of course that great ex communist union boss John Prescott who brought us the M4 bus lane which was in fact a private lane for him and other Ministers in the UK to rush into London from LHR without being held up in traffic .

This is a ten carriage train with First Classs, soft seat economy Class and the rather ominousy named hard seat Economy Class.

As I write we are fairly rattling along after some rather slow stretches when I felt I could almost have walked along beside it. Maybe it is now downhill into Saigon..

The main stops are to allow other trains to come down the single track route and pass heading south. Some of these are at stations stops on the way most are not.

Last night rather than taxi to the bar we walked some way to use the ATM . It led us past a restaurant that we had used about a week ago. It was recommended by a couple staying at the Villa Aria as being  ” not too bad” which for restaurants on the main strip is equivalentt to at least 2 Michilin stars as the rest are so poor.

We went in hope of real Vietnamese food and ate probably the worst meal we have had on this trip or any trip. Truly terrible food served in an offhand manner where clearly we were doing them a favour.

The restaurant has two girls standing outside and they entice customers in by saying endlessly Hello Madam come in for yummy food. How ever  once we had been in they studiously ignored us and they did so again last night. Clearly they knew we had been done and needed to be left alone. Plenty more fish in the sea.

I call it the Maltese Tourism theory. Malta is an island in the Mediterranean south of Italy and close to North Africa. Perhaps unkindly many call it the Alcatraz of the Mediterranean. It is a rock in the middle  the sea. It boasts just one beach and that is very small , plus a big dockyard and for years it was a place you could go abroad and eat British food because the Royal Navy were there .

I went years ago for a visit and after driving from one end to the other in a few minutes ran out of tings to do.

I was there with some Travel Agents and at a function thrown by the Tourist Office asked one of the guys there quite how they sold the place . ‘We work on the theory’ he confided in me ‘that as long as world tourism grows by 6% a year there will always be enough tourists traveling and a few of who will come to Malta. Any downturn from that and we are toast of course’.

The restaurant in Mui Ne knows that every week there is a massive turnover of tourists. Nobody who has eaten there once would ever come back but who cares. iI is also not worth even talking to the ones that have. Not so silly really.

Oh and the train only takes 4 hours not 5 hours as the internet sites say. We arrived at 5.10 p.m. so much faster then by road. All and all a very pleasant and easy experience. Amazingly sitting opposite me was a Vietnamese guy with his family. He smiled a few times and helped me fix the recline on my seat. He even offered me one of his beers. Surprisingly after about an hour he lent over and said in an Aussie drawl ‘ where you from mate’ . He is a miner in Western Australia and comes home for 3 months every couple of years to see his family. He is flying back to Perth on Sunday. He at least didn’t rib me about the Ashes Test Matches.

Goodbye Mui Ne

After two weeks here tomorrow morning we say goodbye to Mui Ne and the Villa Aria and head off to the train station to go to Saigon.

After the mini bus drive down here we decided to go back on the train. first class is US$15 one way and though it takes 5 hours the same as the road trip everyone says that it it a nicer way to travel . I’ll let you know.

So I guess I should do an impressions of blog today . Donald Rumsfeld the U.S. Secretary of Defence under Dubya Bush always used to annoy me with his asking a question of himself and then answering it at press conferences and the like. Unfortunately most politicians have now followed his lead and one of the first was of course Tony Blair. “Did I know the intelligence dossier was sexed up ? Well let me talk through this ” on so on. Of course I will now proceed to do the same !

Would I return to Mui Ne ? Well let me use a sketch from that great sixties classic stage show Beyond the Fringe to answer that one

So like Perkins the answer is goodbye not au revoir . Why ? Well lots of reasons really most of which I have covered on the blogs from here but mainly a feeling that it is all very false. The place has no soul because all that is done here is tourism and the locals very clearly commute in and out each day  on the local buses and live their real lives elsewhere.

The Villa Aria is a very small hotel in terms of ground size and I’m sure is delightful when occupancy is 60% but full it is a bit of a nightmare and more so when a group of 10 Russians are here. Probably any group would dominate such a small space but given their actual physical size as well they have taken it over. The other guests have retreated to the beach and left them to the pool and breakfast has become a battle ground. Enough said.

It has been raining off and on for the last two days and the waves crashing in have been enormous driving the fishermen in their boats further out to sea. The inshore ones fishing for shrimp have been confined to barracks . this is especially true as they put to sea in what can only be described as circular bath tubs.

Seriously two or three fishermen go out in these every morning at sunrise to trawl for shrimp. they are made of moulded fibreglass by the looks of them  and look like this on the inside

The paddle is used like a single oar to propel it along .

Along the beach are dotted the older version of the plastic bath tub made out of rattan and at the fishing village I went to yesterday these older ones were more in evidence.

Now as any self respecting Welshman will tell you these are clearly coracles and indeed they are . Coracles of course were designed to get fishermen and people into low water areas so quite how or why they have ended up here who knows. They are found  in Mui Ne, in Phan Thiet down the road and up in Nha Trang in Vietnam and in India, Tibet and Iraq or Eyeraq as Donald Rumsfeld would say.  They are certainly not made for the swells they have here and hence the lack of fishing the last couple of days. The shrimp they catch are really small and they dry them by the sides of roads and turn them into paste.

I am off out to eat several of their much larger cousins helped down by yet more Saigon Green Label. Tomorrow evening I shall be back in Saigon and drinking and eating more cheaply. until then, and seeing as we started with beyond the fringe , I will leave you with Dudley Moore. I had the pleasure of flying one time in the seat alongside his from New York to London on the lunchtime Concorde. Almost Arthur like he said he had the world’s worst hangover and would I join him in a pre take off Bloody Mary having decided to not stick with a promise to himself when he awoke not to drink again. The Concorde landed too late with the time change for me to go to work that day so I did. One led to a few more and I then had a fabulous flight over with an hugely entertaining companion. What a talent he was.

Giro Di Mui Ne

Those of you that follow my Puglia blog will know that I went down to the start of one of the stages of the Giro D’Italia bicycle race. I even  managed a photo of Bradley Wiggins or Wiggo .

Today I tried to emulate him on a ride to the fishing village ten kilometres away. There is one hill between here and there and as I rose from my saddle to start pumping the pedals I thought briefly of him. Four minutes later as I slowly ground to an halt on the incline I rather hoped no one let alone Wiggo was watching. Boy this cycling is hard work.

I did make it and have the pictures to prove it but on the way I took a few photos of my local pub that we use both for drinks and food now. This is the bar

 

Nothing too salubrious I admit but for me it is home ! They have their priorities right here a coffee with milk is 15,000 dong ( 45 Pence ) and a 400 ml Saigon Green Label is 10,000 dong ( 30 pence ) . The main road separates the bar from the restaurant which is on the sea front.

 

Okay maybe no the most comfortable of seating but when it’s dark and the waves are crashing in it has a certain ambiance, oh and it’s cheap. Plate of fresh shrimp, big plate of squid, mix veg and a couple of plain rice 135,000 dong ( £4 ) . The seafood is displayed on this side of the road but cooked on the other side so a metal bowl is used to slide the  uncooked food one way and the cooked food the other. They wait for a break in the traffic and across it comes over this road.

 

The old Aussie guy Bill ( he is probably younger than me ) seems to hold court there every night and different groups of kite boarders stop by to chat, drink and eat at his table as the evening progresses. Last night he had a couple of French guys and a Pom as well.

What is it with people that stand on boards as a sport. It seems they need almost another language to talk. Snow boarders do it where as skiers don’t, kite boarders use the same one though water skiers don’t and the grand daddy of them all surfers started the whole thing off. Bill seems unfazed by all the dude business and just slowly drinks his Tiger beers.

The Pom was joined later by another one and after the usual high fives etc and a comparison of shoulder tattoos they got to talking about the Old Country. Both it turned out were in the building game in blighty . Loads of jobs in the UK in construction said one and the other agreed tons of them , hard to know which ones to take. Been busy for a year  they both confirmed. Of course in the perverse way of the English workman where had they come during this period of frantic and therefore very lucrative work . Kite boarding in Vietnam. One had come for two weeks and so far been here 5 weeks. Might go back in March guess the boss wonders where I am he said and the other said he was to do the same.

Alongside the bar is one that has closed

 

I guess no one bothered to tell the Vietnamese owner that things have changed in Russia and maybe this was no longer relevant !

Anyway I was putting pressure to the pedals again and eventually made it to the fishing village

 

Hey I agree not worth the effort but once there I had to take a photo. There is a bar there  (as well as loads of tour buses and taxis for the wuzzies that don’t cycle ) . The bar is crawling with young kids selling fridge magnets of Vietnam and some particularly awful ones of Mui Ne for about 4 times the price they are in the “gift” shops on the strip here.

I had never thought about “tat” before I moved to Cyprus where our next door neighbour an English guy told me he was in tat. His company in the Midlands started years ago making tat for “gift” shops in the seaside towns of the UK. The British were keen to take home some memory of their holiday and a wooden plaque with “I was in Exmouth” or Lyme Regis with a tatty thermometer stuck on it that broke almost immediately seemed the ideal thing.  As the Brits started to go abroad the company widened its reach and Trevor joined as international sales manger selling “tat” to “gift” shops in Spain, Portugal and the like. It is always in English and follows the style so successful in the UK. He now sells all over the world as the Brits move ever further afield.

Clearly the Russians have a similar need as they buy the stuff by the suitcase load to go home. So something we have in common at last and okay I admit I have bought a couple of magnets myself.

Howzat

Well it had to happen didn’t it ? I guess I have been lucky really but it was bound to change.

While the English cricket team have been being clinically taken apart by their Australian rivals and then slaughtered in each successive Test Match I have been avoiding any contact with Australians but last night I had my Humphrey Bogart moment as two walked into the bar I was sitting at. Of all the gin joints in all of the towns in all the world they had to walk into mine

They were actually I think rather embarrassed by the way England have gone so meekly under the cosh and were almost apologising for the way Australia have thrashed us. They were rather delighted to get the England captain out for a golden duck ( sorry North America it’s a cricket term ) out first ball ( you are probably still none the wiser ).

After a little jovial Pom bashing which was quite amusing I asked the older guy how long he had been here. He replied 9 years which is quite a long holiday ! In fact he obviously lives here in Mui Ne and so proved to be a font of knowledge about the place.

He told me that when he came here in 2004 there were almost no Russians and very few real hotels. That started to change in 2007 but the Russians coming here were what he called more middle class ones travelling as couples or small families and were both polite and spent money in the town and the hotels. In 2009 a group of Russian developers were told that there was a plan to build an airport at Mui Ne to allow direct flights from Russia and they started buying land and building hotels to meet the expected demand. A tour operator was found to sell the hotels to a much broader mix of Russians.

The airport was a myth of course and apparently there are still some huge concrete shells of massive hotels dotted down the coast. Mue Ne itself expanded rapidly and Russians flooded in in droves. Most could afford the cost of the holiday paid in Roubles but little else. Spending in the restaurants and hotels dropped as numbers grew dramatically.

In 2011 the Russian tour operator went bust stranding 400 plus Russians in Mui Ne and leaving all the hotels with no payment. The Russian Embassy paid to take their subjects home.

A new tour operator was founded ( aren’t they always) called Pegasus and on the game has gone though some hotels are now more wary about taking Russians in large numbers hence the huge disparity in numbers staying in them. Some are chock a block, some less so and some with almost none. The Villa Aria seems happy to have them in groups even being a place with just 20 rooms. I looked at another small place yesterday called The Mia resort and there were none there at all.

So we had a complete history of the place which at least kept the guys off the cricket.

I remember my first holiday in Italy which was to Rome in 1957. After a few days sightseeing we took the small hire car to Fregene which them was a small beach resort area near another little fishing village called Fiumacino ( now the site of the main airport ).

Sitting on the beach there I remember seeing a guy pedal a cart along the beach selling ice cream and Coca Cola. We couldn’t eat the ice cream of course because back then you couldn’t drink the water in Italy and therefore no ice in drinks and no ice cream for us kids. Coke was hugely expensive but he also sold a fizzy orangeade called Pellegrino which was made in Italy and very cheap. Today of course in Rome they are both hugely expensive.

Anyway sitting on the beach today a guy came along doing the same thing. I don’t know if he bought this second hand off an Italian but it is just the same

Think the umbrella is a the original as well. Mind you  a little later a fruit and beer sales girl came down the beach and let me say I never saw this on Fregene beach

However like his Italian counterpart all those years ago this guy also has an eye for a pretty girl  as you can see !

Frank Sinatra was one time on Fregene beach but unfortunately Humphrey Bogart never was.Nor were the Blues brothers but this song was being played in the bar last night almost non stop, a strange choice given the number of Germans here

I guess the Vietnamese bar owner doesn’t understand the words.

Bikes under Bushels

I’ve found in many of the hotels on this trip that it is hard to find out what they supply and what they don’t. They keep their lights under bushels as it were  and this is especially true when they offer something for free. This one The Villa Aria is no exception . In the room there is a huge book which merely contains the menu from the restaurant and a smaller booklet with information on the hotel that seems more like a rule book with things like no noise on the balcony, no swimsuits on the balcony rail, no diving in the pool and so on . All of course are totally ignored by our group of 10 Russians who we are begining to think might be here for the rest of their lives.

Luckily I was chatting to a German yesterday who told me about the market down the road. Quite co-incidentely given that I had posted on Here in Puglia about knife sharpeners, he had been to market to buy some knives. He used to buy them in Thailand he told me but now buys them here as they are cheaper and better. An odd souvenir to take home but there we are. How did you get there I asked. Oh he said the hotel has about 10  bicycles that are free for guests they just don’t tell anyone unless they ask them.

So I am now the proud owner of a bike and it has allowed me to head off exploring around the area ( Geraldine doesn’t do biking ). This morning I went to the market that the German had told me about.

 

 

As markets go it is very small and quite well organised. It is quite noticeable how over the last 20 years most westerners have become used to supermarkets and their cleanliness and the way they display food . The young Brits who were here a couple of days ago were telling us graphically about the market and the fact that stuff was displayed on the floor and that the butchers area was so unhygienic with slabs of meat covered in flies being cut up with blood everywhere etc. . It’s not that long ago that even in the Mediterranean they would have been shopping everyday in a market just like the one here for each meal.

I remember in Porto, Portugal in 1983 asking for minced goat ( no lamb then) and the guy hacking off part of the goat and then painstakingly chopping it on a trunk stump of wood into ever smaller pieces until it finally kind of resembled minced meat and in that butcher’s shop getting a pigs liver was almost like having to sit in on an operation in the local O.R or theatre at an hospital.

This market had but one butcher but lots of fish sellers

 

I wasn’t in need of squid but did find some bananas and bought just over a kilo for about 50p. There was a great deal of hilarity when the old lady held up fingers to signify the price which was obviously way over the odds, with howls of derision and disbelief that she could be so brazen. But of course when I stumped up the cash she had the last laugh on them all.

 

The bike has widened my ability to check out restaurants and bars and now each night we take a taxi to a new place and try the food before finding a taxi to bring us home. Last night  we actually got pho that tasted like something more than stock cube hot water though if the Brits had found the market distressing I’m not sure what they would have made of the kitchen in this joint.

You know they always say that Asians cannot tell the difference between us foreigners that we all look alike. Well  last night I asked the cab driver who took us to the restaurant to come back at 10 p.m. to pick us up. After a lengthy bout of sign language with lots of pointing by both of us at my watch and the number 10  he agreed. At 10 we were patiently waiting for him . A cab drew up and we piled in. I was effusive in my thanks to him as he started off for being so punctual and getting back to us. For sometime we drove with him looking at me and me again nodding and saying how well he had done. Suddenly he stopped and in broken english asked where we were going. It wasn’t the same guy at all ! Well they all look the same to us don’t they.

Dragons

Another thing Phan Thiet the local big town is famous for is it’s dragon fruit. It is grown all along the A1 road which was the one we came down on our epic drive here taking over 5 hours. The road is poor to say the least and in some spots it is almost non existent. Sitting in a car you are bounced around and everything begins to ache even your teeth from the incessant pounding you are taking. Most overtaking is done on the inside on the so  called hard shoulder which is actually a dusty track. It is exciting when buses do it to you. Blaring horns and then it comes thrashing past you on the inside leaving you in a cloud of dust.

What is funny is the fact that you go through toll stations on the way down here.I thought perhaps they were going to pay us for travelling on this makeshift piece of tarmac but no they wanted money for it.

Still towards the end of the A1 there certainly are plenty of dragon fruit farms and the farmers set up stalls to sell some of the produce.

It is a staple at breakfast at the Villa Aria each morning

It’s the one in front that looks like ants are crawling on it ( those are the pips ).

When you read the guide books they make it sound  very much like it is a Vietnam fruit born and bred and that it was used in the past for ancestral rituals. Only recently has it moved into full production as a fruit.

However some simple research on Goggle reveals it is a fruit called Pitaya and is actually part of the cactus family.

It comes originally from Mexico and the Europeans bought it back to Europe with them along with chilli  tobacco and potatoes.

Europeans then took the fruit on to South East Asia to try growing it out there. Interestingly the fruit only flowers at night so has to rely on moths and bats to pollinate it. How about that.

It is very easy to grow once you have one and any part of an old  root planted takes in the soil very quickly. It will take some frost though maybe not the frosts in Martina Franca and being a cactus it doesn’t like lots of water. Rainfall around this region of Vietnam is about 1500 mm each year which strangely enough is only a couple of hundred mm over the rainfall in Martina Franca and this is considered a monsoonal climate.

Actually the fruit doesn’t really taste of much which is why you put it with others on a plate.

I have however found an excellent use for it as it makes a very fine cocktail mixed with vodka to have by the pool at lunchtime. Here’s mine

The Vietnamese also make their own vodka called Hanoi Vodka though I am told it is very difficult to find it up there for some reason. Here it is on sale at every corner shop and costs about £1.70 for a 750ml bottle. If you’re a bit wary of local vodka though it tastes fine Smirnoff is about £6 a bottle but check the seal is intact.

Busy day today blog wise. i did one for Here in Puglia so if you have time check it out. The reason was that the weather has changed over the last few days and we have had 3 days of cloud. Hopefully things ail pick up again soon.

Changing my Book

In the 1970’s in my youth the parties I went to were all bring a bottle. The game was to find a pretty revolting bottle of plonk which wasn’t hard to do in the 70’s and take that for the host to place on the table or sideboard where the drinks were, whilst at the same time hiding a bottle of something more drinkable for one’s own consumption.

The host at the end of the party would find a bottle that even the drunkest person had not risked drinking and take that to the next party they were invited to .

Hirondelle I remember was a particular wine of choice to be displayed as your contribution. They did a red and white version each equally obnoxious. For some reason they initially said the wine came from Austria but once a newspaper revealed that their sales were larger than the total production of Austria they came clean and said the wines came from Cyprus and many Eastern European countries and were blended in the UK . As some one that has lived in Cyprus I can certainly attest to Cypriot wines being particularly loathsome. Blue Nun was another favourite being cheap and sickly sweet . Mateus Rose was always much in evidence and was another wine supposedly from Portugal but the consumption far exceeded the production on the Mateus estate. I had my own killer wine that I bought from a small wine merchant near South Ken tube station. It was Moroccan with an unpronounceable name that probably meant camel dung but sold for about 20p in new money a bottle. A fun game was to see when a bottle you had taken to a party turned up back at one of your own your parties and the Moroccan was easy to recognise.

Books left in hotels are a little like that I think. Despite the advent of the wonderful Kindle people still carry books and once read off load them by leaving them in hotels. All hotels now seem to have an area where you can place them and The Villa Aria is no exception

 

 

What I find myself doing despite having a Kindle full of books is picking up one or two and quite often carrying them on to the next hotel where I then dump them and pick up another few and so on like the wine of my youth. The books even if you don’t bother reading them are great for reserving bed chairs by the pool anyway.

The Germans looking at the titles seem always to be the most generous in leaving books for others to enjoy or maybe they just buy more awful books that they can’t wait to offload. The Brits clearly read lots and are always in second place. Given the massive percentage of Russians here you would expect to find huge numbers of books filling these shelves but there isn’t a single one. Mind you come to think of it I haven’t seen a single Russian here reading a book . In fact they don’t seem to read anything at all except menus.

Disappointingly our group of 10 Russian male weightlifters and female shot putters returned to the hotel yesterday and are back at the poolside scaring the rest of the guests and playing havoc with the infinity pool water level. They have however realised that buying their booze for drinks from 09.30 onwards each day is cheaper in the supermarket than at the hotel bar so they stagger in with colossal loads of it each morning.  With true Russian nerve they then take their bottles up to the bar to have the girl open them.

Breakfast for them is a silent affair. Not a word is uttered while they gorge themselves on plate after plate of buffet food. It is clearly a serious business as they won’t be eating again for 3 hours.

I remember a friend of mine joining his first Royal Naval ship in dock in Portsmouth . In the morning he made his way to the wardroom for breakfast and was somewhat dismayed to find the Captain sitting at the head of the table with another senior officer. Good morning  he said trying to sound relaxed. The Captain looked up from his paper and said rapidly 7 good mornings and then glaring at the Midshipman said that’s covers the week now shut up. Breakfast in the Royal Navy is a silent affair he discovered .