Up the Mekong

Well, it certainly has been a while! In light of that fact that just won't go away, the Watchful Wino is back. My prolonged absence can be explained by my recent efforts to track the Refined Redneck down using several methods that the man himself taught me, but it seems he cannot be outfoxed.

A picture for your enjoyment:

After tearing apart my memory banks to bring you remembrances of another blogworthy culinary experience, it seems that I have located just the one. We have to go back a long way for this one, 2001, June of that year I believe. This one is wicked, and bear in mind that all this seemed completely normal at the time...

So There I Was. Siagon, Vietnam at the aforementioned time, with a buddy of mine from my master's program at the London School of Economics and Political Science. We had decided to check out Asia during our break rather than heading back to the States.

That was a wild trip. We started out flying Air Qatar from London to Bangkok, via Doha, Qatar. To celebrate the fact that Air Qatar turned out not to be a dry airline, as we had expected for logical reasons, we ended up having a few and getting a bit tanked during the London-Doha leg of the flight. We spoke to one another in obnoxious German in order to avoid giving Americans a worse reputation than they already had at the time...that reputation was enhanced when my buddy ended up catching some Z's face-down on the floor of the Doha airport. Got a great pic of that, but not for this venue :-)

After spending some time in Ko Samui, Thailand (the highlight of which was a bungee-catapult that I did - interstellar experience), we made our way to Vietnam. We had a certain apprehension going there, which was based on the assumption that they would not like Americans too much. Something about a fairly large war we had participated in there in the not-too-distant past.

Well, it turns out we were wrong. They were very friendly. We therefore decided to see if we could arrange to do a one-night home stay with a Vietnamese family somewhere out in the sticks. And it was much easier to arrange than you might expect. A simple trip into the local travel agency, a few inquiries, and then a place and time to meet. We showed up at the appointed location at the appointed time, and sure enough, there was our transportation.

We proceeded by van outside of Saigon for about an hour or so, maybe more, where we transferred to a rickshaw. Our host was waiting for us on the rickshaw, complete with a growler of locally made beer that we promptly started to quaff. After trucking around on the rickshaw for a while, we came to a boat landing.

And then it hit us. The place we were going was not accessible by road. Well...it seemed to make sense, being that we were in the Mekong Delta by now. So without a moment's hesitation, me and my two LSE compadres hopped on the boat along with our host, and we proceeded up the river for about 45 minutes - one hour or so.

Then we pulled up to his place. Riverfront property. It had no plumbing, but it did seem to have electricity. And our host's family turned out to be really nice. They had a kid who was learning English who was eager to converse with us.

And then they rolled out the dinner. It must have been their annual best, prepared only for important holidays. We consumed what we could of it, along with some rice, all washed down by that locally made, completely fresh beer. And then we watched some Hong-Kong based TV with them for a couple of hours before turning in to sleep on some elevated, hardwood tables decked with bamboo mats. What a great time that was!

Then the local propaganda boat came cruising by with the Vietnamese government's version of the day's news (a US Navy plane had just made an emergency landing at a Chinese military base; no one in the area was too pleased about that...). After waking up to that news, we boarded our sampan and headed back up the river, into the rising sun. What an amazing sight that was. There We Were, having just had an other-worldly experience, and it became even more so with the sun glimmering off of the Mekong as we proceed back towards Saigon amid an armada of other sampans...I suggest you try it out if you ever get the chance... :-)

More soon.

Loose!