Post Category → Vietnam

Dalat Market (Chợ Đà Lạt)

’s hill resort of Dalat is a horticultural wonderland. The cool tropical microclimate endows its market with the best of both worlds: tropical fruits from the lower hillsides combined with more European fare from the cooler climes. Fresh strawberries sit alongside avocadoes, artichokes, beetroot and dragonfruit; with vendors keen to foist strawberry jam, cashews and the grim local grape wine upon me. Where local markets tend to be the feature that orient me in any town, Dalat’s apparent lack of clear equatorial seasonality is bewildering.

dalat market stairwell
Selling a more meagre array of vegetables in the stairwell.

Originally located on the top of Dalat’s central hill, the market’s earlier wooden structure burnt down in the late 1930s. In the late 50s, it was moved downhill with the market now stretching between two concrete buildings in the bottom of a steep ravine; a walkway linking the top of the hill to the second level of the market.

dalat market artichokes
Globe artichokes arrive at the market fresh or dried as artichoke tea.

Bananas at Dalat Market Vietnam
Arranging Bananas

The pleasure of pork skin: Banh Mi Bi

banh mi bi

Vietnam is one of the few places on earth that you can eat a sandwich whose prime ingredient is roasted pork skin and feel virtuous for doing so. Banh mi bi must rate as one of the world’s perfect sandwiches: crispy pork skin with a luscious hint of creamy fat, perfectly balanced with a tart pickle, streetside mayonnaise, shredded spring onions and red hot chilli; all contained within an hours-old mini-baguette. It’s a world ahead of your average pâté-packed banh mi, if only because the meat tastes like it came from a very happy swine. To double the meat pleasure, Tiem Banh Gia Phat on Phan Dinh Phung street in Da Lat topped it off with pork floss, a meat condiment that is in my estimate, second only to bacon.

banh mi vendor, dalat

The only reason that I picked Tiem Banh Gia Phat was for their surgically clean banh cart. It looked like somewhere that with a tray of scalpels could double as a roadside operating theatre. The bakery out the back also seemed to do a vigorous trade in Vietnamese simulations of French patisserie.

Price: 8000VND (US$0.50)

The Street Sausage of Saigon: Thit Nuong

It helps to be obsessed by a single dish when you arrive in Saigon. I usually hit up a few of my favourite restaurants (the upmarket street food specialist Quan An Ngon, commercial pho franchise Pho 24 anywhere about town) and then am lost in a sea of choice. There’s bun of almost limitless variety, multitude variations on pho, and on every corner and clinging to each alleyway. I negotiate these choices by getting momentarily obsessed with seeking out a single dish and then moving on. I felt like thit nuong: casing-free Vietnamese pork sausage, served with the rice noodle bun or in the ultimate Vietnamese sandwich as banh thit nuong; and with this idea for a dish as organising principle, I hit the streets for some local charred charcuterie action.

bunthitnuong_vendor

In the basement of the mall-like Andong market in Cholon is a small concentration of thit nuong vendors, along with the normal assortment of dehydrated animal stalls. I picked the thit nuong vendor that both had the more impressive charred sausage display and laughed the most at me. I’m not really that funny.

bunthitnuong
Bun thit nuong cha gio

The sausage was garlicky and sweetly caramelised, the rest was light on the herbage and bean sprouts but topped with crushed peanuts aplenty. Now, to find a new obsession.

Price: 14,000 VND

How to get from Kep to Phu Quoc in a day

After doing the most scant research on the Internet, it seems that although many people mention that the new border crossing between Prek Chak in Cambodia and Xa Xia/Ha Tien in Vietnam is open to foreigners, nobody tells you how to get from Kep to Phu Quoc in a day or that two of the world’s best seaside destinations are now less than 12 hours apart. Here’s how:

From Kep/Kampot, catch a tuk tuk, taxi or moto to the border, departing no later than 8:00am (if you were keen on an early start, you might attempt a taxi at dawn from Phnom Penh). The price seems to be set at $15 for tuk tuks but this should drop. The last section of the dirt road to the border post has turned from OK to horrific over the wet season and is unapproachable by tuk tuk. We swapped onto some motorbikes for the last two kilometres and negotiated with them to take us all the way over the border to the Ha Tien bus station, a few kilometres into Vietnam and just over the bridge from Ha Tien town for $3. The border post is unassuming, being a few sheds on the Cambodian side and a huge edifice on the Vietnam side. Getting through the post is fast and neither side asked for a bribe. Visas for either country are not available at the border.

The journey from Kep to Ha Tien bus station took roughly two and a half hours. Although we’d heard that there is a ferry from Ha Tien to Phu Quoc, we couldn’t confirm this with anyone in Ha Tien and so headed onward to the speedboat at Rach Gia, about 100km away. At the bus station, there are two buses that you can catch to Rach Gia: a green express bus or a purplish slow bus. We only discovered that the express buses existed after a few passed our local bus. Local buses to Rach Gia cost about 35,000 VND which take about 3 hours depending on how often they stop to pick up passengers/crates of fish along the way.

From the Rach Gia bus station, grab a motorbike to the speedboat to Phu Quoc, which leaves at 1:30pm and arrives in Phu Quoc at 4:00pm. The speedboat is 180,000VND for foreigners, air-conditioned, and the plushest boat that I’ve been on in two years.

Total travel time from Kep to Phu Quoc: 8 hours.

As a smal addendum: I discovered the ferry from Ha Tien to Phu Quoc once we’d arrived in Phu Quoc. According to a sign painted on it, they left Ha Tien at 10:30am and weren’t at all keen on selling me a ticket.

Addendum (13 March 2009): Paul (commenter below) says the ferry from Ha Tien to Phu Quoc is now running. Can be organised through Sok Lim Tours and is even cheaper than the way that I did it.