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.

Hite Exfeel-S: Alcoholic Colonic

exfeel-s

Brewer: The Hite, South Korea

Beer is not good for you. In large enough quantities, it has the invariable tendency to kill you and thus gussying it up as a health food defies explanation. Labeled as the “Stylish beer with fiber”, Korea’s Hite Exfeel-S attempts to market a beer that is just as good on the way in as on the way out, and as far as I could detect, fails on both accounts. According to the press releases, “Exfeel” is meant to be a portmanteau of “excellent feeling” and the “S” is meant to stand for S-line, a strange Korean term for having the perfect hourglass figure rather than a letter to be appended to the start of “Hite”.

Hite says: “Smooth & light premium beer exclusively designed for well-being of young generation.”

I say: By adding an invisible fibre, Hite seems to have rendered the beer almost perfectly flavour-free. Lightly carbonated, no head retention. Golden colour cleverly distinguishes it from water with Braille embossed onto the bottle to help the visually-impaired come to the same conclusion. Perfect argument against low-calorie beer.

Presentation:1600ml plastic bottle

Korea: French fry-coated hot dog

frenchfry coated hotdog

If Coney Island witnessed the birth of the hot dog, Seoul in saw subsequent generations mutate into a an entirely new genus of animal. An animal coated in a skin of batter and french fries then presented deep-fried on a stick. See the best sex parties here xxx !

hotdogonstick

After first witnessing this monstrosity on Newley Purnell‘s site, I thought that chasing it down would be difficult. That it would be the type of food that only demented South Korean carnies sold for a scant few days of a State Fair until their consumers ended up in the waiting queue for a heart bypass. The taste is about as obvious as it looks: greasy but still crispy fries glued to a hotdog with a thick, neutral batter.

Hot dog on a stick: variations

It turns out that Seoul is packed full of artisan hot dog vendors. Vendors wrap them in bacon, mashed potato, corn batter or what looked to be seaweed then invariably deep fry them. I spotted three french fry-coated hotdog vendors in the narrow alleys of Myeong-dong alone and a few more in the neighbouring Namdaemun Market.

budae jiggae
home-made budae jigae

I blame this mutation on the Korean War. When meat was scarce in the years during and after the war, Koreans made do with whatever they could scavenge from the surplus from the US armed forces bases – Spam and hotdogs. To make these items edible for Koreans, the locals mixed them together with the paste gochujang in a makeshift stew named “Budae jjigae” (부대찌개) – literally “base stew”. Over the subsequent fifty years, the locals have grown to love the processed meat-flavored soup and it now graces franchise restaurant menus, the only difference being that the stew now contains actual meat along with the mechanically-separated variety.

There seems to be no particular rules to making the stew, insofar that you need gochujang and hotdogs to start, and then whatever seems to be lying about the average Korean kitchen to continue: kimchi, frozen dumplings, greens, ramen, rice cake, actual meat. 50 years of hotdog flavoured broth has to do strange things to your palate and drive you towards experimenting with hotdogs in an obscene and deep-fried manner.

Recipe

Try: French Fry Coated Hot Dog on a Stick Recipe


Great eating from the white trash of Asia

A blog’s first post starts with a manifesto, bluster, and the raw energy that comes from somebody’s conviction that they have words in them that are relevant to the rest of the world. Then the blog usually dies, so I’ll get straight to the point.

In the 70s, around the time that I was born, Singapore’s erstwhile leader Lee Kuan Yew, after a few meals in Sydney pronounced Australia to be “the white trash of Asia”. He then set his nation on a course to become Australia’s most popular tourist destination. Poetic economic justice. He later recanted the statement but the “white trash” moniker sticks because it is true. Australians are still outsiders in Asia, but now, thanks to the immigration policies of long defunct governments and amazing raw ingredients, Australians cook great Asian cuisine.

So I plan to document it. in and the rest of the world.