south east asia: a text-filled prelude

I have been absent from the blogging world for what feels like forever. I had a busy, travel-filled summer, and now that I'm back I've got teaching to contend with and my diss to write, so I can't promise I will become a super-frequent blog poster again any time soon. BUT, I do promise never to abandon this blog entirely, and that I will set myself a minimum of one post a month. That shouldn't be hard to do, since I'm collecting photos and things all the time, so it's just a matter of getting them up here...

Prologue/apologia out of the way, I've got a couple of posts for y'all about vegan eats in South East Asia. My Person and I took a trip to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand this summer, and going into it, we were really, really concerned about whether we would be able to find anything vegan, in light of all the fish sauce/meat that both guidebooks and friends were assuring us we wouldn't be able to avoid. Lonely Planet, in fact, was the worst, with the guidebook not only promising that vegetarians would have an impossible time in South East Asia, but also going out of its way to try to shame vegetarians by assuring them that they would be missing out on the "authentic experience" of SEA if they tried to stick to their narrow-minded and needlessly uptight eating regimen.

Can I just take a moment to say how much I HATE Lonely Planet guides? (If you're not interested in my Lonely Planet rant, and you're probably not, feel free to skip to the next paragraph.) I keep buying LP guides when I travel because they're so... ubiquitous, I guess, but this is definitely my last trip with their guidebook. They're not even that great in other respects, I had a terrible time with their vegetarian recommendations in South America, and now I've had another terrible time with their guidebook in SEA. Their vegetarian recommendations are often out of date (as in, the restaurant no longer exists) or just down right bizarre (think, filthy hole-in-the-wall in an out-of-the-way neighborhood), given the plentiful availability of better veg options, if only one cared to look. How many vegetarians must use those guides, and yet they clearly not only refuse to hire vegetarians or even people who are vaguely veg-friendly/knowledgeable, but actually hire people who are totally hostile to vegetarianism because they have some idea that being veg gets in the way of the "authentic cultural experience" LP imagines it's selling. Well, I have travelled all over Europe, in South America, and now South East Asia as a vegan, and I've had plenty of experiences that would fall under Lonely Planet's rubric of "authentic"--homestays in Quecha villages in the highlands of Ecuador, 3 months of life with a German host family in Berlin, a random dinner with a Khmer taxi driver/English teacher and his family in Cambodia, and so on and so on--and guess what? My veganism was never a problem. They may have thought I was a little odd, but they made me their version of vegan food, and I ate it, and it was always a wonderful experience. Yes, my experience as a vegan will be slightly different than the experience an omnivore would have, obviously, but who is to judge which is the better experience? Or, why does one even have to be counted better and one worse? In the end I say, keep your crappy guidebooks, Lonely Planet. I'm sick of you pretending to pander to vegetarians while all the while directing thinly-veiled hostility and disapproval toward us. I don't need you. This is goodbye.

Ok, thanks for letting me get that out there. The breakup has been a long time coming... So anyway, we fearfully packed half our packs full of energy bars, but, as you'll see from the following posts, we had zero problems finding delicious, healthful, CHEAP!, vegan foods everywhere we went... Despite Lonely Planet or anyone else's promises to the contrary, the same thing held true that I've found most places I travel--you just need to wander over to the tourist quarter of any city to find restaurants that will have veg options (and sometimes you'll find entire veg restaurants). The veg Israelis have pretty much always been there before you, paving the way. The only places I've been where that wasn't necessarily true (e.g. Bolivia), I had no problem finding local dishes that were or could be made veg. So stick it, Lonely Planet!