vietnam

I'm going to divide my posts up by country, so, without further ado, here's Vietnam. We were only in Vietnam for 3 1/2 days, so most of our eating experience was in Ho Chi Minh City. Since we're not big breakfast eaters, we kept breakfasts really simple by just grabbing dragonfruit (pictured above) and bananas from our hotel's continental breakfast on our way out the door in the mornings, and maybe supplementing it with a mid-morning granola bar. For other meals, though, we were bent on good veg eats. After investigating 2 of the 3 Lonely Planet-recommended restaurants, one of which was defunct, the other of which was really tiny and unclean-looking (sorry, but it's true), we just started checking things out around the Pham Ngu Lao area of the city ("backpacker's ghetto," in LP parlance). We found tons of stuff--just about everywhere we looked had at least a small to medium-sized vegetarian section on their menu--but nothing that was quite what we were looking for, since we wanted lots of veg Vietnamese food (as opposed to just one or two dishes, or the Thai, Indian, Italian, you name it, cusine that was on display everywhere we looked). So, we wandered down Pham Ngu Lao until we found a side street (also called Pham Ngu Lao) that had a lot of pubs and restaurants (including Le Pub, which is in a lot of guidebooks, so that's a good landmark), one of which was just what we were looking for:




For $3 USD each we got 2 appetizers, 2 entrees, and 2 beers, and it was all so yummy that we came back the next day and did it all over again.



This was such a wonderful dining experience, and there was actually even another vegetarian restaurant right next door, should we have been inclined to change. Not to keep harping on the lameness of Lonely Planet, but here were two great veg restaurants located not more than 10 feet away from a pub that was in their guidebook. Why couldn't they have listed one or the other of those in their useless veg restaurants section? The world will never know.

Anyway, our positive experience with our meals was also reflected in our experience of the city generally--we really loved Ho Chi Minh City. It's a friendly, fascinating, unbelievably scooter-filled city...


The War Remnants Museum, in particular, was really interesting...


After a few days in Ho Chi Minh City, we took a bus to Chau Doc, a town on the Mekong Delta from which it's simple to catch a boat up to Cambodia.


On the way to Chau Doc (at the random, road-side restaurant our bus stopped at) and in Chau Doc itself, we just ate noodles with vegetables or rice with vegetables, which is pretty much the vegetarian stand-by in Vietnam. Both meals were perfectly pleasant, although I failed to photograph them. Here's our waterside hotel in Chau Doc, though, where we had our dinner:


From here we caught a boat up the Mekong to Cambodia, which will make up my next post...