The Also Rans (a good name for a punk band?)

I'm currently going through a bit of a drought at the moment. We're on the island of Ko Chang off Thailand's south coast, and street food's been a little thin on the sand. Instead, I've decided to spotlight some of the street food I've had in the last month or so that for various reasons I've left unreported.

A banana fritter outside the entrance to a waterfall near Luang Prabang. These bananas are small and almost potato like in texture. They can well withstand the heat o'the fryer and come out tasting savory sweet 'n snacky.

This vendor had too choices: spicy or non-spicy. Not wanting to look like a lily tongued farang I opted for the spicy and ended up with something misleadingly familiar. The noodles were almost spaghetti like in texture, and the accompanying sauce looked like Bolognaise in cognito. The resemblance ended there - this thing was stone fire, and the rice cake on top did little to put out the flames.

I had some coconut ice cream in Vietnam and I'm really coming round to the idea of it. The coconut taste is subtle, and there seems to be something extra cooling about this ice cream. The half shell and flag were a nice touch, the accompanying glass of coconut water was undrinkable.

Mini-sausages wrapped in bacon. This one is an O'Sullivan Christmas staple, which is why I found this so exciting. Although the bacon was ok, the sausage screamed everything that is wrong about Asia. With the real thing less than two months away, I shouldn't have bothered.

Chaing Mai Sunday Market

We arrived in Chang Mai on Sunday, just in time for the wonderful Chiang Mai Sunday Night Market. The Market takes over the entire main street of the old town, and features a wide variety of the usual jewelry, fans, lamps, souvenirs etc.

And food. I'd heard that the Thais love to eat, but this literally blew me away. The market is home to the most diverse and well executed street food I've yet to encounter on this trip - think London's Borough Market without the gentrification.

Even in a month of Sundays I wouldn't have been able to tackle everything I wanted too. Here's a quickfire machine gun round-up of what I did.

All aboard the good ship omlette. These little banana leaf boats held a precious cargo of egg and slivers of red onion. The omlette was cut into chopstick friendly cubes and nicely salted, if a little cold.

Fried quails eggs take me back to Xi'an. There, they are cooked on skewers then rolled in cumin and chili powder. Here, they simply pop them in a Styrofoam box and sprinkle with pepper and soy sauce. Either way, its hard to find fault in these little mouthfuls of rich yolky goodness.

Fried noodles were cheap, nicely cooked and customisable. The idea is to grab a punnet then feel free to add as much chili, crushed peanuts, soy sauce, beansprouts and green onions as you can handle.


I did and this happened. Although it's not going to win any beauty contests anytime soon, this was a tray of pure awesomeness. Crushed peanuts and noodles is a killer partnership, and those sliced pickled chillies brought a delicious vinegary kick to the table.

The obligatory pork skewer. These ones had been coated with a sweet glaze. By the time I got there they were cold. OK-ish is probably a suitably non-committal way to express my almost complete lack of an opinion.

The styrofoam container it came in probably had more nutritional value than this deep fried chicken skin. Glasgow's deep fried mars bar have nothing on this stuff. I had to stop eating halfway through to give my arteries a fighting chance. I also had to finish the lot.

Street Sushi! There was actually loads of these stalls, with prices ranging from 5 - 10 baht a piece (10-20p.) Not the best sushi in the world, or possibly even Chiang Mai, but a real novelty.

Finally. German sausage and mashed potato. Yet another example of the multiculturalism of Chiang Mai's street food. A little on the pricey side for what you got (around 50p) but a good end to a great wander.

Papaya Salad

We've spent the last week or so in Luang Prabang doing a whole lot of nothing. We've met some people, gone bowling a few times, and nursed a couple of Beer Lao hangovers. We've read alot, eaten four times at an Indian restaurant, and generally passed our days ambling around the small town drinking fruit shakes and eating Laughing Cow cheese baguettes.



We've also discovered papaya salad. This stuff packs a heavy punch. Papaya shavings are pounded in a huge pestle and mortar along with birds eye chillies, cherry tomatoes, mini aubergines and something loosely translated into English as "hot plums." Citrus juice, salt, sugar and prawn paste are then added and tested to create a precise balance of flavours. The salad also comes with a side plate of cabbage and some other vegetables of weird and wonderful provenance.



I've been accused of wolfing down my food at times, but in papaya salad I've met my match. The hot, sour, sweet, fermented combination is simply too much to tackle full bore. Luckily, however, the crunchy, fresh papaya, and side plate of veg work as the perfect foils to this assault on the senses. With a steady, measured approach, the flavours unfold like oil in a puddle.



I can see why the vendor found it necessary to taste each batch as she went along. Without careful balancing this type of thing could seriously blow up in your face. The chili, citrus and prawn paste were all combustible flavours that both complemented each other and wrestled for control of the taste buds.

This was Laos food done for Laos people and made absolutely no concessions to the western palate. I think I'll wait a while before tackling another papaya salad - I need some time to let my mouth acclimatise!

Street Burger: Luang Prabang

You just can't beat a good burger. There's something elemental about the combination of meat, bread and sauce that, when done properly, leaves most other meals eating dust. I know it, the Americans know it, and apparently at least one Luang Prabang street vendor knows it now too.

Since the start of our trip I've frequently run the burger gauntlet. Sometimes, such as at My Burger My, in Hanoi, this has paid off. More frequently however, my Asian burger experience has been one of disappointment and self-reproach.

Like street food, burgers are something I feel very strongly about. That's why when I spied this street burger stand at the corner of Luang Prabang's main street I was a little concerned. A bad experience here could leave me doubly wounded, and bump the town down a couple of notches in my esteem.

In the end I needn't have worried.

The burger turned out to be a decent all-rounder. The beef had a bit of a cheapo twang to it but was reasonably tasty nonetheless. Most importantly, it had been hand formed. This suggested a little thought had been put into the sandwich and instantly elevated it above the overpriced monstrosities that are the mainstay of most UK chip vans.

Re toppings, I always leave burger dressing to the pros. This particular burgermeister opted for a standard lettuce/tomato/raw onion salad. She also slapped the lower bun with a layer of mayonnaise, and squeezed a few expressionist dashes of ketchup and American mustard on the upper bun. Although a bit of the local hot sauce wouldn't have gone amiss, the classic combo gave the burger a saucy, juicy appeal that cut straight to the heart of the genre. This was burgerdom in its simplest, most unadulterated form.

The best bit about the burger, however, was the bun. It was large, soft, and speckled with sesame seeds. The bun was advertised as locally made and this freshness shone through. No-one in Asia does bread like the South East Asians, and in Lunag Prabang they've got the burger bun down.

Although by no means the best burger I've had in Asia so far, the LP street burger definitely makes the top ten. What it lacks in local flare, it makes up for in straightforward-back-to-basics charm. As such, my faith in burgers and street food remain intact, and I will continue to regard Luang Prabang as one of my favourite spots on the planet!

Come and Halva go if you think you're hard enough!

I've just been looking through some of our photos and found this happy memory.

Sarah discovered this Halva outside Dongzhimen Subway Station in Beijing, where dozens of Uighers were selling massive blocks of it from the back of bicycles.

Resembling an oversized breakfast bar, this Halva consisted of cashew nuts, almonds, peanuts, goji berries and dried apricot, held together with a luxurious honey cement.

Although it started of soft, chewy and pliable, the halva set like concrete over the coming days. The fear of losing a tooth, however, was nothing compared to the rich reward. Sarah and I spent several days munching through our own breezeblock.

Pure nuts.

Luang Prabang Night Food Market

We've just arrived in Luang Prabang by way of an ill-advised detour through Vang Vieng, the so-called adventure capital of Laos. Although the area boasted some absolutely magnificent scenery, it turned out that Vang Vieng wasn't for us. We weren't really digging the tubing vibe (floating/drinking your way down a river) and the only street food in sight was a series of identikit stalls selling banana pancakes served with side orders of cynicism and regret. After 50 dollars was pinched from our room, we decided it was time for a speedy exit stage left.

Enter Luang Prabang, Lao's cultural and historical centre, and an altogether better place to be. The old town here is located within a thin peninsula created by the Nam Khan river's circuitous journey to the mighty Mekong, and is a truly unique place. A scattering of ornate Buddhist monasteries blend seamlessly with a predominantly French colonial style, and the surrounding tree covered mountains gleam with the occasional gold painted stupa. All this makes for a bona fide feast for the senses.

Man can't live on beauty alone however (trust me, I've tried) and this is where Luang Prabang's night food market comes in. The market provides a refreshingly diverse range of traditional Lao style food, and despite Luang Prabang's heavy tourist bent, seems to remain largely locally geared. It's a real maelstrom of smoke an engines as people ride up on their scooters, order, then zip away into the night with their food in little plastic bags.

Although minus a scooter, I put my legs to good use and embarked upon my first wandering graze for a while.

I started off with what has to be one of the best street food finds of our trip so far, the 5000 kip (about 40p) vegetarian buffet. I realise I just used the words best and vegetarian in the same sentence, but this thing was seriously good. For less than 40p, you can fill your plate with a range of rice, noodles, and curried vegetables. Standouts included a pumpkin dish that had been cooked to a perfect consistency, and a fluffy yellow rice packed with flavour.

Feeling somewhat healthy after my veg-fest, I decided to rectify the matter with some good old fashioned meat on a stick. I'd read a little about Lao sausage before I arrived and was naturally intrigued. These ones resembled the thin Denny sausages we get at home, so my interest was additionally piqued. When I bit in, I discovered a meaty centre surrounded by a sweet, glazed skin. This was naturally a little confusing, but an interesting (though one off) experience.

Lastly, I went for something a little different. It's been a while since I tried anything adventurous, and while my stomach keeps telling me I'm not a nose-to-tailer, my brain has a habit of forgetting. This time barbecued buffalo intestines were the culprits. These started off well enough with nicely grilled outer skin and a meaty flavour, but things became increasingly dubious when they turned out to contain a strange mystery filling. If someone had told me there and then that it was sage and onion stuffing, I would have gubbed the lot, but my imagination is unfortunately a little to active for my own good. I ate about half, then discreetly dumped the rest.

Luang Prabang is a great place, definitely one of the highlights of our trip so far. We've decided to stay here for a while, so I reckon a return trip to the market is in the offing.

Cine-noodles

I find it hard to get excited about noodle soup these days. Almost everywhere we've been there is a local variation on the basic noodle, broth and veg routine, and for me it's getting a little old. There are indeed some great versions around, but I find that most are basically a cheap and moderately tasty way to eek out another few hours of activity until your next meal.



The noodles I recently ate on the street in Vientiane fell into this category. They were standard issue fare: thin rice noodles in broth with chopped green onions and a range of veg and spicy sauces on the side. Filling and endlessly customizable, but nothing to (over) write home about.

What really interested me about this place was its location. Along with a few other street vendors and an outdoor barbershop, the stall was situated under the awnings of an abandoned old cinema. The awning itself still retained a wire mesh style billing board and the skeletal remains of a sign. The face of the building was corrugated like a fan and looked like the board for some complicated almagation of bridge and majong. Oversized scrabble letters of various scripts protruded from the roof like antennae, further adding to the board game look.



Back home this is the type of place that would be turned into apartments quicker than you can say Carole Smilie. Not so in Vientiane. Here, it simply decayed elegantly whilst remaining of some use to the citizens by virtue of its cool and expansive shade. Its most glamorous days may have been over, but at least it was still somewhere you could go to grab a bite and watch the world go by.

This reminded me of one of the things I like most about street food. While I find the phrase "authentic experience" more than a little absurd, I do think that eating on the streets can help you cut to the core of a place in a way that most restaurants don't offer. For me, the cinema and its rice noodles summed up Vientiane's languid, post-colonial, South East Asian charm.

That's worth a bowl of mediocore noodles any day.

And another!

Sorry for all the linkage going on here recently, but if anyone's interested a post I wrote whilst in China about the food in Yunnan has just appeared on Seoul Eats.

Much more entertaining however is the Alan Partridge clip that inspired the title for this post.

He must have a foot like a traction engine!

Making up for Laos Time

Yesterday we arrived in Laos' laid back capital Vientiane for some much needed R&R. Despite being renowned as a peaceful and quiet place, the cheapest and cleanest room we could find just happens to be the noisiest 6 square metres in the city. For some reason, it's noisier up here than down on the street and with at least three Asian pop CDs playing on loop in the immediate vicinity, it's most definitely a case of getting what we paid for.

This aside however, the capital so far seems to be living up to its reputation. The tree-lined streets are by in large free from the heavy traffic and grime of its regional counterparts, and the sales technique of the local entrepreneurs is decidedly more low key. All this makes for a much more hassle-free stay than we had in Cambodia and a greater willingness to get my street grub on.

It seems like an age since I was wolfing down cumin dusted lamb kebabs on the streets of China so when I saw these I wanted to get stuck right in. What interested me most about these kebabs was the presence of sliced peppers, onion and cherry tomatoes along with meat on the skewers. This is how we eat kebabs at home but I've almost never seen them done like this abroad. The veg looked charred, wrinkled and juicy, and I couldn't wait for that little cherry bomb to explode in my mouth.

Unfortunately however I never got that far. It turned out that this kebab definitely fell into the dubious category of mystery meat - it looked like lamb, they said it was pork, and it tasted like crap. After about 30 seconds straight chewing we hit the ejector button and the veg never even got to see the light of day.

Next day whilst exploring the vast Talat Sao market things went a little better when we came across a few food stalls. The one that interested us most was of the pre-cooked multi-dish variety that is pretty common in Vietnam. I usually steer clear of these for hygiene reasons and my preference for OSOD (one stall, one dish) operations, but I was getting good vibes from the vendor and the food looked good so I made an exception.

10,000 kip (about a quid) bought a plate of rice with a few curries and vegetables. Both the chicken curry and beef with ginger were good but it was the vegetable contingent that really served with distinction. Green beans were fresh, hot and crunchy, and some bok choy had been sauteed in a sour cooking liquid with a vegetable I'd never seen before but resembled half a quail's egg.

On a completely unrelated note today we saw a Laotian guy with a t-shirt emblazoned with a swastika that said "White Power Division" on it.

Looks like this is going to be a strange place!

"Holiday" in Cambodia

I don't mean to defile such a wicked Dead Kennedys song by the use of inverted commas, but I don't want to leave any ambiguity about how I feel about my time in the Kingdom.

The thing is, this place has killed my appetite, and I don't just mean metaphorically. For the last week or so I've hardly felt like eating, especially the street food. It's not just that all the meat is unrefrigerated and the streets are covered in rubbish, everytime I pull out my wallet I have to worry about who is driving past on a motorbike ready to snatch it off me.

More than that, alot of the stuff that goes on here frankly puts me off. There isn't one decent hospital in the country, and despite massacring around one quarter of the population more than thirty years ago, the Khmer Rouge still remain largely unpunished. Life literally bursts from every nook and cranny in the the land, yet somehow half the population is underfed and underdeveloped.

And Lexus 4x4s are as common a sight on the streets as 6 year olds selling flowers at 2am!

Justice obviously isn't a concept that translates to whatever form of Khmer the elite are currently speaking.

Many of the Westerners here are no better. The older ones lounge around the riverfront in Phnom Penh in their Hawaii shirts drinking happy hour cocktails with bored looking prostitutes like they're some sort of big deal. These sad, fat arseholes would do the world a favour if they could just waddle over to the Mekong with bricks in their pockets and jump in.

Many backpackers meanwhile treat the country like a massive dollar vodka playground. Sure, you can drink beer in hammocks on the beach until your wallet's empty, but there's no point running to the teacher if anything goes wrong - they'll probably be worse than the bullies.

As long as its part of the South East Asia Experience however no-one seems to care.

But there are slivers of light. More than anywhere else i've been, Cambodia abounds in the sort of self help civil society organisations that neo-liberals love to argue make up for the State actually giving a damn for the people it's supposed to protect.

One of these is the Sisters Cafe in Kampot. The proprietress there is an orphan who was saved from being sold into sexual slavery in Thailand by having her leg destroyed by a passing motorbike when she was twelve. She now runs an orphanage in the town, teaching the kids how to cook and screen print t-shirts.

Another one is Friends in Phnom Penh. There, former street kids prepare and serve massive portions of tapas that, though somewhat clunky and unrefined, have more soul than all of Phnom Penh's fine dining restaurants put together.

The country is beautiful and the majority of Cambodians are the nicest people you'll ever meet, but I think the country has a long way to go before it's anything like a good place to visit.

Sure, the food is nice, but what difference does that make when hell is raging just outside the restaurant door?

My Burger My

Things have been a little quiet here of late, mainly because our Cambodian experience has been more street crime than street food (we were recently liberated of our camera.)

Back in Hanoi, however, I wrote a review of a burger place that the folks at hamburger mega-blog A Hamburger a Day have been good enough to include on the site.

If you're interested, you can read it here.

Thanks again Robyn!

Chau Doc Com's Good

As my last post not too subtley expressed, I've been feeling a little disillusioned with the street food in Chau Doc since I've been here. To be honest it wasn't just the food that was getting me down - the heat, harassment, and tiredness all had a part to play.

It's amazing, however, how a few good sleeps and Twins (starring Arnold Swarzenegger and Danny De Vito) can revitilize ones spirits. Today I hit the streets of Chau Doc reinvigorated and hungry for action, managing to score a street food triple whammy for my pains.

Strike 1: After booking our boat tickets to Phnom Pehn, Sarah and I spotted this little ice-cream stall on the side of the road. 2000 dong (about 7p) a piece bought us a single scoop in a cone with a sprinking of crushed nuts on top. The ice cream had a soft, rich, creamy consistency, and a mild coconut taste. It also boasted a brittle, savory, rose-shaped cone that was as tasty as it was aesthetically pleasing.

Strike 2: There's a great market down the street from our hotel with some interesting food options. The place bustles with street food (some good, some not so good) and today we went to one of the bigger outfits for lunch. I ordered the Com Suan (pork chop with rice) and was rewarded with a lesson in simplicity. The plate brought together the four elements of meat, rice, veg and chilli sauce with effortless grace, and reminded me why I love street food so much. The pork chop had been glazed then grilled, and had that dreamy charred/sticky thing going on. Two generous portions were served on top of rice, cabbage and some hot hot hot chilli sauce. Perfect, simple, filling, and at 15000 dong (50p) a real bargain.

Strike 3: Back in Glasgow one of my favourite sandwiches was the "flamin' spiceball" from Il Cappucino on Great Western Road. This super creation involved meatballs, hot sauce and cheese and is proabably number four or five on the "must eat " list when I get home. Little did I know that I'd come across something similar in Vietnam however. This tasty little number involved a crusty baguette, pork meatballs in spicy tomato sauce, and sliced carrots and onions. Had there been a little bit of cheese on top and I could have been back in dear old glesgae there and then (except for the fact that it was pushing 30 degrees and nobody was trying to bottle me.) As sandwiches go, this one was damn good, and at 15000 dong, about 40 times cheaper than the flamin' spiceball (yes, I did just work that out on the calculator.)

All in all, it was a great day for street food, and the perfect way to spend our last day in Vietnam.

Ca phe sua da: Condensed milk with a kick.

We're currently in a town called Chau Doc on the Vietnam - Cambodia border, gathering our strength for Phnom Pehn and lying low for a few days while trying to avoid the tour touts and other hazards. Vietnam has been a bit of a mixed bag if I'm honest. Hanoi and the other areas in the north and centre were great, but Saigon and the Mekong delta has left us feeling a bit underwhelmed.

So too has the street food. It may be because my first street food experience in Saigon left me with food poisoning, but alot of what I see on the beat I find either uninteresting or unappetising. Much of the food seems to have been sitting out in the sun all day and there's only so many times one can get excited about a bowl of noodles.

Furthermore, we've been getting a little sick of being overcharged and talked about while we're eating. Only this morning a perfectly good bowl of won ton (pork dumplings in a peppery beansprout and green onion infused broth) was destroyed by the fact that everyone in a six stall radius was both pointing and laughing. I know I should be magnanimous and good humoured about being a massive pink idiot, but it does wear a little thin after a while.

One thing that never fails to perk me up however, is ca phe sua da - ice coffee with sweetened, condensed milk. This is something akin to Vietnam's national drink, and is available on almost every street corner. To make it, the vendor pours some pre-brewed black coffee concentrate over about a quarter of a glass of condensed milk, and then mixes the whole thing with a tall glass of crushed ice.

I've had ice coffee before, but nothing that compares to this. The coffee is fantantastic - rich, dark and strong, but in my opinion it's the condensed milk that makes the glass. Off white in colour, thick, sweet and syrupy, its the kind of thing that should disgusting, but somehow manages to interact with the coffee and ice in a way that can only be described as transplendent.

Ca phe sua da is at once refreshing, stimulating and moreish - some of my best moments in the country have been spent sitting in the shade with a glass of this in my hand watching the motorcycles whizz by. While Vietnam has its fair share of touts, scammers and serial starers, it also has ca phe sua da, which in my mind more than makes amends.

RIP Keith Floyd

Just a quick note to mark the passing of Keith Floyd, who died Monday at the age of 65 from a heart attack.

Floyd was the orginal food punk, cooking glass in hand with a devil-may-care attitude while Anthony Bourdain was still washing dishes (no disrespect to Tony.)

I first encountered Floyd on the BBC's Saturday Kitchen, where re-runs of his mediterrean adventures ran at just about the same time as my own, latent relationship with cooking was starting to develop.

He embodied a relaxed, fun and creative approach to cooking, emulated today by chefs such as Jamie Oliver (one of Floyd's most vocal eulogisers) and played a part in taking alot of the starch out of British food culture.

Cheers Keith.

Street Shots: the week in pictures.

We came across this mobile fritter factory on the main street in Hoi An. Not sure what the balls were but the ones in the wok are banana fritters. Sarah tried one and said she couldn't taste any banana. Just out of shot were some thin donuts with lots of sugar on them. They tasted kind of chewy and stale - the type of thing you might buy in packs of twenty at a cheapo supermarket.

Not so much street foodie as sea foodie. I ate these tamarind prawns in a sun lounger out on one of the beaches by Hoi An. All along the beach there were little huts that specialised in Vietnamese seafood, This wasn't great but the day before I had tamarind crab (no photo unforunately) at a different place which was out of this world (the crab, not the place.) The crabs' shell had been lifted off and right where the roe lived, was placed a mixture of tamarind, onion and chili. Delicious

A contender for the Hoi An heavyweight title? Chao Vit is a semilina like mixture of rice, chilli sauce, green onions, oil and duck. It's savory with a surprising kick to it, with decent pieces of barbecued duck thrown in here and there. My enjoyment of the meal was hampered however, by the constant overselling of the vendor next door (whom Sarah ordered from.) When we finished she tried to charge us double, and the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth.

Mmm. Some sort of "sea fish" wrapped in banana leaf and grilled with lemongrass, tamarind, chili and soy sauce. Slightly underdone but still delicious. There's a bunch of outdoor eating places next to the river in Hoi An that do this kind of thing for the tourist crowd. The food is good and cheap, and we ended up eating there three nights in a row.

Finally, my first street food in Saigon turned out to be dud. I got these fried noodles with chicken and shrimp left at the Banh Than market - a supposed street food goldmine. They left me feeling queasy, and led to the first tangible case of food poisoning in the six months or so I've been writing this blog.

Street Fighter: Cao Lau vs Com Ga

Hoi An, in central Vietnam, is a place where you can very easily drop some serious coin. The streets are lined with hundreds of tailor shops, and the lure of tailor-made cloths can stitch up even the most rigourously observed budget. Whilst there I went a little overboard and got a three piece suit, two shirts and a fantastic imitation Baracuta Harrington jacket.

One thing that doesn't cost the world however, is street food. And in Hoi An, two of Vietnam's most famous street dishes wage a nightly battle for supremacy.

It's a classic match up of noodles vs rice. In the red (street) corner, Cao Lau comes out punching with a heady dish of noodles, beansprouts, croutons and pork slices, while in the blue corner, Com Ga (translation: chicken rice) plays the long game with its simple yet arresting combination of flavours.



From where this commentator was sitting, it was a one-sided match from the outset. Although Cao Lau made a decent show of keeping its fists up, I found little to excite. The noodles were tired and worn out, the broth tasted brackish and the meat was of that "don't look at it while you eat it" quality. All in all a pretty common routine, and one that Yunnan runs rings around.





In Com Ga however, I got the impression I was around some serious talent. The rice had been cooked in coconut milk, chicken stock and turmeric, giving it a light, delicious savory-ness that could survive all by itself if needs be. As for the chicken, it had been roughly shredded and was of top rate quality - neither bone nor gristle in sight. The plate was topped off by a generous forest of green leaves, one of which tasted incredibly like coriander but looked intiguingly unlike it.The combined effect was a studied, gentle form that took a bunch of simple flavours and ran with them all the way to the moon.

And for me that's the true mark of a champ

Gimme some suga!

I originally thought this stuff was bamboo, and had worked out my intro to this post before I even tasted it. I wanted to mention the fact that some species of bamboo can grow up to 18 inches per day, and that by tensile strength, bamboo is in fact stronger than steel. I even wanted to say how I someday hope to own a light green short sleeve shirt with a dark green bamboo pattern coming down it in vertical stripes.

Turns out, however, that I was wrong. These long green shoots are actually (and probably obviously) sugarcane. The cane had been stripped and was being made into a cold drink on a pierside on Cat Ba Island in Halong Bay. The vendor fed each stalk into a motorised mangle one-by-one, collected the liquid in a jug underneath then mixed it with crushed ice in a tall glass.

The result was a white, cloudy drink with a light, sweet, refreshing taste. My realisation that this stuff would go great with rum was only slightly before I realised they were basically one and the same.

Beer Ahoy!

It didn't take long for Sarah and I to discover another Vietnamese institution: the Bia Hoi.

These street bars are located all around Hanoi, and supply the basics - cold beer and a seat from which to watch Hanoi whizz by.

The beer is based on chezch pilsner, and brewed on rooftops all across the city. It has a fresh, hoppy taste, and most importantly, it is cheap - one glass will set you back no more than about 10p.

All this makes it incredibly easy to simply sit back, run up a tab and let the chaos get on without you.

Which is exactly what we did.

Bun Cha

It's our second day in Hanoi, and Sarah and I just stumbled on what I've since found out to be one of Northern Vietnam's most famous street dishes: Bun Cha.

Bun Cha is a lunchtime favourite that marries rice noodles, grilled pork meatballs and a fish sauce infused broth in a fantastic dish that screams our arrival in South East Asia.

In classic street food style we didn't even have to order this one - our lunch was brought to us while we were still fiddling about in the Lonely Planet food section and looking around us awkwardly.

We each recieved a plate of lukewarm, slightly sticky rice noodles and a bowl of broth. We also got a large plate of leaves to share and some chopped chili and garlic by way of condiments.

It was all pretty intuitive - take a small bunch of noodles, drop it in the broth along with some leaves, chili and garlic and then gather up as much as you can with your chopsticks, making sure to grab some of that pork along the way.

What happened next was outstanding; the pork meatballs were charred on the outside and medium rare in the middle, containing subtle hints of a spice mix I was having too much fun to even think about. The broth, meanwhile, was in turns sweet, savory and spicy, the unmistakable tang of fish sauce acting as a prelude to the slow chili burn that followed. Apart from the lettuce, I have no idea what the other leaves were. Suffice to say that they were good, with a nippy little purple number making a particular impression.

So good was lunch in fact, that I barely registered the three mice that scurried past our table during the course of our meal.

Now thats what I call food.

Banned in the PRC!

So for some reason, Street Foodie was caught up in the 10% of all websites blocked in China. As such, I've relied on my Dad to post for me for the last five weeks. Thanks Dad!

Whether it was my reckless use of bad puns or my virtual ignornarance of spelling and punctuation we'll never know. What I do know is that now I'm back online I'll be posting MUCH more frequently and being a much better webmaster all round.

Looking forward to writing about Vietnam. Street food is everywhere and the ice coffee has been keeping me awake at night.