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Friday 14 March 2014

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Kitesurfing Vietnam Biography

source(google.com.pk)

It was a tiny soup stand made up of corrugated iron sheets and old, huge metal pots, locked up during the day with its benches folded in like a turtle hiding in its shell. Around dusk, the smiling woman who ran it started to unpack her stand methodically, unfolding the metal sheets, popping out the table legs and separating the herbs and meat and noodles into easily-accessible rows. A friend asked her once if she was open for lunch and she said no, that during the day she cooked at one of the resorts but at night she and her husband came to their tiny stand, making extra revenue – and lots of soup.

I should note that I didn’t see one tourist at this soup stand. I walked by every night and ate there several times. It was packed with taxi drivers instead, their cabs driven halfway onto the sand, tipping at awkward angles while they slurped up their meal. The tourists that walked by would stumble awkwardly when they saw me in the midst of ravenous taxi drivers, one or two stopping to ask warily how the soup fared. “Oh it’s the best in town,” I would respond enthusiastically. “Easily the best I’ve had in my weeks in Vietnam too.” Hearing my words but ignoring my advice, they’d nod absently and continue their trajectory along the beach in search of eats. (This genuinely confuses me. If the place is packed with people, smelling fabulous and there’s a tourist there also telling you it’s the soup to end all soups why would you keep going?) Baffled, I’d drown my questions in pork and beef broth, the soup lady cackling softly at my failed attempts to lure others to partake in the fun.

The last night in town, I brought my friend Hung to dinner. Fluent in Vietnamese, he was an ideal conduit for all my soupy questions. From the tenderness of the meat (“it’s because I don’t remove it from the soup!” she said with a smile. “It’s tender because it’s in the soup!”) to questions about the herbs she served with the soup (“no fish herb, no no no”), I left town secure that not only did I eat the best soup in town, I learned quite a bit in the process.

To make matters more fun, her husband was a connoisseur of coconuts, talking to us about why certain trees grew better-tasting ones than others (“they need salt water as they grow – it makes them sweet”) and eventually taking his motorbike to their home to fetch some of his prized young coconut for us to try. I ended my trip drinking sweet coconut water, messily scooping out the pulp with a soup spoon when the water was gone.

Seafood soup Mui Ne Vietnam
An unusual Christmas lunch of seafood soup and fresh coconut. NOT the soup from the soup stand, which remains etched in my mind but not my memory card!
Ducks at Dusk

I noticed the ducks first. They were gurgling and clucking softly, waddling in a twosome at the side of the road. Their movement caught my eye, peripheral to my concentrated efforts not to fall into one of the many cracks in the sidewalk. To prevent myself from stumbling in the dark, I froze in my tracks to turn their way. I know nothing about ducks, but these two looked as happy as any ducks I’ve ever seen, whirring around in a rhythmic, sand-kicking frenzy.

It was my second night in Mui Ne and I was on my way to a seafood dinner, tracing the length of the water until I found the restaurant I wanted to sample for tamarind crab. Lost in thought about what food adventures awaited me during my week in town while trying not to fall off the road, the ducks were a strange interjection. In the shadow of giant palm trees and in filthy roadside sand, they were shifting from foot to foot in perfect unison, swirling their way through the one of the few empty lots on the beach’s strip. I looked down to see a trail of duck shells littering the small sliver of rocks at the edge of the sand, just before the sidewalk began. The ducks were most certainly not there during the day, so who brought them to the beach at dusk?

It turned out that the woman who gently wrapped and fried delicate fish spring rolls was responsible for the ducks, loading them on her tiny motorbike and releasing them at dusk when she set up shop. Happy ducks meant more eggs for hot vit lon, a fertilized duck egg that is a hugely popular nighttime snack in Vietnam. Like the soup stand, the woman’s tiny plastic tables were only populated with locals, all of who stopped eating to stare when we ordered a plate of fried fish spring rolls as an appetizer for our soup. We didn’t try the duck eggs, but the spring rolls were fabulous, crispy and filled with tender pieces of fish with the skin still on.

Despite the beach and the soup and the many kite-surfers dotting the horizon, when I think of Mui Ne, I think of those ducks.