From top left, clockwise: mangosteen, soursop (and open soursop), rambutan (and open rambutan), longan (and open longan), snake fruit, and custard apple.

It’s about time I wrote a fruit post. I think it all started last year when Matt’s sister returned from a quick trip to Vietnam. She told me about how she had eaten this strange and wonderful fruit—dragon fruit. I knew I wanted to try it during Matt and my trip. During one of our first few days in Thailand I picked up a dragon fruit at a local market, but was disappointed to find that it wasn’t very fruity. It tasted more like a watery kiwi, pretty plain for its striking appearance. Not letting the dragon fruit get me down, I was determined not to give up on my quest for good fruits. Bananas and oranges are always good, but it was due time to start branching out.

Things began to pick up in Cambodia where I tried longan, rambutan, and tamarind (in a sauce) for the first time. We also tried a couple new varieties of bananas—one with round black seeds at the bottom (like b-bs) and the other so small in size that each banana could be eaten in 2-3 bites. I gained more courage for venturing out after chatting with another fruit person after hearing about the exciting fruits he’d tried during his travels. Back in Thailand I tasted water apples, jackfruit, mangosteen, yellow watermelon, and dried tamarind for the first time. Tamarind is delicious and chewy; it’s got that sweet and sour thing going on.

In Brunei Matt had a bite of soursop and raved about it, back in Malaysia I tried a soursop shake but still need to try the real thing. I decided to give dragon fruit (also known as pitaya) another shot, particularly since I’d heard the red dragon fruit is far better than the white variety, which is what I’d tried before. The red ones are indeed sweeter and juicier, about what I’d expected when I first heard of them. I also had my first crack at freshly roasted chestnuts, which aren’t exactly fruit, but they come from a plant and taste really good so it sort of counts for this list.

In Indonesia we both fell in love with the crunchy and tart snake fruit as well as re-tried mangosteens, this time ripe and incredibly amazing.

(inside of snake fruit)
The flesh of a mangosteen is very silky, soft, and juicy. It tastes fragrant like a mixture of flowers and fruit, but not too overpowering. I tried jackfruit again, this time in a curry. I don’t really care for it, but the trees it grows on look pretty interesting.

Walking past the fruit stalls at a market in Saigon, I realized that almost every fruit being sold could not easily be found at home. Since arriving in Vietnam I’ve tried custard apple, langsat (it took me a while online to figure out what the name), pink guava, and the infamous durian, which wasn’t exactly bad, just interesting (though the smell in our hotel room after a couple of hours was pretty bad). I think the thing with durian is that it has a really nasty, fleshy, almost custard-like texture.

Paired with the smell it just isn’t so good. Maybe if it was a firm fruit I would have liked it better. Langsat looks similar to a longan from the outside, except that the color is slightly different and it is not round. Once opened, you can see that it is very different.

Instead of a juicy round flesh, the langsat is divided into segments and has a more citrus taste (almost like a really mild grapefruit) than the longan, which is very floral and juicy. Once peeled, longans look similar to the inside of a peeled grape. Rambutan, like longans are in the lychee family. Though they look exciting on the outside (kind of like a koosh ball), the fruit inside has never impressed me much.

Good water apples are similar in taste to a regular apple, only, as the name suggest, more firm/watery in texture than grainy as even crisp apples can be. Custard apples don’t taste like an apple at all, but are delicious nonetheless. The trick is to buy a ripe one—the scales on the outside should be easily peeled back to reveal a white, moist, pulpy flesh.

Black seeds dot the interior, but are easily spit out as you enjoy the distinct flavor and custard-texture of this fruit. I tried a soupsop, which is in the same family as the custard apple, but it was not ripe and unfortunately not very good. The soupsop juice I had though seemed to be similar in flavor to the custard apple, only more tart and tangy.

I’m glad that I’ve been able to taste so many new fruits. It seems like I have tried a lot, but there are still so many more out there. My favorites so far have been: passion fruit (in abundance at the buffet on Embudu), mangoes, custard apple, mangosteen, snake fruit, longan, and langsat. So maybe you’ve said in the past that you don’t want to travel because you don’t care about seeing anything, but you really should visit SE Asia for the fruit if nothing else.

Here’s some websites I used to help me identify the langsat. They have some pictures of fruit I mentioned above but don’t have pictures of myself.

http://www.indoindians.com/food/indfruit.htm
http://www.bangkokcooking.com/fruits.php

Massive structures made from such small grains of sand, dunes have always intrigued me. The beach a few minutes away from where I grew up has them, and their slopes gracefully frame the rough sea. The dunes where why I wanted to come to Mui Ne. Red dunes. I’ve seen grey ones and tan ones, but never red. So we decided to stop here for a day since it was on our way north anyways. In the morning we caught two xe om (motorbikes) to take us to the dunes.

In hindsight, we probably could have found the place on our own, but at the time we weren’t sure. I read a book once (I think Monkey bridge by Lan Cao) that described a few places in Vietnam, one of which was a fish sauce village. We passed through one on the way through the dunes—I could tell by the smell before I saw the shops, and could picture the scene in the book happening in a place just like that. Shortly afterward, the dunes were in sight. As Matt and I got off the bikes and started walking toward the dunes, we could see a handful of little kids running towards us with plastic sleds. They followed us up the dunes, pitching their services. “My name Kim. If you go twice, go with Kim.” “Where you from? I from New York,” said one little girl (obviously not). “How old are you?” I gave my age. “Oh, you look so much younger,” nice try kid, I thought, but I’m not trying to look like I’m 19.

Despite all the sweet talking and their natural cuteness, Matt and I declined to pay their inflated prices for unlimited sledding, but still decided (well, I made Matt do it) to pay a little bit to have one try each. The girls began to prepare a path for our sleds by throwing sand down the dune to decrease the friction for when we slid down. Matt went first, with the help of a push from one of the girls, and I followed. It was fun. The kids got all pouty when we refused to go again, but were quickly distracted by a large sand beetle I found. Matt and I continued roaming the dunes for a little bit. It was beautiful to see the wavy marks in the sand caused by the strong wind, echoing the larger shape of the dunes themselves. But it was hot and after about 30 or 40 minutes at the dunes, we walked back to the road to head back to our hotel. I don’t know why, but for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to try rolling down one of the dunes. It was a bumpy and sandy way down. Somewhat thrilling I guess, but mostly I was just dizzy and very sandy. I didn’t try it again.

Mui Ne was going to be a one-night stop to break-up the journey to Nha Trang. But after a few minutes staring out at the wavy ocean and thinking about how flexible our itinerary is, we quickly decided to stay an extra day. It was well worth it too. We stayed in a nice little room on the second floor of a guesthouse overlooking the green South China Sea. Most of the time here, the wind was strong and the waves were up. We walked a couple kilometers down the windy beach our first evening there. It felt like our shins and calves were getting sandblasted, but at least we were entertained by the dozens of kitesurfers flying around just offshore. Closer to shore, teenagers surfed in on the small waves. The windy, green-watered beach was unlike most of the picture-prefect beaches we’ve been to as of late, but the wind, surf, and activity made it a dynamic and enjoyable beach.

While we spent yesterday and this afternoon at the beach, the coolest thing we did here was visit some massive sand dunes this morning. We took a pair of motorbikes 15 km north, through villages along the fishing-boat-filled bay, to the huge dunes. Hopping off the bikes, we slippily hiked up a mountain of sand from the road. A group of small girls ran to us with plastic sheets, which they hoped we would use to slide down some dunes in return for a few dong. They followed us as we walked up the dunes and along the ridges past giant bowls of sand. The dunes were much bigger than I had expected and it seemed almost like a scene out of Lawrence of Arabia, with the huge dunes overlooking the sea. It was really windy up there, so for a second day in a row, our legs got sandblasted, but the wind continually altered the texture of the surfaces. We did eventually slide down the dunes which was fun, but my favorite part was taking in the unique scenery.

Besides the beach and the dunes, there doesn’t seem to be a lot to do in Mui Ne. It’s pretty much a tourist enclave strung out along a road of tour agencies and restaurants. On the plus side though, Mui Ne wasn’t very crowded and it was a quite place to relax. It wasn’t a bad place to stop for a few days.

Given what we’ve seen the past few days, its amazing that we’re even in Vietnam. Just a generation ago, American was engaged in a bitter decade-long war here. And now, we’re welcomed as any other nationality would be. In one sense, I’m grateful that so many places we’ve visited are so forgiving of the US and the West in general. And on another hand, its amazing to see how much places change, how fluid situations are. Forty years ago, Vietnam was arguably the worst place for an American to be in the second half of the 20^th century. And now look at it. Makes me wonder what Baghdad will be like in 40 years. Similarly, Laos was closed to all foreigners only fifteen years ago. What will North Korea be like in 15 years? Ten years ago, there was still fighting going on in Phnom Penh. How many of today’s hotspot will be safe in a decade? Perhaps there’s still hope…

One of my highlights in Saigon has to be our tour to the Cu Chi tunnels today. Cu Chi is about an hour and a half north of Saigon and a center of resistance during the war. Just as it was a few decades ago , it’s a forested region with pockets of rubber plantations. During French colonial times, rebels hid weapons in hidden holes and underground storerooms. But during the American war, these were expanded into an extensive tunnel network, comprising 250 km! We learned that the tunnels were built along three levels at 3, 6, and 8 meters, complete with stairways, air ducts, kitchens, sleeping quarters, wells, and booby traps. They were ingeniously designed with thousands of hidden entrances surrounded by booby traps, along with secret submerged entrances only accessible by swimming underwater in the Saigon River. Smoke was filtered and dissipated through various systems, so cooking could commence undetected from above. Air ducts were built into termite mounds, which provided camouflage.

model of tunnel system

B-52s destroyed nearly 80% of the tunnels in 1968-69 and defoliate/napalm was used extensively in the region, but it was from Cu Chi that the North launched effective offensives on Saigon. We got to go down into a couple of the tunnels, which were really really tiny. Many of the tunnels were built incredibly small, so Americans and other Western troops wouldn’t be able to enter or would get stuck due to their larger build.

it was tough for this little Asian lady to fit in this hole…imagine a GI trying to infiltrate the tunnels

We learned of all the horrors that the fighters faced below ground, along with the problems intruders encountered. One of the scariest things were tons of booby traps that we saw. Here’s some photos and descriptions of how they work:

false floor with metal spikes below

more spikes…yikes!

this set of spikes would swing down and impale any GI kicking down a door

Walking through the woods, it sounded like we were in the war, since there was also a firing range at which you could choose to use any of the weapons used by Vietnamese or American troops. Short bursts of AK-47s continually pierced the air. When she heard that there was a firing range, Joylani turned to me and said (seriously), “I want to fire an automatic weapon.” When we got there, she decided maybe not due to the super loud noise and the 1.5 USD per bullet price (minimum 10 bullets). Anyways, the tour of the tunnels was really interesting, between seeing and going in the claustrophobic tunnels, seeing the scariest looking booby-traps, and learning about the nature of the fighting that raged here.

View of Saigon from Kyla’s flat

While Matt left to go take the GMAT this morning, I met up with my friend Kyla who I’ve known since elementary school, but hadn’t really talked to since our freshman year of college (aka 6 years ago). To make a short story short: contact via facebook, found out she was in Saigon, “Hey, let’s hang out!” (Fact: I went to my first slumber party at Kyla’s house, where I also tasted my first crepe. Coming from a then no-fireworks family, I was also terrified by the sparklers her sisters and the other girls were running around with the night before.) Naturally, it was fun to catch up and hang out, but even more so by the novelty that our little reunion was taking place in Ho Chi Min City, a far cry away from little old Arcata where such reunions normally take place running into old friends and classmates at the local grocery or at the Plaza.

The last time I saw Kyla, neither of us knew what a xe om was much less could have pictured us riding one through Ho Chi Minh City. (Well, maybe Kyla knew, but I sure didn’t.) So that was fun.

Ok, so I don’t remember why it was called that or what exactly the historical significance of the Reunification Palace is (something to do with the war…), but I’m sure Matt will cover that in his post.  My post will focus on design.  This place is amazing!  It’s got a classy Asian retro feel to it, somewhat minimalist while still managing to carry an ornate flair.  The lines in the furniture and building are simple, but the windows and upholstery are done up in opulent fabrics, and a rich color palette is used throughout many of the rooms.  It was fun to picture important political meetings happening in such funky spaces.

The basement was a stark contrast with cold gray walls and gloomy corridors.  This space was very industrial looking and seemed simply functional for one purpose—war time communications and planning.  The only items in the rooms were phones, typewriters, desks, and a file cabinet here and there.   It was quite a contrast to the carefully curtained and upholstered upstairs.  The only visual connection to the upstairs was the presence of these colorful phones that could be found in both locations.  I can imagine that each one had a specific purpose, a la Bat Phone.

Other than the Reunification Palace, what really got my attention today was the traffic.  Ho Chi Min City, like Phnom Penh, is heavy on the motorbike traffic, perhaps even more so.  As the traffic through an intersection starts to slow down in one direction, a multitude of motorbikes going the other way becomes a critical mass, creeping through the intersection before picking up speed.  Eventually the process repeats itself and bikes start crossing traffic from the other direction.

Today was our first full day in Vietnam and we spent the day sightseeing HCMC. First, I should mention that HCMC and Saigon are used pretty interchangeably, so I might switch back and forth too. We decided to walk around the city, rather than get driven or biked around. It was really hot, but it was great to get a feel for the city. We almost got run over by a few of the 4 gazillion motorbikes zooming around the city, but it was fun. The first thing I noticed was how the roads were like rivers of motorbikes, with some drivers spilling over onto the sidewalks even. The other thing I noticed was how much construction was going on. Everywhere, foundations were being laid and stories being added to existing buildings. For the first time since India, we’re in a rapidly developing place. I think Vietnam’s GDP growth is third in the world, only to China and India. I’ve also read its two stock markets are the fastest growing in the world. Anyways, the sheer number of motorbikes and construction were initial indicators that money is flowing in Vietnam. Private property has only been legalized within the past decade, but capitalism is driving life here in HCMC. It’s all a bit ironic though, because two of the three sights we saw today revolve around the American War (known in the US as the Vietnam War), in which the Communists drove out the Western capitalists/imperialists.

Our first stop of the day was the impressive War Remnants Museum. The first gallery was one of the best I’ve ever visited, being a tribute to photojournalists of the war. It displayed walls and walls of excellent photography, along with photographer bios and anecdotes (mostly describing how they died on assignment). The photography featured some Pulitzer Prize winning work, photos that had a large impact on American perceptions of the war, along with some more artistic pieces. It featured famous guys like Robert Capa, all the way down to little-known North Vietnamese photographers. The next gallery was photo exhibit about UXO and mines, featuring not only Vietnam, but also Laos, Sri Lanka, Angola, and the Balkans. The rest of the gallery showcased all aspects of the American War. Besides the usual weapons, uniforms, history, and stories, the museum also had some more unusual exhibits. One was photographs of napalm and Agent Orange being used, its point punctuated with two jars containing deformed fetuses that died from the effects of Agent Orange. Another interesting exhibit was a mock-up of the “Tiger Cages” used by the South Vietnamese to torture the NVA. The museum’s anti-war message was really effective as many of the photographs pictured horrific things that I couldn’t even imagine, the exhibits conveyed the insanity of many aspects of the fight, and propaganda was kept to a minimum. I did think the tanks and fighter jets surrounding the museum were pretty cool though.

From the War Remnants Museum, we walked a couple blocks to the Reunification Palace, the location where the infamous “Fall of Saigon” culminated. Although blocky and ugly from the outside, the inside was really cool. Large rooms lived up to their palatial status while wide, open hallways were breezy and cool. It was here, at the Independence Palace as it was called, that North Vietnamese tanks rammed down the gates and surrounded the compound. It’s said that the South Vietnamese president greeted the North’s commander by saying, “I’ve been waiting here all morning to transfer power to you.” The commander responded, “Your power has crumbled, you cannot give what you do not have.” And that was the end of the war. Now a museum, the palace has been kept nicely. Many of the rooms are very luxurious, although I’m not sure if that’s from the southern upper class or the northern military rulers. Most of the information is propaganda, but it’s an interesting place to walk around. The basement is kept as it was during the war, as the operations center of the South. Small plain rooms with antiquated radio and communication equipment, old rotary phones, and wall-sized maps of South East Asia and Vietnamese provinces.

After lunch (pho of course) we headed to the HCMC Museum. This museum was actually pretty boring. Besides temporary exhibits of South Vietnamese weddings and a history of HCMC’s municipal development, the museum was a bunch of boring war propaganda. But it began pouring outside, so we were stuck in a museum for awhile. When the rain subsided, we dashed over to a large market. I steered clear of the butchers’ aisles full of weird animal parts and Joylani found a nice little drink and dessert stand, which I’m sure she’ll describe in detail in one of her posts. Pooped out from walking all over Saigon, we headed back to our hotel where we rested before going out for dinner (again, pho of course ) and then drinks with one of Joylani’s high school friends, Kyla. Although I’ll let Joylani write more about that, it was cool to hear some local expat perspectives on HCMC and Vietnam. Hopefully, I learn more in the coming days and weeks.

Flying in just as the sun dropped down and the glassy rice paddies faded into the fog.  Once over Saigon, my first impression was how colorful it looked.  Rather than the usual yellow/white city lights, Saigon from above looked like a city decked out in Christmas lights, presumably the rest of countless neon signs on all the shops.

 

Flying into Ho Chi Minh City was unlike any other aerial approach I’ve seen. Like most busy airports, we circled in a holding pattern before landing. Although the business capital of Vietnam, HCMC is not a city of tall buildings. Not unusual for a developing country, but even from the sky, it was unique. Usually, a yellow glow hangs over cities, being illuminated by millions of incandescent lights. But HCMC was a neon city. From the sky, the city was a hodgepodge of neon blues, reds, and oranges, along with some purples, yellows, and greens. Once en route from the airport to our hotel, we got a first hand look at the busy avenues chock-full of neon signs. Different, but cool. As we’ve just been here one night, I don’t have too much to report other than lots of neon signs and millions of motorbikes.