Tet in Vietnam

Lunar new year, aka Chinese new year, but in Vietnam it's called Tet, is the biggest celebration of the year.  In the south it means yellow flowers, fruit trays, dragon dances, and impossible crowds at transport since everyone goes to their home towns. In the north it's red flowers, but we always go south as that's where my wife is from, so never mind that.

If you're a tourist thinking of visiting Vietnam, as interesting as the new year might be, I would recommend against going at that time. Mostly because it's impossible to get anywhere, and especially in the big cities, almost everything is closed. So instead I'll tell you here what you'll miss. And things you can find other times of the year when it's a much better idea to visit.

 

One such thing would be the flower markets. And since the south is sparkled with rivers going everywhere (I'm talking about the Mekong delta here), a lot of these are on boats. The flower markets get very crowded but they're definitely worth seeing with all the colours and variety.

In every household in the front they'll have a fruit tray, with all sorts of fruits gathered up and often drink cans behind them. There's also assorted nuts and other such snacks, and tea may be served. The first visitor of the year should be someone successful though, as it sets the luck for the rest of the year.

Another thing you'll find are flower trees, they try to make sure the bloom at the right time. There's likely some at the gate outside, and another indoors. The indoor one is decorated like a Christmas tree.

The cities tend to also have fireworks and other such things during new year. And dragon dancers go around doing their thing in front of houses. If you have family there, you'll need a lot of money in red envelopes to give away.

The breakfast in Vietnam tends to be either noodles or bread filled with all sorts of things. This stall in Long Xuyen kind of combines the two in a dish called súp bánh mì, you get both the soup and the bread. It's right at the central market in Long Xuyen, on one of the side streets. Look around of that dish name and of course "chay", which means vegetarian, and the most important word to recognise in Vietnam as most of the vegetarian eateries don't have any English labelling. So with that you should be able to find other food. Use Happy Cow to find the restaurants.

This time we went to Ben Tre, a province known for its coconuts, just south of Sai Gon (Ho Chi Minh city). Over there you can kayak along the river and see many blue birds, cycle on little roads surrounded and shaded by coconut trees, and of course buy coconut candies. They tend to be vegan (do check though, you never know!).

 Cempedak Private Island

As a surprise to my wife, we spent the weekend in the autumn on Cempedak island. It's in Indonesia, quite near to Bintan, 2.5 hours from Singapore. As a private island, the resort is the only thing on the island, so you rely on them for food and everything else. This turned out to be a great thing because we could just forget about everything for a while and not be constantly happycow'ing where to eat next like we usually do on travels.

The surprise worked perfectly, even at the Indonesian customs she still had no idea where we're going, but at that stage I had to bring up the name as the customs officer was asking. Nonetheless, it was perfectly smooth -- you arrive at Bintan, go to the lounge at the port and the Cempedak people pick you up from there and drive you to the other side of the island where they have their own speedboat for the rest of the trip.

The arrival was perfect, the place in the darkness of the night had a bit of a magical feel to it. I had told them several times we're vegan since we would be relying on them, but was positively surprised when the guest relations manager upon giving us our welcome drinks was saying they know we're vegan, clearly knew what it meant, and was asking about which kind of vegan breakfast we'd like.



Cempedak is surprisingly eco-friendly. The whole place is built of bamboo, they don't allow any plastic on the island, compost the waste, use water sparingly etc. All this is really nice to see in a luxury resort, and it really doesn't appear to take anything out of the luxury either. The place was much nicer than any 5 star hotel we've been to (and we've been to many!), particularly when it comes to service level.


We chose the seaview villa, which is higher on the hill than the beach villas. Since we didn't try the beach villas it's hard to compare, but the villa on the hill was wonderful, and the wind blowing through made sure we didn't miss having an aircon at any time of the day.



The villas are huge, two floors, really specious, and with a private pool for that morning swim. The water in that pool was quite chilly in the mornings though. The bed has mosquito netting, which is good, although we didn't see too many mosquitos around. Might be just luck.



As for things to do, the resort has kayaks, sailboats, paddle-boards, windsurfing, etc, all free of charge. I even got a free windsurfing lesson since it wasn't busy. They do an eco-tour of the resort area in the mornings, and one extra free activity each day. You can also go snorkeling or diving nearby, or of course relax by the pool or at the villa, or go for the spa treatments. The spa is not cheap, pretty much at Singapore prices, but has a great view.



We also brought our musical instruments along (my wife plays the guzheng and I play the dizi, Chinese bamboo flute). Magnificent environment to be playing music in. At night the sky was so full of stars we were totally amazed, never seen such a rich night sky!

The best part of the wonderful stay was still the food though, I think. Every time at the end of a meal they would suggest and ask things they would do for the next meal, and since they were totally attentive to feedback, the food kept getting better and better throughout the stay! And we never had to wonder about things being vegan as they clearly knew what it is and how to make great vegan food, which is truly a rare treat in a non-veg place.

Beach Clean-up

This weekend I participated in the beach cleanup effort by Seven Clean Seas. It's a young organisation, just a year old, with the aim of reducing the waste in our seas. Now it's turtle hatching season here in Singapore, and the poor turtles have trouble climbing up to the beaches with all the plastic garbage.

The turnout was great, I don't know how many people but must've been in the hundreds.

We split to four groups and went to different beaches. It's quite shocking really how much garbage there end up at the shores of the clean Singapore. Here's a before picture of the beach where I ended up:

With so many people, the cleanup was quick, took a bit over two hours. Here's the after photo:

Overall, a lorry-load of garbage was collected, estimated to be up to 3000 kg! 😲

Singapore

So let's start by what's so great about this small island nation I'm calling home nowadays.

1. 691 all vegetarian eateries, and counting! Haven't seen that amount in any other city, despite what any most-veg-friendly rankings say. I haven't done a research on the database though, if you know of places with more, feel free to comment below. It's a lot though, whether more exists or not. My favourite places, you ask? Loving Hut at Joo Chiat, and Herbivore in Fortune Centre. Speaking of Fortune Centre, more vegetarian eateries there in one shopping centre than in the whole country of Finland...

   

   My favourite dish, the almond crumb filet, at Loving Hut

2. It's green. Really, surprisingly green for a city state. Trees shading almost every road, gardens all over the place, and some tropical rainforest with wild monkeys and wild boars!

   

   Lower Peirce Reservoir

   
   

3. Good infrastructure, like fast internet and good public transport. The MRT is highly reliable and the coverage keeps improving with new lines coming up. It can get crowded during the peak hours but not to the level of having to push people in unless there's some exceptional circumstances.
4. It's safe, everywhere in the city and any time of the day. Obviously you can't get zero crime in a city of 6 million people, but the crime rate is extremely low so one doesn't have to worry about it.
5. It's well-connected. Changi has been chosen the best airport in the world too many times to count, and overland or over the sea you can visit Malaysia or Indonesia pretty easily (although the borders can also get crowded for the weekends). So one doesn't have to feel limited by the small land area of the country itself.

Of course there's also down-sides to everything, like they aren't good at recycling, could use more press freedoms, and the political system could use more options, but on the balance of things I find this the best I've ran into thus far. :-)

10 years

It appears this long forgotten blog still exists, and so do I, so let us resume... Not going to revamp on everything from the past 10 years, just starting fresh. But the "few months in each country" thing seems forgotten, I'm rather settled in Singapore and liking it. There's still travels though, not to worry. :-)

2009

I want to write recent stuff, but in order to maintain the chronology, need to update things a bit. So, go with 2009 first. As mentioned in the end of the previous, we got back to Beijing, and indeed stayed there the whole year. There are a few new restaurants and now the vegan club has reactivated, but otherwise it's much as before. Large, crowded, polluted, but friendly and with excellent food.

We did have a summer holiday in the Nordic countries though. In Tampere, Finland, the only vegan restaurant I mentioned earlier went bankrupt, sadly. That reduced the eating out options to one vegetarian restaurant, and even that open only during lunch time on weekdays. Quality not really worth cheering about either.

In Beijing there came and went a favourite restaurant, the Loving Vegetarian, which there's probably no need to review as it is indeed gone. The Vegan Social Club continued meetings, but rather than regular meetings in restaurants, potlucks in member's houses became the norm.

With reduced travel funding there wasn't an awful lot of that either. But there was Isabel's first visit to Europe in the summer, visiting Finland, Sweden, and Norway. While most of the time went in Finland, probably the most special part was visiting the fjords in Norway. We went over land and sea; Stockholm is quite good for veggie people but I'll get back to that on the more recent things, and Oslo was ok also. From there we took the train to Bergen, a beautiful town by the water but not so great food-wise.

Then we went by boat over to Flåm, with gorgeous fjord scenery all around. Flåm had even less when it comes to food, but the big hotel in town would cook decent veggie food and grilling something outside was always an option. We went kayaking, saw porpoises, and had lots of fun!

Back in China in the autumn we made another trip to Sichuan, but never mind that, wanting to get on to a bit more recent things. Here's a couple more photos from 2009 though.

Vietnam, part 2: and then there's two

Well, that's almost two years without updating this blog. However, I'll continue where I left off, as I did start this blog entry more than a year ago but just never finished it. The rest of the things to be updated later.

So even before arriving in Vietnam, I contacted a vegan girl in VeggieConnection and asked about veg food and interpreters for doing user studies in the country side. It turned out she was an interpreter, and all-around super nice, so we ended up talking a lot on the phone during part one of this trip. Part two, then, is where I took the bus to her village to do the user studies. The girl is called Isabel, and I even stayed in their house, enjoying the wonderful vegan cooking of her mother.

This meant a five-hour bus ride from Ho Chi Minh city to a city called Long Xuyen in the Mekong river delta. The minibus ride included a half-an-hour lunch stop in a place with no vegan food, and a ferry-crossing where one could see these funny boats with eyes painted on them. She came by motorbike to pick me up from Long Xuyen. Now I'm not crazy about motorbikes, so a girl wearing a mask arriving by motorbike isn't the greatest turn-on for me, but I hopped on and we chased the sun on to her... town, perhaps, she called it a village but I was almost inclined to call it a city due to the apparently large population. I still don't know what the population is, but at one or two main streets I guess it doesn't really constitute a city.

I was lucky enough to come in time for dinner, and her mother was cooking. I was asked to carry the food to the living room, fine, but after I set the plates on the table they pointed out that this wasn't the Vietnamese way. They eat from the floor. Ok, fine, when in Rome... The food was delicious though, and everything served in the house is vegan! Awesome. The mother and one elder sister are vegans also, the rest vegetarian. Unfortunately Isabel was the only one speaking any language other than Vietnamese, so my communication was limited, but the whole family, including the husbands and children of her elder sisters, all live in the house. I was given a bedroom upstairs complete with a huge balcony. Before you go thinking it was immense luxury, let me point out that there was no bed. Just a bamboo-mat on the floor.

No deep sleep then.

Whatever light sleep there was got interrupted at 5 AM as a loud radio broadcast came on. At first I thought it was someone in the house, maybe using the radio as an alarm clock and accidentally turned it too high that morning, but then I noticed the noise came from the outside. It's a broadcast that's heard all over town, every morning from 5 AM to 6 AM, to get people up with the sun, apparently. This would set the pace then. Given that I wouldn't be able to sleep, I got up, and since Isabel was sleeping and I couldn't communicate with others, I decided to go for a run. On to my shorts then and off with everything else and running around the small town certainly did turn a lot of heads. I guess foreigners are a rare sight, and crazy ones even more so.

After a nice run it was time for breakfast and then to work. I set out heading to what seemed more like countryside with Isabel, after we printed out the forms she had translated. After the first interview it was already lunchtime, and given how long it seemed to take to get these done, I figured we should give some gifts to the people we interview. So after lunch we bought some small stuff and started to give those to all the interviewees. Just small things like drinks and snacks, but they were well-received. To my surprise Isabel had to do most of the writing on the forms as a large proportion of the people were actually illiterate! That I hadn't expected.

Anyway, we picked up pace in the interviews and got quite a lot of them done in the coming days. And it was just a lot of fun spending time together too, whether it was at the interviews, meals, going around by bicycle, or hanging out on the balcony at night. Some days later I was due to go to a workshop in Hanoi, so we celebrated getting the interviews done, and somehow the whole thing started turning romantic all of a sudden. Odd.

So we went for a hike up a small mountain called Núi Cấm near the town of Châu Đốc, close to the Cambodian border. Along the way there were lots of beautiful flowers, a small water-fall, and the above heart-shaped splash of water. Up on the mountain there is a big Buddha statue and a pagoda (Chua Phật Lớn), where we were lucky enough to arrive at dinner time and they offered us free food. All vegan of course. Unfortunately it was already getting dark and there wasn't really any way of getting back so we just stayed in a little hotel on the mountain.

Then there was a quick train trip to Hanoi and back... it takes 29 hours one way but is quite alright. You can get rice from the train but not vegan food otherwise, so bring something along to have with rice or bread that you can buy from stations the train passes by. It stops for 5 minutes or so, enough for quick purchases. After a quick and uneventful conference in Hanoi I returned south and joined up with Isabel again to go to Đà Lạt, a nice city of flowers that's considerably higher than much of Vietnam and hence has cooler temperatures. We had a lovely few days there, rented a tandem bike (that we decorated well) and went around. There are a couple of veggie restaurants in Da Lat also, but I don't have their details on me just now... message me if you need those!

After Da Lat it was time for Isabel's graduation from the university. And for that I needed something formal to wear. We went around looking for a sizable suit to rent in Ho Chi Minh city, and eventually found one at a wedding photography shop. Isabel wanted to try on a beautiful wedding dress she saw, the shop staff thought we were getting married, and on an impulse we decided to take wedding photos! That proved to be heaps of fun, not only at the moment but also later when sharing the photos with friends and relatives, some of whom really thought we got married, and also going through the photos just between us. That always put us to a good mood.

The graduation itself was a simple party with shows that seemed like primary school performances to me. Either way, I had been called by my boss to get back to China, and with that looming we went to a beach for a couple of days. One of the easiest to reach beaches from Sai Gon is an island called Vung Tau. There's a fast ferry service that takes you there in about an hour, and the town of Vung Tau does have a veggie restaurant so don't worry too much about food. The beaches are passable only though, yet, with Isabel that was lots of fun.

Almost forgot to mention, also during the stay Isabel's sister had a baby. And funnily enough my sister in Finland had a baby a few days later. We did visit the hospital. Christmas in Sai Gon seems to involve getting on motorbikes and sitting in a traffic jam for a few hours, then returning home. Supposedly they're going to see the Christmas lights in District 1, but no-one seemed to be getting anywhere. Nothing else going on really. One of Isabel's friends helped me convince her to come to China with me, so we got on a train north together. Alarmingly she was feeling cold as early as Hanoi, but we pressed on nonetheless.

The price of the international train tickets had doubled during the couple of months, so we decided to find an alternative. This turned out to be a bus from Hanoi to Nanning in southern China, and a train from there to Beijing. This drops the price to a third of the international train: it costs over 2000 CNY while the bus is 150 CNY and the train from Nanning around 500 CNY. Unfortunately with the timings one has to overnight in Nanning, but the cheap hotels around the railway station only charge 80 CNY a night. That is where we spent New Year Eve then. Oh well. By the way, there is a veggie restaurant in Nanning also, I'll put the address here later.