Breaking from tradition I’ll do a little accounting of experiences in the last 24 hours.
Smell
• Passing through drifts of smoke ripe with the smell of burning sugar cane. Heady smell of burnt sugar, dark and bittersweet mixed with woody overtones
• Viet tea in the north. Grassy and oolong, bitter and strong.
• Water Buffalo dung smells a lot like cow dung.
• Burning paper money: acrid paper smoke, sharp and irritating to the nose. Prevalent at places of worship. Went to a huge pagoda today with giant cauldrons filled with smouldering ‘money’.
• Rice liquor – kerosene and hoochy vapour with a strong rotten tone.
• Tropical woods in bungalows have a heady Catholic smell. Reminds one of confessional booths. Memories of guilt and sin and all that good stuff.
Taste
• Ultra sour unknown fruit, shape of giant olives, brindle orange and green skin with a very flocked with a hairy surface. Rub off the fur and bite, the flesh is gelatinous and puckery, flavour is grapey and faintly citrus. The seed is supposed to be chewable but I don’t think it’s worth the trouble. Used by old women for stomach problems.
• Greens for enhancing pho. The Muong serve up a mixture of cilantro, banana flowers (faintly anise) and dill. Quite a combo.
• Dang – a medicinal leaf used by locals for stomach upset. Ultra bitter.
• Special rice – the Muong grow 5 different qualities of rice. We sampled a few, the best rice is nutty and sweet and with a woody smell.
• Broth of morning-glory and crabmeat. Buttery, faintly fishy and, well, yummy.
• Fresh tofu is creamy and a bit sour, funky with a mildly sour taste.
Sight
• Limestone cave with beautiful crenellated stalactites that look like crepey tofu but, like, big.
• Two six-year old girls, long glossy black hair - walking along road, holding hands like little girls used to in Canada
• Woman working in a rice field. Dwarfed by enormous billboard advertising shampoo. Backdrop a shockingly beautiful landscape of distant blue sugarloaf mountains.
• Two dogs locked in post-coital distress. They couldn’t unlock. They are struggling butt to butt, male pushing female with his hind legs, she is yelping in agony. Twas ever thus.
• Enormous gilt-covered 20m tall Buddha, one of 8 or nine similar scale figures. Towering 40 feet high in cavernous pagoda filled with hundreds of Viet tourists. Smoke-filled space with rich lateral light seeping in.
• Young boy, eight or nine flailing stream with a seven foot stick. Three men waist deep in narrow brown stream holding a net, waiting to receive the fish that he is frightening.
• Five year old boy beating the bejeezus out of a large yellow plush duck while his amused friends look on.
• Drunk weaving tipsily in tourist market with a clot of thick black hair on his neck, like a fun-fur goitre.
• Elegant young Muong woman in a psychedelic pink track suit walking behind water buffalo.
• Infant wearing bright orange crocheted elf hat with two yellow dongles.
• Woman climbing up into rice fields with a gait designed to avoid slipping and tripping like I was. Sort of like watching those super-marionettes on Fireball 5 or whatever that puppet series was called. Loose hips and knees, feet slightly splayed, back erect, arms relaxed.
Sound
• Sweet tinkle of water running through rice paddies. Trickling from plot to plot over stones, through bamboo pipes and gurgling through rubber hoses. Makes one want to pee every 10 minutes.
• Thin quacking bleat of Water Buffalo – at first I thought it was a bird making the sound.
• Snap and crackle of welding torches all along the highways and byways - manufacture is taking place.
• Groan and whine of sugar cane juicing machine.
• Cacophony of every kind of honk, beep, WAAAAH and tootle you can possibly imagine and six more you can’t imagine.
• Faint piping of frogs in the paddies. Very northern Ontario familiarity.
Today's photo is of brown cane sugar bricks. They measure about 4" x 8" and contain enough calories to power a small country
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