Five flavours: Day -2 Teaser preview

Soundtrack: “Spice Up Your Life”, The Spice Girls

Five flavours to bind them all and in the humidity eat them.

Sweet, sour, salty, spicy, and bitter are calling me. Don Walker may have written, “Went back to South East Asia, I know the answer sure ain’t there,” but I don’t think he’d even been to Bali at the time he wrote “Khe Sanh”. Maybe he was asking the wrong question, because if he’d been wondering about where to go to find a handful of awesome flavours that make the backbone of amazing cuisine, then SE Asia is the place to be.

Five. Don Walker, Phil Small, Steve Prestwich, Ian Moss, Jimmy Barnes. Velma, Daphne, Fred, Shaggy, Scooby. Claire “a princess”, Bender “a criminal”, Andrew “an athlete”, Brian “a brain”, Allison “a basket case”. Scary, Sporty, Posh, Ginger, Baby.

Hue, Hoi An, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Singapore.

Or sweet, sour, salty, spicy, bitter. The five flavours underpinning South East Asian cooking. Ingredients like palm sugar, chilli, lime, fish sauce, tamarind, ginger, sugarcane, soy sauce, garlic, and good old fashioned white sugar (I remember being at a street vendor in Bangkok watching the guy at the next table our spoonfuls of white sugar onto his pad thai).

So expect food, and lots of it. Spicy bon bo in Hue, crunchy banh xeo in Hoi An, fiery pad kra pao in Bangkok, salty larb in Chiang Mai, and my regular chilli pan mee in Singapore. We’ll be going back to our favourite tailors in Hoi An, there will be drag shows, temples, potted histories, whisky bars, relaxation, new takes on classic books, large lizards, flinging arrows at defenceless pieces of paper, and shows with everything but Yul Brynner, all documented here in my incredibly objective style here at the the world’s least read travel blog.

We’ve been to all of these places before, so there will be familiar sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings. Hopefully there will be new experiences and perspectives too. Time catching up with old favourites, and hopefully time for making new ones too. I’ve got space in my case for a bunch of new clothes, and everything else is nicely tucked into smaller bags and containers. It’s not going to look like that at the end of the trip, where the aim is just to make everything fit.

It all begins on Saturday, with a respectable mid-morning flight out of Perth. There are no crazy early morning flights on this trip, no alarms going off in darkness, though I totally expect that won’t stop the sleepless nights before.

The cargo shorts, chunky sandals, toothbrush charger, trusty laundry bag, Phillies cap (thankfully they’ve started winning again), and of course the laptop are packed and ready to hit the road.