2026 | five flavours
spicy, sweet, sour, bitter, salty.
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Five flavours: Day 2 Hue
Soundtrack: “Umbrella”, Rhianna Hue. The ancient capital of Viet Nam, full of history and royal tombs, ruined citadels. The scene of some of the worst conflict during the Tet Offensive during the American War (see previous ruined citadels). We toured a lot of that history back in 2014, so this visit is mostly just seeing modern Hue, eating the food, and relaxing knowing we are far from our day jobs. Despite being quite tired from yesterday’s expedition, we were awake fairly early, early enough to catch the hotel breakfast before it entered its death throes. This hotel does a fairly decent breakfast spread: as with all hotel buffets there are…
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Five flavours: Day 1 Perth – Hue
Soundtrack: VietJet boarding music Frequent readers (all 3 of you) can skip this paragraph. It was the same old story, even though I was packed and ready, and it was a mid-morning flight that didn’t need a 3am alarm, I still slept badly and woke up far too early. I’m beginning to think that even if I booked an afternoon or evening departure my body alarm would still kick me up hours before my phone has the chance to say, “Smile! You’re travelling!” We’re flying VietJet this time, even though I basically swore never to fly with them again after the last time (https://www.slowlyandloudly.com/2024/01/08/viet-nam-the-fourth-day-12-hoi-an-transit/) the fare price we got was…
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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,…
