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Five flavours: Day 8 Hoi An
Soundtrack: “Dedicated Follower of Fashion”, The Kinks I could get the hang of holidays like this. Sleep in, breakfast, shopping, banh mi, massage, relaxing, more shopping, cocktails, and dinner. The hotel’s breakfast this morning included a serious serve of cao lau, meaty rice noodles with plenty of pork on top. Lots of greens on the side too. I’m working on a theory, backed up by no evidence whatsoever, that the Vietnamese diet used to just be a lot of noodles and meat, until a nutritionist (possibly sponsored by big lettuce) came along and got famous promoting having a big serve of chopped greens on the side of every soup dish.…
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Five flavours: Day 6 Hoi An
Soundtrack: The Hoi An Memories show music Today started way too early, as I’d booked us into a tour of My Son Sanctuary and surrounds. There were two choices, the 5am start to beat the heat, or the 7.30am, so I went with the 5am. FYI My Son is pronounced “mee son”. Our guide had the indecency of being on time. I’d managed to quickly drink a can of coffee so I was vaguely conscious for the drive through Hoi An picking up the rest of the tour. Then is was about an hour out to My Son via the local twisting roads. For part of this our guide gave…
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Vietnam the third: day 18, Singapore
Gin. All over the world, countries that have never grown juniper berries are making this stuff. And then a selection of these come to Singapore, to the ground floor of a crazy faux art deco tower. Atlas Bar. I first came here in Feb 2020, during a Singapore boys’ trip that I meant to blog but never got around to. That evening, my wonderful and articulate male friends said, “We’re going to a gin bar”. Oh, I said, what is this place called. “Atlas,” they said. So I googled it, and all these links with titles like The World’s Best Bars started appearing. So I promptly changed out of my…
