Oestrogen rules!

I was going to revisit here a train trip I took from New Delhi to Agra, way back in 1980, prompted by the appallingly tragic triple train crash that's just happened in India. But of course that would be somewhat appalling too - insensitively trivialising and tone-deaf. So instead I'm going to write about war as a tourist attraction.

Today is the anniversary of D-Day, after all. And who hasn't done a tour of northern France and not been to the beaches, visited Dunkirk, been awed by the white crosses stretching away into the distance at the cemeteries, marvelled at still being able to see the remains of the Mulberry harbour at Arromanches? It's hugely sobering to see it all, stand on the edge of a bomb crater, read the info boards, and imagine the horror of it all - but it's also, be honest, fascinatingly interesting, dramatic and thus, yes, entertaining.

Wherever you (ie I) go in the world, there are wartime (and worse) 'attractions' - I honestly couldn't count the battlefields and war cemeteries I've visited, from Gallipoli to Gettysburg, Adelaide River to Bourail in New Caledonia. Plus Stalag Luft III and, even worse, Auschwitz and the Hanoi Hilton. These places have an irresistible appeal that's a weird combination of honest reverence and regret for all those lives lost and pain inflicted, and a creepy fascination for viewing the utter depths of cruelty that men (it's always men) are driven to by their overwhelming desire for power and territory.

And, though I suppose it's possible to travel the world and have holidays that don't include stuff like this, it's always there, pretty much wherever you go. The tourist industry isn't backward in pointing that out and, yes, exploiting it openly with focussed tours and suchlike. Their main customers are, of course, Baby Boomers, whose parents lived through WW2 - I wonder, once we've all shuffled off , whether younger generations will be quite so interested?

I'm guessing yes. After all, war has been a constant throughout human history, and is certainly front-and-centre right now, with the distinct possibility of others looming, despite the deservedly quite distracting threats of climate change. Do you ever wonder how different things might have been/might be if there were a bit less testosterone swirling through the people in charge around the world?

Seventy years on

I suppose the sun does shine at Auschwitz. Of course it does. But, having been there on an entirely appropriate cold, grey day, it's hard to imagine it in the sunshine, the red bricks glowing warmly, 'Arbeit Macht Frei' silhouetted against a blue sky.

I was struck, though, by how neat and tidy it was, by the row of young poplar trees in front of the buildings, how well-maintained it all seemed. Perhaps it's a mark of respect by the Germans, who to their credit keep this shameful part of their history open to everyone, for free - or perhaps it was always like that, a kind of orderly balance to the nightmarish things that went on there. It's true that there was a kind of disconnect that went on, men doing hideous things and then going home to their wives and children, living normal family lives.

We marvel at that, but it's important to remember that it's not solely a German characteristic: it's what all people are capable of, and you don't have to look far inside any current newspaper to find proof of that. The world has never been so connected, so conscious of events, so comprehensively informed by affected individuals as well as commentators - and yet it's still clearly entirely possible for some groups to dismiss others as not just not like them, but not even human, worse than worthless.

So visiting Auschwitz, and Budapest's House of Terror, and Hoa Lo Prison in Hanoi, which I have, and so many other similar places in Cambodia, Africa, Russia and elsewhere, which I haven't, is necessary. Travel shouldn't just be about good times, it should always be about learning, and understanding, and remembering. That's why they say it broadens the mind - and, if nothing else, the Holocaust came about because of narrow, blinkered thinking.

China, again.

Bunnies. Soft, fluffy bunnies with floppy ears and big brown eyes. They're up there with pandas and kittens and polar bear cubs in the aww department. And yet, I learned today, angora rabbits - even softer and fluffier than your bog-standard bunny - are having their fur torn off every three months by workers in China to supply the demand by fashion houses in the UK and presumably elsewhere in the western world. Ripped out, by hand, while the rabbits scream, and are then shoved back, totally traumatised, into their little cages. According to SumOfUs, companies like H&M and Topshop have stopped stocking angora garments from this source, though Zara, to its shame, still sells them.

With China's long history of abuse of human rights, it maybe seems a bit trivial to bother about the rabbits. It's not as though there isn't plenty of horror in the clothing industry in many other countries as well; but I'm particularly attuned to Chinese abuse of animals, both direct and indirect. Of course there's the indisputable fact that China, closely followed by Vietnam, is the major market for rhino horn. It has been for a very long time, as a traditional medicine (odd, how the Chinese, so clever at so much, haven't sussed that keratin does nothing for fever or anything else. It's fingernail, for goodness sake!) - and now, with increased affluence, the demand is even greater. Having been to South Africa and been literally awed by seeing rhino in the wild - so immense, so ancient, so inoffensive - and meeting some of the people who risk their lives daily to protect them from the poachers, I'm thoroughly disgusted that in the 21st century this is still going on.

The rhino will all be gone in 10 years at this rate. And so, I read elsewhere yesterday, will the elephant, currently still in large numbers but being poached so much faster that they too are doomed. Again, so the Chinese demand for ivory can be sated. It's all about money, of course, all along the line from poacher to purchaser. But it's not just the greed that's so dismaying: it's the total disregard for animal rights that incenses me. When I was in China, I saw no wild birds, but plenty imprisoned in tiny, tiny cages - in Macau, I came across some left on the grass in a park, for the fresh air, I presumed, that I was really tempted to let fly free. But in Qingdao, even worse, I found a man selling baby goldfish sealed alive inside small water-filled plastic pouches attached to keyrings. As a symbol for Chinese (dis)regard for animals, I think that's an image even more powerful than a screaming rabbit.

Buen apetito!

Mmm, yes, I know what this reminds you of. Creepy, eh? But it's apparently a Mexican wrestling mask, and it was given to me at a special Roll Your Own Burrito session put on for some media people at Mad Mex, newly opened in Fort Street, in Auckland. Yes, there was tequila too - we started with a shot of the cheap stuff, 50% agave, plus salt and lime, and worked our way up through the mid-range liquor to the 100% agave which was much smoother and sippable. Though still throat-grabbingly strong, hack, hack.

But Mad Mex isn't about the drink (they're not licensed yet): it's the food that will be bringing people back and back again. Delicious! And really filling, once you've worked your way, Subway-style, through all the options of meat and salads and sauces. Regular punters don't get to roll their own, but we were given tuition (it's harder than it looks) in heating the tortilla "till it screams" and then adding the insides - for me, rice, pulled pork, black beans, sour cream, salsa, lettuce, guacamole, hot sauce. It makes a very substantial package once it's assembled. What's especially pleasing is that it's all healthy, fresh, authentic and ethically-produced food. But most people will just keep coming back because it tastes so good.

Things fell apart a bit (not our tightly-rolled burritos, though) after the tequila came out. Oddly - or perhaps not - the last time I was knocking back shots was in Vietnam last year, again with Kathy who organised yesterday's get-together. There, it's rice wine, pretty much tasteless fire-water that I wasn't so bothered about until I was introduced to the flavoured version - apricot is best - which led to a somewhat blurred experience but I believe the evening involved a thwarted art heist. It's probably just as well that I haven't been to Mexico. (But if you're offering, the answer's Yes!)

Halong Bay cruise: review

Fastest raffle win ever, yesterday: tickets bought from cute little Sea Scouts outside dairy, walk home, phone rings, "You've won!" I don't want to seem churlish, so I'll say it's only slightly a shame that it was a fishing hamper, with two rods, backpack, tackle box filled with assorted hooks, weights and lures, and a hurricane lamp (at least that will be a useful addition to the disaster kit, for the next tornado/earthquake/eruption). Because, unfortunately, I don't fish.

I fished in my youth with moderate success, and have been on boats while others fished, also with moderate success, but it's not something I do any more. The last time I dropped bait into the water was in Vietnam with World Expeditions last year, in Halong Bay at night, off the back of the boat we were staying on. We were after squid, apparently. 'Apparently' because nobody caught anything or even saw movement in the circle of torchlight on the dark water - though there are worse things to do after a long and sociable dinner than sit in the warm night and dangle a line overboard.

The Halong Bay boat operation is a huge and pretty slick tourism phenomenon: a great fleet of vaguely junk-like big wooden boats all now roughly painted white in a token gesture towards cleaning the bay, disgorge and reload their passengers with military organisation. Our boat, the romantically-named Bhaya 3, was all dark varnish, airy spaces and billowing white curtains. I liked my room with its french doors, veranda and big bed, though it would have been cramped with two people and their suitcases.

The set-up is that you're loaded, the boats set en masse off into the islands which are dramatically scenic; there's a buffet lunch and a visit to a floating village where assorted schoolchildren sit in a tiny classroom reading aloud and studiously ignoring the succession of Westerners peering in and pointing cameras at them, and where workers poke pearl seeds into oysters. Back at the boat, the sensory treat of a massage on a private deck is rather compromised by diesel fumes rising from the engines below. Dinner, fishing, bed, and then in the morning, tai chi on the top deck (eager Westerners rising early for the authentic experience and then feeling silly when they find themselves copying the instructor as he adjusts his tunic buttons). A flit of the totally for-show sails, a visit to a cave with coloured lighting picking out the stalagmites, the phallus naturally a glowing orange, and then it's brunch as you head back to port so the ships can go through the process all over again.

It's a spectacular place to visit, and if you're short of time, this is the way to do it - but far better would be to take several days and go further into the islands. You might even catch an actual fish.

Velbekomme!

And so the coincidences continue: first Bornholm popping up in the ISS Twitter feed and then my Ecco shoe catalogue; and today it's Noma's turn. A story in today's paper about insect protein is linked to the start of the 24th Wild Foods festival in Hokitika, and references Noma as attempting to make eating bugs more mainstream. Next month there's going to be a wittily-named Pestival in London, and the Noma people will be involved.

Apparently they've already served ants, on purpose: I did once almost eat a wasp in my restaurant lasagne, but that was accidental, and the Noma chef insists that anyone who's eaten mushrooms has also eaten more worms than they could imagine. He gets lyrical about a puree of fermented grasshoppers and moth larvae (tastes like fish sauce, evidently) and a sweet mayonnaise using bee larvae. It doesn't get my taste-buds agitating, but that's just privileged Western prejudice - plenty of peoples around the world have been eating insects for ever.

It wouldn't be the worst thing: I have bitten the bottoms off live green ants in Outback Australia ("six of these a day and you'll never get scurvy") which were tangy and lemony and really rather pleasant. The huhu grubs I ate in Hokitika certainly didn't look inviting, being big, fat, pale and unmistakeably larvae, but tasted of creamy peanut butter; and the deep fried crickets I was served in a Hanoi restaurant were a crunchy novelty that was quite tasty, if somewhat spoiled by the anxiety about getting legs stuck between my teeth. (Shocking photo - I blame the rice wine.)

Lolly largesse

My camera came back from the repairers today - again. I was careless with it last year, and it fell from my suitcase onto a hard floor, about half a metre, and ever since has had intermittent faults with exposure and focus. I hope it's properly fixed this time, because I hate to be without its familiar black presence. The floor it fell onto was the one I was writing about sleeping on today - at least, on top of a mattress on that floor in the homestay in northern Vietnam.

It was such a fun trip, that World Expeditions one, and of course a lot of that was down to the other people, who were a jolly bunch; but it was also great to be in a new country and surrounded by unfamiliar scenery and people and culture and food, all of which was just delightful. Particularly the food. And the apricot rice wine. There was a horrendous amount of driving in a van, much of it along awful roads full of bumps and potholes and traffic, as well as often quite frightening drop-offs; but it was worth it to get to the off-the-beaten-track area where we were the centre of attention and frequently the subject of the locals' photos. It's always a bit of a hoot when that happens, and perfectly fair pay-back.

When we were in the depths of the Dong Van Karst Geopark (how that name is rolling off my tongue now!) we stopped to interrupt a lesson in a tiny hill village school that had just six little students sitting at their desks looking very solemnly at the blackboard and obediently not at us. They were very neat and clean, and totally unlike the small band of grubby urchins that was roaming around outside, in ragged clothes and no shoes (or pants, in several cases) - I wonder if they swap over for a half-day of education each? These ones I'm sure would have thought they were the winners that day, as some of us had been foresighted enough to bring lollies and shiny stickers, and though they were shy they weren't backward at sticking out their hands. Good for them. I bet they don't get many treats.

Atiu! Bless you...

Finished with Easter Island, now I'm on to Vietnam, so naturally I was thinking about motorbikes. No-one who's ever been to Vietnam can remember it without thinking of motorbikes - the sheer number of them, the initial terror of taking on an unbroken tide of them while trying to cross the road, the ever-more-incredible loads carried on them. I was wondering when was the last time I actually rode one, after spending seven years of my youth puttering about the streets of Christchurch on a Vespa 90, and another one in England astride a Honda 50 (no matter how well I wrapped up, I lost so much body heat going to work in winter that it truly took me till morning tea time to thaw out).

Anyway, the answer is five years ago on Atiu, in the Cook Islands. Not many people go there, compared with Rarotonga and even Aitutaki, but it's just a 45 minute flight away. It's known as the island of birds, caves and coffee, because that's just about all there is to see there; certainly it's not the place to go for classic white beaches and turquoise lagoons. It does have those, but they're very small and shallow - no windsurfing here. Nobody lives by the beach because the coast is ringed by a wall of fossilised coral, so the only habitable bit is on the volcanic plateau at the centre.

But the birds are brilliant, literally, and the jungle is a vibrant green, the beaches that do exist are white powdery sand, and the narrow ring of lagoon is turquoise. Some of the caves have birds nesting in them that navigate by echo-location, there's an underground pool you can swim in by candle-light - oh, and other caves are full of human bones and skulls. There are also bush beer clubs where you can sit with the locals in a circle on palm tree stumps and drink orange-juice based beer from a communal coconut shell. It's surprisingly good - perhaps the original boutique beer?

The coffee business, run by a German, is interesting to visit, and his wife makes beautiful traditional and modern tivaevae, or appliqued quilts. So there is tourism there, but very laid-back and low-key, just like everything and everyone else on the island; which makes hopping onto a motorbike for a lazy circuit a very pleasant thing to do. Just watch out for the traffic.

2012, wrapped up

The most remarkable thing about this year is that I didn't go to Australia. (I'm still feeling that I've used Oz up - although I'd be happy to be proved wrong. Anyone listening? Kimberley cruise, Kakadu, Maria Island, WA for the wildflower season...?) 

I did pass through, though, a number of times, on my way to more distant destinations; but my first travels this year were domestic, first to old favourite Waiheke Island, just across the harbour but in another zone entirely, ambience-wise. Beautiful, relaxing and laid-back, it never fails to please - even when the weather disappoints.

The weather gave us the runaround for the next trip, too: doing the Crater Lake walk on Ruapehu with the daughters - but after driving down there through thunder, lightning and torrential rain, the day of our ascent to and traverse along that precipitous crater rim was one of glorious sunshine that showed off the turquoise of the lake to great effect, while the cloud that came to swirl around beneath us made us feel like gods, on top of the world in both senses.

My Pavlovian addiction to checking my emails dozens of times a day was reinforced by an invitation popping up there in February to go on a LAN tour of South America. It was a wonderful circuit in a small but jolly group through Santiago to Buenos Aires, to the literally over-the-top spectacle of Iguassu Falls, to Lima where the food was a revelation, and then to Easter Island, which was very special and totally worth foregoing the Travcom/Cathay Pacific Media Awards (in which I was only Runner-Up, so, pft).

In April I began my longest trip yet, flying Etihad to Abu Dhabi, where the Grand Mosque was astonishing, though I could really have done without the sweaty nylon robe I had to wear. Next stop was France, for a glorious, fabulous cruise up the Rhone from Arles to Lyon and finishing at Chalon-sur-Saone. I do so love a river cruise, and Uniworld's River Royale was just perfect, with the best staff ever.


Then it was England for a wedding and old friends, and another cruise that didn't go so well, when I managed to dislocate my shoulder leaping off a boat in the Norfolk Broads. Ouch. But I soldiered on, fortunately joining an Insight coach tour of Eastern Europe for the next 3 weeks where I was very well looked after. It was all about history, war and architecture, subjects which would have bored me rigid in my youth, but which now I find deeply interesting. It helped too that on the way to starting the tour in Budapest, we'd called in at Zagan in Poland to visit the site of Stalag Luft III where my father had been a prisoner, which was a moving experience as well as being fascinating.




Home again after 5 weeks away, I was anchored to the sofa for the next three months, writing, writing, writing with a cat at each side and a dog at my feet. I popped down to Christchurch for a look at my sadly shaken hometown, and was both horrified and inspired by what I saw - the vast empty spaces, blowing with dust, and the cracks in everything; but also the optimistic spirit of the people I met, and their bright plans for the future.

September saw the start of another flurry of travel, beginning with flying with Emirates to Dubai again, where I went up to the 124th floor of the Burj Khalifa, and on to Portugal for a scant 5 days mostly in the province of Alentejo where I loved the fortified hilltop villages, the gnarled olive trees, the sheep with bells on and the friendly people; but hated the food-focused itinerary and unprofessional behaviour of one of the small party.




Back home for one night, I was away again next day for a week of glorious relaxation in the Cook Islands, purely a holiday of lying about, sleeping in the sun (not recommended: the sunburn was epic and I still bear the unsightly tan-marks) and doing very little of anything. Stand-out was the day spent cruising on and wallowing in the WMBL (world's most beautiful lagoon) at Aitutaki - just perfect, in every way.

Then, four days later, I was off to North Viet Nam in another group which was lots of fun. We had a brilliant guide, Duke, who took us from Hanoi up into Ha Giang province for a homestay, a day's trekking through the paddy fields and villages, and a long drive into the Dong Van Karst Geopark, which was just brilliant: spectacular peaks, cute kids, colourful villages and a mind-blowing road. The traffic throughout was fascinating - even in Ha Long Bay out on the water amongst those absurdly picturesque islands.



After a fun day out on the train down to Matamata for a look at the obsessive detail of Hobbiton, the year finished back on the sofa with, sadly, just the one cat now at my side. I've had 49 stories accepted for publication, about half of those in the NZ Herald, as well as writing around 30 blog entries for Air France and others for the Yahoo! website. I've been to lunches and dinners and a cooking class, learned how to take the top off a champagne bottle with a sabre, had massages, ridden a camel and a Segway, eaten insects as well as fabulous meals, and been given a huge and beautiful bouquet for my services to Australian tourism, having had over 100 stories published about that immense country. Ironic, or what?

It's been a good year and I've been to some amazing places, met lots of lovely people and written masses of stories (if you're interested in reading some of them, click on the links over there to the right). It's been busy, and tiring sometimes, but I've loved it and am looking forward to more of the, er, different: Alaska, maybe? Africa? Who knows - can't wait to find out. Watch this space!

Moving pictures

If I were techier (as opposed to tetchier than usual, having tried it and failed) you would be able to click on the image above to view the video - but I'm not, so you'll have to follow this link instead. What you will then be treated to is the end result of a quite extraordinary amount of work on the part of two of the guys on the Viet Nam trip, who were up early most mornings out filming, thinking all the time about what would be good material and how they could link it all together, looking for angles and experiences, and hauling around with them an amazingly heavy collection of eye-poppingly expensive gear. So expensive and preciousss, in fact, that when Brendon's feet went out from under him as he negotiated the treacherous algae-slimed concrete path down a steep hillside that had us all slithering, he went down on his elbow to protect the camera he was carrying.

There was blood and dirt and a flap of skin, and afterwards pain and swelling and difficulty, but he kept filming and photographing, and Dean kept eating the insects and stupid fish and braving the torrents of traffic at the big intersection, and now we've got the result. It was an interesting glimpse into the enormous effort it takes to produce something so fleeting, so I'm all the more respectful of what's getting them all excited down in Wellington this afternoon.

It's the big premiere of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey after who knows (somebody will, given the rabidness of Tolkien fans) how much work by how many people over how much time. I read, for instance, that some of the dwarves had to carry 30kg of costume and prosthetics, and then act with/through all that, so perhaps Dean should stop his cheerful whingeing about hauling around Brendon's gear. They're all going to have fun down there today, celebrating the final result, and good for them. Most of the actors have flown here on Air NZ's specially-themed 777 and will be working their way right now along 600m of red carpet towards the Embassy Theatre past an estimated 100,000 fans to see the movie. Can hardly wait, myself.

PS: Like Peter Jackson in many of his movies (but not this one), I have a small cameo in the video, leaping in a sprightly manner off a bank in the background. Did you spot it?

Less v. more

The Year of Getting Rid of Stuff has not been the smoothly continuous event that I originally intended, but today I tackled the garage and jerked us a little closer to a more Zen-like existence. It reminded me of what Kathy said when we were at our homestay in northern Viet Nam on our brilliant World Expeditions tour, that she rather envied the sparse decor of the house, compared to her clutter of possessions at home. And it was: mostly as bare as you see above - barer, in fact, as the table and mat only come out at meal times - with just one small area that had anything non-functional in it, obviously treasures.

We had been a bit apprehensive about the homestay, wondering how uncomfortable it was going to be, but it was perfectly civilised (we were all immensely relieved - literally - to find flush toilets and hot showers, having already encountered some truly alarming squatters on the trip). Those mattresses were on the hard side, but then so were most of the hotel beds: must be a Vietnamese thing. We had pillows and mosquito nets and privacy, it was quiet at night - apart from the 4am rooster and the kittens at dawn - and the food was really delicious.

We didn't realise that it was actually pretty upmarket, as traditional stilt houses go, till we got to the lunch stop on our trekking day and saw a more authentic one: much dimmer and barer, no windows, with instead of a kitchen a concrete pad and an open fire, and of course no flush toilet but a squatter downstairs in a shed. Presumably with income from the tour company, though, they still had their luxuries: the fridge for cold beer, a TV, phone, wardrobe with mirror and even a Nintendo. And again, the food was excellent: a fire, a wok, a casserole, that's all that was needed for a tastier meal than I produce in my kitchen with all its mod cons.

Then we called into another house a bit later, which was barer still, with far fewer amenities. But they made us welcome, and brewed a pot of green tea for us, and told us, through Duke (who took the photos above) that he is 70 and she is 49 - Duke was full of respect for the old man, hearing this - and both still work for their living, as they must - or starve. They did have their own rice thresher downstairs, though, which must have been a source of income for them at harvest time.

I really liked that we got to see real life on that trip, instead of just hotels. Even if it does make me feel as though I'm being smothered by all my possessions (though glad I have a soft sofa to sit on instead of a wooden stool 5cm high).

Zooming out

When I'm in a new country, I always like to get a photo of their flag. No real reason, except to help me remember it, and it's fun to try to snatch it mid-flap. So when I was in northern Viet Nam with World Expeditions and saw this motorbike parked at a viewpoint in Ha Giang province, I snapped it. See how the angle of the bamboo the flag's tied to mirrors the angle of the peak behind it? Entirely accidental.

Of course, I'm not the only person to think of doing this, so Brendon was there too, taking a better one despite his mangled elbow; and Kathy behind me - never my best angle - was recording the moment...

... while further back still, Duke was photographing her photographing us photographing the flag. And each one of us was working, I'll have you know.

They're off? No, that's off

Well, I was going to write about the Melbourne Cup today and whinge about how the Aussies stole Phar Lap, and about seeing his hide at the museum in Melbourne, and his skeleton in Te Papa in Wellington, and how everything shuts down in Oz for the race, and how big it is here too, and even perhaps referencing Makybe Diva at Port Lincoln in South Australia - but I've done all that before, as no doubt you well remember. So instead here's another coincidence.

Months ago I was nailed to this very sofa painfully putting together a story about Queenstown restaurants (without having been to most of them) for Vacations & Travel magazine, an Australian-based publication. When it eventually came out, they sent me a pdf but not a hard copy of the magazine (tch - black mark) and I tried to buy one but couldn't find it. Then, travelling home from Viet Nam, I came across it in a bookshop in Singapore Airport, but didn't have any local currency to pay for it.

So today I put my faith in a little magazine-only shop in Takapuna, and there it was. With, on the cover, a view of Halong Bay that was instantly familiar. Just as well really, because the photo wasn't labelled anywhere - nor, oddly, was there a story inside about Viet Nam, although I found a couple of references to the Mekong hidden inside a story about river cruises (which I could have written for them from personal experience, pft). It's a bit naughty, I think - though understandable, as the view from high up at the exit from Surprise Grotto really is cover-worthy. Why, I even took a snap of it myself.

Bon appetit

Now, I've just cleared up the kitchen and dining room after an evening hosting a family dinner that took all afternoon to prepare and felt almost like Christmas. It was fun though, and the food - though I says it myself - was very tasty, the creamy potato and apple-layered baked dish that I copied from one I tasted when I was in Portugal being a particular success. I have to admit, though, that it wasn't a patch on the dinners we were served in our up-country homestay in Viet Nam on our World Expeditions Rocky Plateau tour.

It was, however, much more comfortable, sitting on padded chairs at a proper table instead of sprawled awkwardly on the hard floor alongside a table literally nine inches high. Totally unable, in our useless Western way, to either cross our legs for more than five minutes or to squat flat-footed, we propped ourselves up somehow, legs all over the place, feet poking up in inconvenient places. It's testament to the deliciousness of the food that the discomfort mattered not at all, as we eagerly worked our way through the usual assortment of plates of pork and beef and rice and crispy vegetables and rice: so hot and fresh and yummy, healthy and filling and tasty. In this photo it looks a bit sparse, but it was honestly a feast, after a day spent hiking up and down hills and grappling with slippery steep paths through the rice paddies.

My kitchen's fitted out with a fancy oven and microwave and fridge and dishwasher and hot running water and double sink and so on. Theirs had a double gas burner, a stack of enamel bowls on the floor, a tap, and very little else. It's kind of embarrassing, how much better their food was than mine. All I've got going in my favour is the pork crackling - which was magnificent tonight, believe me.

These are Isaac Davison's photos, by the way: thanks for that, Isaac. If I could offer you another half-finished drink, I would.

Road safety, Vietnamese style

 

Yes, still harping on about Vietnamese traffic - it made that big an impression on me, you see. Not, fortunately, physically, though the same can't be said for the 31 people who apparently die on the roads there every day. There are all sorts of figures if you go Googling, and I'm no statistician, but some of them look pretty official, and are very interesting. There's a list, for example, of world annual road fatalities per 100,000 vehicles: New Zealand is 11, the UK is 7, the US 15 - and Viet Nam? 1,238. (To put that in perspective, though, most of the African nations are much higher in the thousands, with Togo at 14,050 - remind me never to go there - while Malta and Iceland are lowest at 5.)

But back to Viet Nam (they prefer it spelled as two words, incidentally, though the rest of the world seems to ignore that). Helmets have been made compulsory, and we were told it's the equivalent of a US$10 fine if you're caught without one - but only after the age of 8, children's heads being apparently less vulnerable. Or valuable. Anyway, that's all very well, except that most of the helmets worn would be less use than a colander with a chinstrap, being made of thin plastic (but with cool Burberry or Ralph Lauren patterns on the sides); and many of the girls choose ones with an open slot up the back to accommodate their pony-tails. Can you see the one in the photo below? (Note also the cat's cradle of electricity cables strung from that lamp-post - absolutely typical.)

Other points to note in the photo below: phone use while in motion (texting also seen); even pedestrians ignoring the zebra crossing as nothing more meaningful than paint on the road; family of three in the centre; face masks (available shaped, padded and in nattily-patterned fabrics); someone blithely riding the wrong way along the street. It's a circus, it really is.