Choices choices

How do you decide where to eat? Read reviews? Guide books? Tripadvisor?

Most of the time I try to follow my instincts. You get a feel by reading menus, looking at a place, smelling it. If a menu features curry of the day as well as pasta of the day I guarantee you the food is going to be shit. If you walk into a Ramen joint in Tokyo and you can smell pigs, leave quietly.

But there are a lot of restaurants in Vientiane, I only have four nights, and I don't want to miss anything good. There's a strong French influence in town, so I'd like to strike some kind of balance between that and the local food.

Guide books are of limited use. Frommers is usually pretty reliable for restaurants, but things, and chefs, change more often than they print a new edition. The Lonely Planet can be a bit hit and miss - it's not written by food critics after all. But often it's all you have to go on. Two nights ago, I sided with the Lonely Planet. Here's what they say about Le Vendome:

Dripping in ivy and candlelit atmosphere, this hidden gem played host to journos during the Secret War. Souffles, pates, salads plus a good wine selection. Timeless.

I'll admit to being seduced by the image of khaki shirted writers sipping gin and tonics and flirting with each others' wives as the bombs rained down. And I interpreted timeless as a tender compliment. Here's what I wrote:

Dripping in ivy? Yes. The chef? A genius, succeeding where so many others have failed. He appears to have invented some sort of time machine, and is timelessly churning out French bistro food straight from the 1970s. An appalling sauce accompanies my steak. Greasy, oversalty fries and an unforgivable squiggle of marie-rose sauce on the edge of my plate. A bizarre and disgusting medley of badly cooked, lukewarm vegetables watches on. Desperate. Waste of a bullet.

Last night I used my own initiative and plumped for Makphet. It's a non-profit restaurant that only employs street kids, training them in the kitchen and hospitality in general. I can relax, with no expectations of the food and just appreciate the fact that they're doing the Lord's work. My old friend the Lonely Planet sticks to the salient information:

Described as a training restaurant run by street kids

(Described? As in is?) and

Newly located in a biscuit-coloured villa

I walked past it three times before I realised. First time I was looking for a bourbon, then a custard cream, then a pink wafer, before instantly recognising its unmistakable garibaldiness.

But on with the food. I start with rare buffalo fillet, thinly sliced and wrapped around julienned vegetables with a tamarind dip. Golden parcels of pork and dried shrimp come with a lime, fish sauce, chilli and peanut dip. They're both exceptionally good; fresh, simple, perfectly balanced and beautifully presented. Main course of stir fried chicken with young bamboo and mushrooms doesn't disappoint.

Later on, I'm walking home around about the time the Makphet kids are knocking off for the night. There must be at least fifty of them. They're all laughing and joking with each other as they get on their little bikes, still in their greasy uniforms, and ride off home together. That's how I'd describe it anyway. Awesome.

Tripadvisor? I think that may merit a separate post another time, when I've had a few more drinks and am in the mood for a proper rant. The bottom line is, know who you can trust...

Providence

I've done some pretty stupid things over the last few months. Things like asking for Loperamide instead of Loratadine in the pharmacy, and constipating myself for three days instead of mitigating an allergic reaction to some particularly fierce mosquito bites. Or turning up to board a flight to Vietnam and discovering you actually need a visa before they let you in.

'Plan' might be stretching it a bit, so let's say my 'intention', having arrived in Hanoi two weeks ago, was to spend a month travelling south to Saigon before crossing over into Cambodia. The visa I hurriedly mustered in Luang Prabang gave me 14 days instead of 30, scuppering any hopes of reaching Saigon.

One thing you get better at on the road is reading the signals; understanding your own instincts and how you react to things. Knowing where to eat, drink, sleep. When to keep driving, when to stop. How, when you make mistakes, wrong turns, to accept and incorporate them, and see where they lead. When you don't really know where you're going anyway, you've got nothing to lose.

I could have got a visa extension for Vietnam. I'd have had to stick around in Hanoi for an extra four days, right when I was loving it least. As the days tick by and the unmentionable looms ever larger, time is a more precious resource than ever. My own stupidity might have ripped up the plan and chucked it out the window, but you roll with your own punches. So I decided that there was more than a smattering of Providence in all this and booked a flight to Vientiane instead. Vientiane, the capital of Laos, the country that two weeks ago, I'd wished I didn't have to leave.

Flying back to Laos from Hanoi, we hovered in our little propeller plane above a sea of meringue towards the setting sun, orange and pink in the distance. It was almost dark when we stooped down to land. I got my visa on arrival from some cheerful immigration staff, and from the moment I stepped off the plane, right up until the seconds in which I type these words, the smile has barely left my face.

I just need to find a pharmacy, that's all.

This renewed a contemplation, which had often come to my thoughts in former time....how, when we were in a quandary (as we call it), a doubt or hesitation whether to go this way or that way, a secret hint shall direct us this way, when we intend to go another way - nay, when sense, our own inclination, and perhaps business, has called to go the other way, yet a strange impression upon the mind, from we know not what springs, and by we know not what power, shall overrule us to go this way; and it shall afterwards appear, that had we gone that way which we would have gone, and even to our imagination ought to have gone, we should have been ruined and lost. Upon these, and many like reflections, I afterwards made it a certain rule with me, that whenever I found those secret hints, or pressings of my mind, to doing or not doing anything that presented, or to going this way or that way, I never failed to obey the secret dictate; though I knew no other reason for it, than that such a pressure or such a hint hung upon my mind.

- Robinson Crusoe

Friend or Phở

I like Vietnamese food, but must confess to having been a little disappointed over the past couple of weeks. Restaurants, street vendors; some good, some bad, nothing brilliant.

The most famous Vietnamese dish must be phở - noodle soup. I used to slink off down Huong Viet on Englefield Road and eat bowls of the stuff for lunch on my days off. Yet despite being a Hanoi specialty, the best pho on this trip was in Tempe, Arizona. Until last Thursday that is, when it was surpassed by one I made myself.

Cooking classes are ten a penny in Hoi An. Most places offer classes whenever you feel like it, but I plumped for Red Bridge Restaurant. The day began with a visit to an organic garden outside of town. Some 200 families maintain it as a co-operative, and they grow just about everything here. Each tiny rectangle of land is hand cultivated, and their combined effect is one of great tranquility, like a giant Zen Garden being meticulously raked.

Not so tranquil is the market we visit next, but the produce is extremely fresh, and it's a lot cleaner than some I've been to in this part of the world. They also have the weirdest chicken trussing technique I've seen so far. As with everywhere else in South East Asia, nearly everyone working here is a woman, and the butchers are exclusively female.

Good pho is all about good stock. We brown beef shins over a charcoal fire, as well as grilling shallots, onion and ginger. All are then blanched to remove the smokiness before going in the pot with all the spices. While that simmers, we prep the pickle, veg and herbs, and make the rice noodles from scratch. With the right kit and a bit of patience it's fairly simple, and a lot more rewarding than taking them out of a packet.

The result is divine, as good as any I've had, and now I've got the recipe. I chalk up another dish on the menu that has been slowly writing itself in my mind these last few months.

We also make a fish claypot, a chicken and banana flower salad and lemongrass shrimp in banana leaves. The latter is extremely good and will be added to my barbecue repertoire just as soon as I've grown the banana tree. The fish is basically Cha Ca, another Hanoi specialty. Mackerel marinaded in turmeric, cooked with dill and spring onion then topped with peanuts. There's even a street called Cha Ca in Hanoi, where establishments of varying quality purport to be the original Cha Ca La Vong, a fifth generation restaurant selling nothing but, though viciously overpriced.

Hoi An has its own local dishes, the best of which is Cao Lau; thick, doughy noodles served in broth with sliced pork and rice paper crutons. White Rose are small open dumplings made from the same batter; both are only available in Hoi An, since the water used to make them has to come from the nearby Ba Le well. So insulted would they be if you attempted to make them without it, they all refuse to show you how they're made.

This is all well and good, but I'm getting the impression that I was spoilt in London. I know other cities have big Vietnamese communities, and anyone from Melbourne will tell you how great the food is down Victoria Street, but there's a dingy little community centre in Hackney where the chairs are uncomfortable, the staff unfriendly, the service unpredictable and the food way, way better than anything I've had in the homeland.

Hanoi: a tale of two cities

I won't lie. I didn't lie. It must have been obvious. I don't like Hanoi. I'll live - dust myself on, keep going. It doesn't matter.

Except it does matter. And for one reason; someone I've only met a few times, a subversive hard-smoking chain-drinking German philosopher poet journo, who I instinctively like and respect, told me it's his favourite city in the world. And that's been bothering me, because I must have missed something. So I came back.

Every city has a skin. Some are easier to puncture than others, but you can't understand the place until you're through. You need to be in the right frame of mind, and have the right approach. If you're in London and New York and you don't talk to anyone, you won't get through. If you're in Hanoi and you don't look beyond the mopeds, you won't either.

The first thing I do in a new city is go for a walk. I'll walk for hours, trying to get my bearings; not just the geography, but the soul of a place too. I walked for two days in Hanoi trying to get a grip, but to no avail. On Saturday night I pulled up a small plastic chair outside a Bia Hoi joint, and realised where I'd been going wrong. I'd never thought to stand still.

There are two cities in Hanoi; the one that's moving and the one that's not. The former washes in and around the latter. It is manic but magical. When you are moving with it, you're just another molecule being flushed through the pipes. You don't really see the other city; it passes by in a blur. So I sat and drank my beer and watched in wonder and realised what a great place Hanoi really is. How unlikely yet perfect is its harmony; the order resurrected daily from the chaos, unchoreographed, unfeasible and so irrefutably human in all its joyous complexity. Mopeds and all.

I'm glad I came back. Thanks Frank.

Go on Mỹ Sơn

And behold, for on the morning of the seventh day He woke, and there was no more rain.

But be careful what you wish for. It turns out that as well as dampening my spirits, the rain has been keeping hordes of tourists locked up in the resorts that circle the old town. Now they roam free; it's like some activists busted out the denizens of the local zoo, and the charming side of Hoi An that shone through the drizzle is suddenly overrun.

The locals have stepped things up a gear too, and are competing fiercely for the extra dollars. Walking down the street being greeted by each person trying to flog me something, I feel obliged to offer cheery replies. From every shadow, alleyway and shop front comes another salutation and entreaty to buy something else I don't want.

-Hello
-Morning

Keep walking...

-Hello please
-Hello thank you

Next one:

-You want buy something from my shop?
-No thank you

From behind a tailor's dummy:

-You want buy nice clothes mister?
-No thank you

-Taxi for you?
-No thanks

-Boat trip for you my friend?
-No thanks, I get sea sick

Still walking...

-Motorbike tour?
-Nope

Keep going...

-Breakfast?
-No thank you, I've already eaten

-Massage for you sir?
-No I'm fine thanks

-You want eat in my restaurant
-No thank you, not hungry

-Nice shoes for you mister?
-Don't wear shoes, thank you

-Hire motorbike?
-No thanks

Keep walking. Stop. Turn back...

-How much for half day?
-80,000
-Done

I hand over the cash (about £2.50) and he hands over the keys, together with a crash helmet that offers about as much protection as, and is slightly less fetching than, an upturned salad bowl. With a hand scribbled map stuffed in my pocket, I set about getting as far away as I can in as short a time possible.

Okay, so it's not Hanoi or Saigon, but it's still crazy. Oncoming trucks and buses, dust, fumes, people carrying trees on their bicycles. Cows, dogs, chickens, old women, kids. It's like playing Paperboy but in real life and a lot faster. I get the hang of it after a few tentative minutes. The trick is not to ride too fast, and to remember that you only need the throttle, brake and the horn. Other extras, like mirrors and indicators, are completely superfluous.

Settled into the rhythm of things, I really begin to enjoy myself. In the hour and a bit I'm on the road, I don't see a single other tourist. And by the time I reach my destination, the ancient Cham temple complex of Mỹ Sơn they've all left there for the day as well. I'm in stunning surroundings, wandering in and out of the ruins, and there is not a soul to be seen; just invisible crickets and frogs for company.

It's probably not the most visually impressive of the many historic sites I've been to on my travels, but it's still impressive. The temples and tombs date from between the 4th and 14th centuries. For a thousand years, this was the greatest religious site in the Kingdom of Champa, a once great seafaring empire that controlled central and southern Vietnam but was eventually squeezed out by the north. In 1969 the site was subjected to US carpet bombing, and remains surrounded by unexploded ordinance. It's hard to tell what accounts for this, but most of the statues I see have been decapitated.

It happens to all Great empires in the end.

Hoi An. More Rain.

It came as rather a pleasant surprise to wake Tuesday morning in Hue and find that it had finally stopped raining. It was still grey and bleak and miserable, but at least it was dry. At 10am, I took a car south to Hoi An. It's a spectacular drive; Bach Ma National Park on one side, the South China Sea on the other, and incredible scenery squeezed in between. Or so I'm told; thanks to an almost impervious mist, I could barely make out the windscreen wipers.

By the time I arrived in Hoi An it was bucketing down again, on a Biblical scale. The cloud completely unbroken, the sun fallen from the sky and an almost fantastical amount of rain dropping from the Heavens. Luckily I'd brought the poncho with me, and we reunited once again as I set out about town. Hoi An is a pleasant little place; an extremely old town centre with a high concentration of tourists, and it's famous for food and tailoring.

The clothes shops and tailors are a bit of a joke. There are hundreds of them, each capable of turning round suits within 48 hours, and pretty much everything else within 24. They stock vast ranges of fabric, the quality of which I am not qualified to judge, but I would be fairly sceptical of those Made in Italy tags. I suspect that in the past you could get a really nice suit made here, but today there are just too many outlets for them to all be any good. I'm not about to try and second guess, though I hardly need a suit made anyway these days. But I do need to eat every now and then.

I instinctively like it here, but the rain is a persistent menace, and it's hard to really enjoy a place in these conditions. I'm realising how lucky I have been so far; those one off moments, like Iguazu, Machu Picchu, Yosemite - they could all have been screwed by the weather but weren't. But that won't stop me moaning about it now.

It's not just the fact that it's raining; it is being inundated by the conviction that is just never going to end. Even when it does occasionally stop for a few moments, it somehow still manages to feel like it is actually raining, and if you ever get confident, or stupid, enough to proclaim that it isn't, and even venture out sans poncho, you get very wet, very quickly.

There's only one way to break the spell, and that's to get as far away from here as I can. The people will thank me for it, I'm sure.

Hue. Rain.

There were moments in the last three days in Hue when I dared to believe it might, and even a very fleeting hiatus when it seemed as though it actually did, stop raining, but none of them undermined the sense of perpetual inundation. In Merquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, it rains in Macondo for four years straight, and I think a similar fate may have befallen this ancient city.

Being English, I refuse to yield, and stoically venture forth in my giant poncho (designed for motorcyclists, with a large clear square at the front for the headlights that aligns neatly with my groin area and precludes any surreptitious ball-scratching). When I find somewhere to get out of the rain and have a coffee, I feel like I am sat in a wind shelter on some dreary seafront; a pebble beach, incessant drizzle, and nothing to engage my interest but soggy sandwiches and a packet of pulverised mini-cheddars, washed down with luke-warm coffee from a tartan thermos.

On the basis that I haven't travelled around the world to sit in misery, I decide to skip town. But first, and somewhat reluctantly I have to confess, to take a tour of the city and visit a few historical sites (Hue being the ancient capital and all that). My surprise was matched only by my delight.

The tomb of Tu Duc, the last de facto emperor of Vietnam, is a sprawling place, lying peacefully on the outskirts of Hue. The complex of buildings was completed in 1867, a good sixteen years before his death. Tu Duc passed most of those remaining years loafing around the place; hunting, fishing, writing poetry, picking flowers and screwing concubines, whilst natural disaster and famine ravaged his empire, by then under French colonial rule.

The extraordinary serenity of this ivory tower belies the brutality with which it was built and the lives lost in its construction. Tu Duc might have had dandyish habits, but he was an evil bastard too. His body doesn't lie here, but in an unknown location in Hue, and the 200 men who interred him there were subsequently beheaded to preserve the secret.

The pristine reflections of the trees in the water suggest two worlds; one real, the other imagined. I'm glad it's raining - the mist and drizzle frame and complement the eeriness and, as I walk about, the line between those two realms blurs. The old concubine's pavilion is as haunting a place as I have been. Ghosts, if I believed in them, would skitter across the lake.

Tu Duc's life was wrought with contradictions. He was well aware of his failings as an Emperor, and castigated himself by renouncing hunting (!), penning self-critical verse and beseeching forgiveness at the ancestral altar. He felt cursed too, rendered sterile by smallpox, heirless and unloved. The torment of his soul permeates this strange, beautiful place, where sadness smiles and joy weeps.

Maybe that's why it won't stop bloody raining.