Luke Nguyen’s Vietnam Food Tour: Days 3 and 4
Time to pack our bags and leave the Old Quarter of Hanoi for an adventure on a boat in Ha Long Bay, a UNESCO site known for its thousands of towering limestone islands topped by rainforests. We hopped on a medium-sized boat (25 cabins) and headed to Lan Ha Bay, next to Ha Long, but a little quieter. Quiet is a relative term since the bays were teeming with tourist boats.
There are people who actually live in the bay on floating houseboats and survive on fishing and tourism, but I don’t know how peaceful they find it anymore with all these floating parties sailing by.
Once we tied up at a small (very small) dock, we checked into our nice, spacious cabins because this is an overnight on the bay.
Then we were taken to the Luon Cave by rowboat propelled by some impressively powerful older women — to check out the thousand-year-old rock formations.
Somehow, we stayed awake long enough to enjoy dinner, and it was time to slip off to bed and listen to the soothing sound of waves lapping at the bow.
The next day, we skipped the Tai Chi class (come on, it was at 7 am) and were taken to Cat Ba Island to walk through the Trung Trang Cave.
This cave is seriously old — hundreds of millions of years.After climbing a couple of hundred stairs (take a deep breath), we walked through about 300 meters of ancient stalactites, stalagmites, and cathedral-ceiling rooms. Don’t miss the bats flying overhead.
There are some pretty tight spots (hold in your stomach) to squeeze through and some stooping under low rock ceilings (those daily squats came in handy), but most people can make the trek.
Ha Long Bay done! Off to Hue. We bused back to Hanoi, hopped on a short flight, and got to our accommodations in Hue — the Silk Path Grand Hotel.
Luke picked us up and took us around the corner to a local restaurant called Tai Phu (2 Dien Bien Phu) that serves authentic Hue food. Food, by the way, is different all over Vietnam. For example, phở has different flavors in Hanoi, Hue, and Ho Chi Minh City.
We ate two delicious classics here.
We started with Nem lụi, a grilled specialty of Hue — pork paste wrapped around lemongrass stalks and grilled, served with dipping sauce.
The second dish was Bánh khoái, a Vietnamese seafood pancake. It’s famous in Hue. The rice flour batter is pan-fried in a generous amount of oil, resulting in a crispy texture. It’s stuffed with shrimp, pork belly, mushrooms, garlic, green onions, and bean sprouts, then folded over. You eat it with peanut and soy sauce.
This is Luke’s favorite restaurant in Hue, and since they know him well, we were able to check out the kitchen. It was not the French Laundry — pretty basic, with giant pots of batter and a row of butane burners to fry five Bánh khoái at once by a hard-working woman who smiled as she made each one perfectly.