The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
MOTORBIKING THERE
somewhere to survive a zombie apocalypse in style.
By contrast, I also stayed at the InterContinental Danang Sun Peninsula Resort on Monkey
Mountain near Hoi An. Trump and Putin stayed there last November for the APEC forum. I wondered if they enjoyed the cartloads of adorable yellow-masked doucs in residence as much as I did. Those colourful monkeys are all the fun. I visited purely as a sidestep to eat at my favourite French chef Pierre
Gagnaire’s restaurant, La Maison 1888. It was as I’d hoped – gloriously playful without being pretentious. Wonderful stuff. Much like the Bill Bensley-designed Danang Sun Peninsula resort itself, which is my new favourite hotel in Asia, with cliffside “floating” booths at its Citron restaurant, a funicular railway and a loooooong row of suspended basket chairs by the prosaically named Long Bar, with weird mechanised screens fanning them from above, beside the beach.
The old trading port of Hoi An itself is beautiful but sodden with tourists, most of them obsessed with floating candlelit lanterns into the river from rowboats. It has the prettiest market I saw in Vietnam, with giant baskets of freshly cut, firm yellow noodles sitting by the river, and battalions of chrysanthemum sellers. I ate cao lau – barbecued pork with crackling, the aforementioned local noodles, stock and greens – in the covered market at a counter next to extravagantly arranged mountains of white rose dumplings. Locals claim it can only be made by using water pulled from a nearby well, making it entirely region-specific. I also went to Banh Mi Phuong for its
Vespa Adventures (vespaadventures.com) runs a “Saigon After Dark” tour for $96 per person. mangroves. It felt like we were off for an uncharacteristically jolly lunch with Colonel Kurtz. We alighted to cycle around local farms and small factories, drank fermented coconut wine, and finished at a waterside restaurant where we ate prawns in coconut and chunks of baked mackerel wrapped in rice paper with herbs, salad and vermicelli noodles.
I reflected on my fortnight over a couple of piña coladas, which felt apposite after the trip to a small family-run coconut processing plant an hour before. The food in the north had been fresher tasting, the south saltier and with more seasoning. But the flavour profiles were similar. Vietnam was entirely… delicious. The next day, while dealing with the comic ineptitude of Ho Chi Minh airport, I realised something: I’d spent two weeks eating in Vietnam and hadn’t had any pho.
But it’s not like I’d missed out. I could just get the bus down Kingsland Road at the weekend and be transported back for a bowl. Vietnam is a movable feast.