Coffee Cup HCMC - The Workshop

At first, The Workshop sounded like your average Saigon café, until I saw the menu...

Click here for the full article as published in Word Vietnam

Just...wow...

If you were looking for one final excuse to visit Vietnam.

This stunning film has also ruined all other holiday videos for me.

I am the Saigon Street Snacker...

For the fourth month in a row, I'm currently working on my next Street Snacker article for February's magazine. It seems I've found my calling - eating and drinking. It's a tough life.

For now, here are my efforts for January's issue for those of you unable to get your hands on the printed version.

Happy New Year!

Forest!

After a few thoroughly festive days doing nothing but drinking beers and champagne from the hotel room bin (filled with ice), while having long hot baths, watching movies and TV box sets and generally doing nothing, we extended our stay in Dalat by another two nights and donned our hiking kit once again to hit the hills of the surrounding countryside...

Coffee berries

The freshest passion fruit ever

Coffee plantations

Merry Christmas!

We like Dalat already. After a long Christmas Eve car journey, we climbed up the mountains to be met with temperatures not felt for a long long time.

Coats, jumpers and jeans were the order of the day and by the time we were heading home after an evening of exploration last night, Rosie was wearing a wooly hat! It was quite surreal, but has certainly helped us get in the festive mood.

We have earl grey tea, a hard drive full of movies and a few presents to exchange. Now it's time for a festive buffet breakfast in the five-star hotel across the road and a festive home-made joke...

What do you call a Christmas crooner who didn't get the electric shaver he asked Santa for?

Michael Stublé.

...anyway, here are some pics. 

A sunny Christmas morning!

Jungle!

Q

More articles hit the Word website, plus updates

A rooftop BBQ restaurant I'd highly recommend - here

Street Snacker - Bun Cha Ca Danang. A delicious fish-cake noodle dish - here


Despite being an officially atheist country, Vietnam does Christmas. The big department stores have giant illuminated displays of Santas and reindeer and sleighs and snowy Christmas trees, our local co-op store is playing dodgy covers of Christmas hits and the staff are all wearing santa hats, and the foyer of our apartment building is thoroughly decked out...

Yes, that's a roaring log fire

The "ice-bar"

Our friendly local Communist party's website has a few images of the brilliant illuminations, which include a mile-long boulevard of twinkling flags to mark the 40th anniversary of "reunification" which falls in April 2015 (the Americans know it by another name..."the fall of Saigon"). I'm hoping to get Rosie on the back of the bike, camera in hand, to film this amazing sight for you.

Our friends Geoff and Jane have recently blogged pictures of the various Christmas scenes from Ho Chi Minh City here.


The weather in Saigon is warm and dry, currently 30 degrees (midday). The arrival of the dry season brought with it significantly lower humidity levels so it's much more comfortable outside - it feels rather like those record-breaking hottest days in the UK at the moment.

Rosie's 3 week Christmas break began in style yesterday (lunchtime cocktails in the Mekong Merchant anyone?) and today we're resting and relaxing preparing to haul on our rucksacks once again and get travelling for the next week or so.

As a pre-Christmas treat, we bagged a table a HCMC's number one restaurant, Pizza 4Ps, for tonight - I'm expecting good things - and tomorrow morning (Sunday) we'll be bussing it to Nam Cat Tien for a spot of cycling, hiking and bird/gibbon spotting in the jungles of one of Vietnam's most splendid national parks. After three nights, on Christmas eve, we'll head up to the mountains of Dalat.

1,500 metres above sea level, they say it's the Switzerland of Vietnam, enjoying year-round Spring-like temperatures (roughly 10 degrees cooler than Saigon), sweeping mountain scenery and plenty of homely goodies like cauliflower, strawberries and early morning mist. We've also been promised surroundings that are "even more Christmassy than Saigon".

Stay tuned...

I'm very much enjoying...

...Word's new website design and homepage

The Marou Story Goes Online...

...along with a few others.

Click here for Marou.

Here for The Great Escape

Bo La Lot is here

He Runs She Runs

At 4:30 this morning, we rose to the rooster in a bizarre boutique hotel room in Siem Reap, Cambodia, surrounded by Barbie dolls in display cases on the walls and random bits of neon plastic glued, literally everywhere, all over the room.

Siem Reap is just a few kilometres from the ancient city of Angkor, the ancient seat of the god kings built over one thousand years ago.

It was over beers in a Brooklyn bar that a friend of a friend told us of Angkor's annual half-marathon event, held in aid of land mine victims. "We have to do that!" we said. Owing to my relatively flexible caldendar these days, I was able to find the huge amount of time required to train for such an event - having only started running in February of this year - and  Rosie entered the 10k run...highly respectable given the busy first term she's just had in a new school in a new country.

So with the sun not yet up, we were donning our running kit and heading out across town in a tuk-tuk to get to the start line opposite the mighty Angkor Wat temple. A new sensation was felt...I believe many across the world call it "cold". At maybe 15 degrees, Rosie's arms prickled with what many across the world call "the goose's pimples".

Long story short, it was amazing. I made a good start and quickly found myself at the 5k mark...the scenery is stunning and with people from all over the world competing, there was a great atmosphere. As we headed up the park's east boundary, families and children from the nearby villages had come out to cheer us on, standing in long rows along the road, holding out their hands to high five as we filed past. I have a GPS watch and noticed how much faster I got when passing them...it really helped!

The 10.5k half way mark was a long time coming but as I pushed on, time seemed to speed up and before I knew it we were at 16k with only 5 more to go. Drummers and dancers met us along the way, pounding to the beat of the thousands of feet running past, and as the incredible temples appeared and disappeared behind us, I was soon staring down my last 3k. It was around 8am, and the tourists had started to appear in the park, roaring and cheering us on...and my pace rocketed, leaping from an initial 6:28 per kilometre to 5:30. Sprinting the last 500m was amazing, speeding along the narrow tunnel formed by the crowds. The dance music from the PA system was pumping, I could see the finish line through the trees and I shot past everyone and anyone ahead of me to finish in 2h 11m with an average pace of 6:11...not bad considering the temperature was hitting 30+ degrees by the end.

From a frosty morning in February, when I was only just able to jog 1km around my parents' village, to an international half marathon, I'm really rather proud of myself...and exhausted! Could I have turned around and done it all again, do I have a marathon in me? Not today, no thanks....but never say never...

Rosie hit a new PB for her 10k, leaving the "fun runners" chewing her dust and finishing in an amazing 1 hour 8 minutes. Quite a change from her Santa Run on a bitter London morning exactly one year ago to the day. After leaving her waiting for me for over an hour, we were reunited on the banks of the Angkor Wat moat for a big sweaty hug with the towers of the largest religious building in the world looming over the jungle beyond the water.

After massages and a huge lunch, we're now just chilling in the cafés (me) and manicure bars (Rosie) of Siem Reap before making the 45 minute flight back to Saigon this evening.

Here are the before and after shots:

Some time later...