Lost Malaysian Aircraft

What is this subject doing in our travel blog?

Well, the current (10 March) search for the lost Malaysian Airlines flight MH307 brings our recent travels back into sharp focus.

In January 2014 we flew by Malaysian from Adelaide to KL and from there to Ho Chi Minh City, and later returned from Manila to KL and thence to Adelaide. We covered the same route north east from KL as the ill-fated MH307 flight and although we were in a different aircraft, it’s very hard not to think about how fortunate we were to have had safe flights.

Air travel is one of the safest forms of travel yet devised but when things do go wrong they do it in a big and sad way. But modern aircraft, according to aviation experts, do not, and cannot, just fall out of the sky, they are so strong that even the worst weather conditions won’t break their structure.

Structural testing is very extensive, check out this Airbus Industries test strategy, and this wing test video on the Boring 777 (the same aircraft type as the lost Malaysian airplane).

Planes do crash of course although very few have ever been due to major structural failure (see here). Mostly they are due to human error either in maintenance or piloting, and occasionally sabotage.

So it’s a very sad day for the passengers, crew and relatives of all those involved in this tragedy and it’s made me think long and hard about our good fortune.

DIY Cooking Class

We had a special treat for dinner that night, we went to a DIY Cooking Class.

It was at the Gioan cookery school in Hoi An:

A delightful bubbling young lady (who could remember all 12 of our names, but I couldn’t remember one of hers) was our instructor. I had to look up her name later, it was Hahn and she calls her self Happy Hahn.

She comes highly recommended and should have had her own TV cooking show, everyone else has:

She showed us how to prepare the elements of a 5 course meal which we cooked ourselves:

These few photos are courtesy of Jenn. Thanks Jenn. See her complete Vietnam photo set on Flickr, and her travel blog is here.

The group all raring to go:

Preparing the veggies:

Frying the spring rolls:

Burning the banana leaves???

Serving our salad:

We ate what we cooked and it was good, we made our own spring rolls (as well as 4 other dishes) and none others we subsequently tasted were as good:

We all had nifty aprons on and there was plenty of beer and wine on tap but we took it all very seriously:

Not too many photos that evening, we were busy and our hands were mucky, but here are a few more, courtesy of Andrea:

When we eaten all the food and drank all the beer and wine, we bought a signed copy of Hahn’s Vietnamese cookbook for for a $ or 2, for some “Happy Chopping, Happy Cooking” at home:

So goodbye from Happy Hahn and her Gioan Cookery Class, it was a great evening out:

Street Food Tour

On the last evening in Ha Noi we went of a conducted tour of street food vendors.

Our guide was a young dynamic Vietnamese who obviously loved his city and its food. He assured us that everything we would taste was safe to eat, even the silk worms.

We met at the railway station, as you do:

And walked first though the dry spicy part of the market:

And sampled a sort of Vietnamese hot dog from a street vendor:

Then it was on to the fish market:

Mark had a bit of an altercation with the load of material on a motorbike and helped the guy reposition it, which apparently he didn’t want and there was a bit of Vietnamese swearing:

And then fruit and veg market, trying samples of fruit as we went. The various apple type fruits and dragon fruit were very nice but the samples of roasted sweetcorn were revolting, hard and chewy. We disposed of it in the gutter as soon as we could. The corn we had later on Boracay was superb, sweet and luscious:

Finally the meat market:

The silk worms (front bowl) were quite tasty:

Our guide talked a lot but we were now getting a bit tired:

We had thin pancake type things all rolled up, sort of spring rolls:

These sweet rice balls were very nice although they looked like balls of maggots:

But we were unsure about the Thit Paté:

It was quite a crush at times through the narrow crowded streets:

Being tired we sat on small stools in the gutter outside a very small restaurant and were fed a Vietnamese BBQ:

That was followed by a weird ice cream desert with slimy lumps of fruit wallowing in a mix of ice and cream/condensed milk. It tasted good though:

And we completed our food tour at a small upstairs coffee shop in a thin building called a “tube” overlooking Ha Noi and relaxed watching the lights of Ha Noi below us:

As we wandered back to our hotel we were mesmerised by the glitter and colour of the ornaments being prepared for the Chinese New Year celebrations a month later. Surprising really since they hated and feared the Chinese so much:

So that was a great end to our great Vietnamese adventures.

Early the next day (4am to be precise) we had to be up to catch our taxi to the airport to fly to Manila, and the start of the real reason we came all this way in the first place.

The Streets of Ha Noi

We flew from Hué to Ha Noi with Vietnam Airlines and they were very good and we’d recommend them.

Hué Airport:

Ha Noi is smaller than HCMC, about 2/3 the size but there are better roads and more private vehicles there, since it’s the capital and houses embassies and government departments.

But it’s somewhat rougher than HCMC and slight more expensive. There are large gardens and lakes in the city centre which give it a more open feel, although the traffic is just as challenging.

We had tea and coffee in a small coffee shop:

On our first afternoon we walked down to the old French Quarter which were a maze of narrow cluttered lane ways with some evidence of French architecture still surviving and places called “Café de Paris”.

An outdoor BBQ:

Mollie wanted some sticky tape and then we came upon this shop selling nothing but rolls of stick tape:

And we practiced “safe shopping”:

Ice delivered by motobike:

And a kitbag of ???:

But some things are best carried by hand:

Pedicabs are popular in Ha Noi but I didn’t trust them in real traffic:

That evening we went to dinner with Reiner and Marika and had spring rolls made at our table. Not as good as the ones we made ourselves or course:

More pics from Ha Noi:

View from our hotel window:

A food mincer shop:

 

Pretty flowers:

Lunch in the French Quarter:

A Catholic Cathedral in Ha Noi:

The central lake in Ha Noi:

A large clock:

It would almost fit my wrist:

A very smart jewellers shop in a run down building:

A “drive in” restaurant, you drive your motorcycle right inside:

The Opera House in Ha Noi:

It has a nice coffee shop attached:

The missing middle sized clock encased in a quartz block was bought by Mark and Mollie after protracted negotiations. It may or may not have been genuine antique but it was a very interesting piece anyway:

Prue trying out a $700 pair of shoes in the Jimmy Choo shop:

It was good to see our Nicole advertising the Jimmy Choo shop deep in communist Vietnam:

A government building in Ha noi. No pics of Nicole here:

Nice old bridge across the lake to an island temple:

For our farewell tour dinner that night we went to the KOTO restaurant. KOTO stands for “Know One, Teach One” and is an Australian supported vocational training program for the homeless and disadvantaged youth of Vietnam.

It is a worthy cause we were happy to support, and we’d had lunch there a couple of days earlier:

And we were in good company too, even our former Prime Minister had visited the restaurant (although she’d left before we got there, several years before actually), but Kiwi’s Stephen and Kirsty still reverently moved aside for the photo:

But actually our Julia was just one (October 2010) of a long line of antipodean public figures to visit the KOTO restaurant.

Foreign Minister Bob Carr; the Premier of Tasmania, the Hon Lara Giddings MP; the Honorable Tom Kenyon MP, Minister for Employment etc. etc. for South Australia; the Governor-General of New Zealand, Lt Gen The Rt Hon Sir Jerry Mateparae; and the not so honorable David and Janet Ribbans have all had lunch there. Nice to see our taxes are being well spent, but how many Vietnamese youths could have benefited from all this expense?

And on that high (?) note we paid our respects and thanked Phu for guiding us so well across the length if not breadth of Vietnam, and for teaching us a few new words and phrases and a lot of Vietnamese history. He seemed genuinely appreciative of our company even though he’s done this same tour many times before.

And that was the end of our tour. We said our farewells to the group that had become quite well knitted by now, and split up to embark on our onward or return journeys across the globe.

We’d had a good ride together.