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.