I'd been waiting to go to Hue ever since I first tasted the mi quang at Ngu Binh in Westminster, CA. This may seem like a silly reason to want to take a trip across the Pacific, but as it turned out, Hue was waiting for me right back with much, much more than mi quang.

It had that too, of course, but it made me work for it. A handwritten sign on an already out-of-the-way street pointed down a narrow alley that skirted a lotus pond. The sign said 'My Quang'. No mi quang in sight after 100 meters or so, only frogs and old motorcycle parts, I was about ready to turn around when I saw the sign again, posted outside someone's house. Only previous experience eating in Asia allowed me to semi-confidently walk into what appeared to be a family's living room while they were shucking cassava and demand that they feed me noodles at 2:00 in the afternoon. And yes, it was worth it.

The best food Hue had waiting for me, though, was something called 'com hen' – rice with tiny clams, pork skins, sour starfruit, banana blossoms, and assorted greens. I had heard tell of such a thing, but had to cross two rivers to find it. Passing deserted rice restaurant after deserted rice restaurant was discouraging, but it happened that it was just because all of Hue was eating lunch at the one we eventually found. The ladies serving it also got a good laugh out of Julian's attempts to explain vegetarianism. The word 'chay' that works everywhere else was lost on them. What do you MEAN you don't eat tiny clams?? Who doesn't eat tiny clams??

Appetizer-size banh khoai, like mini banh xeo, awaited us at every turn. Banh beo showed up on every menu, casually, like, yeah, this is something you just get to eat every day. There were nem lui, these spam lookalike pork sticks whose association with spam disappeared the instant the spices and sour mango accompaniment hit your tongue.

It was extraordinarily hot while we were there, too hot even for me, way too hot to even consider walking in the sun – hot enough for me to drink, in one day, three bottles of water, two sugarcane juices, a passionfruit smoothie, and two lemon sodas without even looking at a bathroom. The next city, Quy Nhon, was just as hot, but was also, mercifully, a beach town, and had the same Indonesian custom of just stumbling into the ocean at the nearest port of entry wearing all one's clothes.

Not being a big tourist center, everyone in the whole city was just shocked to see us. On the beach, we were preparing to go in the water and watching a flock of teenagers splashing each other when a Vietnamese guy approached and in strangely formal English demanded to know, in turn, about California's population, economy, landscapes, healthcare system, water conservation policy, and educational system. This burst the floodgates for the teenagers, who had apparently been wanting to approach us but hadn't the nerve to do it until someone else did it first. They ran over and squatted, giggling, in a circle around us, understanding nothing of the conversation on Californian medical insurance and not caring a bit.

2-9 didn't derail us too much beyond most restaurants being closed for lunch and our being forced to eat crappy rice at a stall. Oh, and having to spend the night train ride to Saigon in a soft-seat Vietnamese train with Alvin and the Chipmunks movies playing at top volume. But by '3-9' everything was normal again, with the Ben Thanh market starting my Saigon adventure off right by feeding me incredibly delicious fried snails in garlic oil, accompanied by the old trusty standby, passionfruit juice.

The Nanning-Hanoi border-crossing train was full of Germans, Chinese, and one German-speaking Chinese, plus one sole Japanese tourist with the aim of visiting seven countries in two months. (He was on Country #3.) The whole lot of them, and us too, were unceremoniously dumped off at 5:00AM (instead of 10AM like the schedule said) at Gia Lam station (instead of Hanoi main station, like the schedule said). Walking bleary-eyed off the train while it was still dark out into a firestorm of taxi touts with maps that made stark the terrible, untraversable distance between Gia Lam and the Old Quarter was disorienting to say the least, but then, probably for the last time, Julian saved the day by being able to speak Chinese. One of our fellow passengers was a Chinese professor teaching in Vietnam, and after insisting that we sit down with him and drink beer and eat pho (not caring at all that it is perhaps not customary to drink beer at 5AM) he got us on a public bus to the city center, saving us probably $20 and a huge headache. We left the rest of the tourists helplessly cabbing in circles (as the cabs tended to only take them to the bus station: surprise!) but they waved away our beckoning, so we reached the city center alone.

Hanoi looked like I thought China would look but didn't: choked with motorbikes, shabbily clean, and tightly packed. There isn't as much street food as in China, and there aren't as many restaurants. The old people exercising around the lake were doing aerobics, not tai chi. Nobody cared that there were white people walking around with rolling suitcases at 6AM, whereas in most places we went in China, that alone would have guaranteed onslaughts of hellos.

I hit Hanoi running with the intention of eating everything in sight, but at first, and I can't believe these words are about to fall from my fingertips, the food didn't turn out to be that earth-shattering. (I'm writing this from Hue, where the food actually IS wonderful, but that's a story for another entry.) We had bun cha Ha Noi for our first lunch, and it was blandly pleasant. Bun rieu cua for breakfast the second day and while the broth was complex and delicious, the rest was just filler. Banh cuon for dinner the second night, and it was mostly rice noodle. There was one dish that just killed us with flavor and crunch and that was a dish of deep-fried eel vermicelli. The eel was like bacon, and coupled with eel porridge and grilled eel salad, it made my average-food-dampened spirits lift. We promptly put in another order, and almost (but didn't, but should have) got a bag of the deep fried eel to go.

The one touristy thing we said we'd do, we did: go see Halong Bay. Time constraints left us with no choice but to do a day trip. The interminable bus ride and obligatory 'bathroom' stops at tourist-geared souvenir shops didn't do a thing to make the boat trip not worth it. The day was hazy and it was even threatening us with typhoons, but they missed us and we got to cruise around the mountains in ships and kayaks. My dad's kayak had a leak and he had to book it back to the dock, and then Julian and I got stuck behind a houseboat, which was guarded by an angry dog, but these things, similarly, did nothing to make the kayak trip not worth it. The water was tropically warm and smooth as glass, and the cove we entered was blocked on all sides by massive island-mountains so that we couldn't hear any ship noise.

Ladies selling delicious rambutan and mangosteen on the side of the road have brightened each and every day, especially at the (probably technically rip-off) price of 75 cents a pound for rambutan and a dollar a pound for mangosteen. How many rambutan shells and mangosteen rinds have Vietnamese gutters gained because of me? Probably somewhere in the thousands. I can't even wait to get home and wash my hands before I start shoving it in. Incidentally, there is absolutely no reason I have not yet contracted typhoid. I've eaten fruit out of the dirty-nailed hands of vendors, drank nuoc mia and passion fruit juice out of pitchers with visible dirt streaks and the buildup of years of mold, retrieved durian I dropped on the ground, failed to wash any thin-skinned fruit I've bought, and then of course there are the meals upon meals of street food cooked in pots on the curb that I've had. My travel clinic nurses would be very angry.

So everywhere in Vietnam there are these giant red patriotic looking flag-signs that say 2-9. They became a running mystery, as they contained no other explanation yet were everywhere. We only found out when we were having lots of trouble booking train tickets from Quy Nhon to Ho Chi Minh City on the 2^nd of September that we realized 2-9 meant September 2^nd and September 2^nd was Vietnam's national holiday: basically the Vietnamese 4^th of July (that is, if we had signs up all over our country that said '4-7' in huge red and blue type). It is definitely possible that we will be stuck in a lazy beach town while the locals are too busy setting off fireworks and visiting family to feed and house some stupid tourists. Stay tuned, I guess. The next entry will probably be me fawning about Hue's food, but the entry after that MIGHT contain details on whether we starved and slept on a beach in Quy Nhon.

No blog entries for poor Kunming, mostly because it was replete with laziness. Well, not it so much as me, but the reason stands, and there's only so much writing one can do about frantically trying to learn Vietnamese with an iPhone app and a Lonely Planet phrasebook before plunging headlong into Hanoi, or about playing even more pool, or about stumbling across a Chinese conference on homosexuality taking place in our hostel but unfortunately getting there in time only for the scintillating lectures on how to write professional emails.

We did hike at XiShan, a misty mountain a few miles west, but Chinese hiking mostly entails walking on the shoulder of the road getting honked at by tour buses. There was one side path with a woman selling pineapple on it, but aside from her it was mostly murderous stairs. Luckily, the climate here is completely unlike everywhere else in China. At an elevation of about 6500 feet, its air has trouble holding the pollution it forms (or something - it's clean, anyway) and its temperature is best described as 'room'.

On the way back from the mountain, we stumbled upon another frog-torture-esque night market (but perhaps less graphic due to high fish content and low everything else content) the difference being that this one had a lady standing off to the side spit-grilling whole fish wrapped in banana leaves and stuffed with herbs for RMB 12. I wasn't going to let the frankly hygienically appalling conditions stop me from getting a piece of that (really, when have I?) and it was delicious, especially eaten squatting on a stool next to Julian and some others eating makeshift market hotpot. The only reason he acquiesced to this hotpot was to get me a pair of chopsticks as quickly as possible before my fish got cold. (The fish griller didn't have chopsticks, but she offered me a glove to hold it with while I gnawed. I was afraid the herbs would fall out if I did that.)

Tomorrow we train it to Nanning, where we can catch a direct train to Hanoi instead of fooling around with the sketchy overnight buses and land border around Hekou/Lao Cai . This was the original plan, but one too many Internet horror stories about bag-slitting thieves, extortionate border taxis, unreliable customs procedures and bathroom-less eight hour bus trips had us searching for an alternative.

Assuming Vietnamese firewalls are as easily fooled by the addition of the Korean suffix to Blogger's website address as Chinese ones are, you will hear from me there.