We arrived at Hanoi after a harrowing twelve hour night bus and wasted no time in making our way to the Perfume Pagoda. It was an exhausting but exciting day, and I’ve got more pictures of temples, pagodas, caves, and dramatic landscapes. But since that’s essentially more of the same, I will instead share with you some of the nuttier things we’ve seen in our first week in Vietnam.

Snake Wine
Cobra/snake/scorpion/lizard wine is frequently sold at tourist spots throughout Vietnam. This photo was taken outside the Cu Chi Vietcong tunnels.

Our host in Saigon said he had never tried the wine, as did his friends, so at first I thought it was just a crazy concoction sold to tourists. But in Hanoi, the proprietor of our guesthouse was quite proud of his “homemade” cobra wine and posed with his enormous vat of the stuff.

Doraemon
The four-year old neice of our Saigon host was an avid reader of the Vietnamese translation of Doraemon comics, a popular Japanese cartoon character.

(I’m not sure if it’s relevant, but her mother works in Japan.)

Leftovers
What appears to be a small pile of live ordnance found in the ruins of Hue.

Fetus Sauce?
Even stranger than snake wine are the mixtures found in ramshackle rural restaurants. Here are a mixture of concotions that include goat fetuses, animal phalli, and lizards.

Hanoi Ear Doctor
I find this the scariest picture of the lot. Dr. Quack is operating his clinic on the open street of Hanoi. It’s about 7pm, there is no meaningful streetlight, and he’s sticking a pair of forceps down the ear canal of his patient. To complete the lunacy of the scene, there’s a cage of canaries hanging above the patient’s chair.

The Case of the Poison Rhubarb

Romping around the ruins of Hue, I spotted a plant that looked very much like rhubarb. I am familiar with the plant in Anglo cuisine, and it does originate from Asia. To quote wikipedia:

The plant is indigenous to Asia, and many suggest that it was often used by the Mongolians; particularly, the Tatars tribes of the Gobi. Varieties of rhubarb have a long history as medicinal plants in Traditional Chinese Medicine, but the use of rhubarb as food is a relatively recent innovation, first recorded in 17th century England.

Rhubarb is a crisp plant that snaps when pressure is applied to the stem. This plant bent instead. I tasted a few drops of juice that ran out of the point of fracture. Tasting nothing particular, I concluded it was not rhubarb, which tastes sour. The time was 11:43 a.m.

11:44: I feel a tingle on my lower lip, the tip of my tongue, and the back of my throat.

11:45: The tingle becomes a burn. I tell my traveling companion that I believe the plant may have been poisonous.

11:47: Lacking water, we hastily exit the temple complex to purchase a drink.

11:51: Burn gets worse. Traveling companion offers to return to the scene of the crime to break off a piece of the plant in case we have to go to the hospital. I tell him it’s probably OK —it’s bad, but not that bad… right?

11:54: I feel light-headed and dizzy. We cope with the situation through jokes, imagining the following update to the next edition of the Lonely Planet Vietnam guide:

Don’t touch wild plants! In December 2005, an American tourist tasted what he thought was a familiar-looking wild plant and woke up the next morning stone blind.

11:56: Lemon soda purchased and hastily consumed. The cold liquid provides instant relief to the affected areas; burn subsides, light-headedness and numb lip and throat continue take about an hour to completely dissipate.

Moral of the story: Don’t touch or taste tropical flora, no matter how familiar it appears. Ever.

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