Dunes and Food

Mui Ne, Vietnam. Dunes and Food.

Mui Ne is a resort town on the beach, a five-hour bus ride from Ho Chi Minh City. Here is a photo taken inside the bus.

This is a so-called sleeper bus; the picture was taken between the left and the center rows of double-decker seats (three rows in all). To my amazement, nearly everyone except me manages to sleep in these hard, narrow reclining seats. We took buses like this several times in Cambodia and Vietnam. I would be happy never to ride in one again.

Mui Ne has developed rather recently (since 1995) as a resort town with shops and restaurants along the beach side of the road, hotels and other businesses on the other side. Here is a photo of our very nice hotel and one of the view.

Dunes. Mui Ne is popular for surfing and other beach sports. It is famous for the sand dunes about an hour’s drive from the village. The hotel manager called a driver with a jeep for us and off we went, stopping to take a few pictures along the way.

Fishing boats along the beach

Tricia and our driver

Just a nice view of the coast

The dunes look like other dunes you’ve seen – very beautiful, giving you the sense of being in a different country from where you just were. The wind covered up our tracks soon after we made them.

On the way up . . .

We didn't rent a dune buggy

Tricia trying to tie up her hair against the wind

Sun starting to go down

Angela and Katherine going back down the dune

Many people rent a sled to slide down the dunes. The vendor will wax the sled for you so it slides better. We resisted the vendors at the white dunes, but caved in to the very persistent elderly woman who followed us up the red dunes, which are about a half hour away. The ride down the dune was bumpy and, uh, sandy. Unfortunately, it was too dark to take pictures by the time we got there.

Food. This section is mostly about food we didn’t eat, so skip to the end (banh xeo) if you prefer to read about something that we did eat.

Since Mui Ne is a beach town, near a fishing village, seafood is fresh and plentiful. Katherine and Angela partook enthusiastically; Tricia and I found vegetarian alternatives. None of us sampled the so-called exotic dishes, seen on the pages below from the menu in a restaurant where we had lunch.

Finding snake, turtle, and frog on the menu was less surprising than seeing the dishes in Russian along with Vietnamese and English. We later learned that Mui Ne is very popular with Russian tourists and that quite a few businesses there are Russian-owned.

Alligator wasn’t on the printed menu of the seafood restaurant where we had dinner, but was simply displayed on the counter, waiting for another customer.

In another restaurant, in the town of Da Lat, the menu pages labeled Beef, Pork, Chicken, Fish, etc. were followed by a page titled “Animal,” apparently meaning wild meat.

It's interesting that boar, anteater, and porcupine are all prepared either with ginger or lemongrass, but deer isn't, or at least not at this restaurant.  -- I  didn’t know they even had porcupines in Vietnam, let alone that they are eaten.

Banh xeo. Lest you think we were overly preoccupied with collecting examples of startling foods in Vietnam, let me conclude this post with a delicious snack we enjoyed, banh xeo. Walking around the French section of Da Lat, we stopped to watch a vendor cooking these little morsels, like a thin crepe but crispy on the outside, like a super-thin taco. In the picture below, we had already demolished two orders of banh xeo and started on the third.

The crepes are cooked on a sort of griddle, spread with a thin layer of a pork and shrimp mixture (or other filling), then folded over. To eat them, you wrap them in a lettuce leaf with herbs and dunk them in the sauces – at least, that’s how the vendor told us to do it, but then we saw other guests plop the whole thing into the dipping sauce, cut it up with their chopsticks, and eat the pieces. I can’t describe the flavor, except to say it’s very yummy, spicy and a little sweet, and not like either Thai or Chinese seasonings. Here is a link to a recipe that I found online; of course, I don’t know if our vendor would think it’s authentic.

http://thelunacafe.com/vietnamese-crispy-crepes-banh-xeo/

When you open the link, scroll down to find the recipe. Let me know how it turns out if you decide to make it!