A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [69]
No one should come here.
Our waiter is a friendly-enough young fellow, soft-spoken and attentive, but I can’t get it out of my head that if I should suddenly decide to order some monkey, he’ll happily slit the little fella’s throat with the same friendly expression on his face.
I’m in much better spirits the next morning when we board a riverboat to go to the nearby floating market at Cai Rang. It’s beautiful out, the sun creating pink-and-orange coronas around the edges of the clouds, the light on the water hypnotic. Bamboo-frame houses with thatched roofs, tall palms, the crowded waterfront of Can Tho pass by. The river itself teems with activity. Net fishermen, their handwoven nets extended like the wings of giant moths over the water, dip and pull with ingeniously crafted levers of bamboo poles. Families in sampans pass by, sampans with lone women paddling from the stern and baby sitting aft, boats overloaded with cinder blocks and building materials. There are floating gas stations: a thousand-gallon floating gas tank piloted by a chain-smoking old man sitting on top. The river traffic gets more intense as we near Cai Rang. Sampans are so overloaded here, so low in the water, I can’t imagine how they stay afloat. Boats are piled high with sacks of rice, fertilizer, produce, potted palms, cages of live poultry.
And there are floating food vendors.
A chugging sampan pulls alongside our craft and inquires if we’d care for coffee. He’s got a whole Starbucks rig set up at the helm. Attaching his boat to ours with a frayed rope, he sets immediately to work filling our order, one hand keeping his boat aligned as we speed along the river, the other steaming, filtering, and pouring some of that fabulous Vietnamese coffee into tall glasses. Another boat, this one selling baguettes, comes along the other side, and we buy a few of those, too. They’re still warm, crunchy, and delicious, as good as any you’d find in Paris. A boat selling pho joins us and soon Philippe and I are digging greedily into bowls of outstandingly fresh spicy beef and noodles, a slice of liver, those brightly colored and crunchy garnishes making the flavors pop. I could eat here all day. Just float along and everybody comes to you. Pâté sandwiches, roll-your-own beef, spring rolls, sweets – all this in the middle of busy river traffic. At the market, there are floating fishmongers, livestock pens, fruit and vegetable wholesalers, bakers, plant sellers, all of them in waterlogged, porous-looking, questionably seaworthy vessels of indeterminate age. Slurping down the last of my morning pho, I’m thinking that this is living. Everyone smiles. Children shout ‘Hello!’ and ‘Bye-bye!’ and ‘Happy New Year!’ – all wanting nothing more than to practice the few words of English they know. A dessert boat sells candied mango and banana, skewered melon, chunks of pineapple, whole jackfruit, durian, mangosteen, dragon fruit, and custard apple. Boats chug by with bundles of beautifully wrapped square and triangular banh dangling from the wheelhouse, an entire convenience store aboard, selling cigarettes, sodas, beer, and fruit juices in plastic bags. Women cook in woks of boiling oil on fast-moving boats, grill little packets of ground meat wrapped in mint leaves, fry little birds, boil noodles. Everything smells good. Everything looks good to eat.
Looking at the far shore, I can see doorless shacks built out over the water, nearly without furniture, except for an occasional hammock, the glow from a much-repaired television set. There are television aerials over medieval-style privies built out over the water. Watch the shore and you see every stage of domestic river life: mothers bathing their children, pounding laundry, scrubbing their woks in the brown water, laying out circles of rice paper to dry on rooftops, fastidiously sweeping their tiny primitive abodes, every inch clean and squared away.