Bed-knobs and chopsticks

Today I have been getting my head around a proposal from Jessica that I go to Laos early next week. We already have a trip planned in North Vietnam, and I would have been flying to Hanoi with Jessica on the 26th or 27th of this month. But as Jessica will be busy working next week, she suggested that I spend some time in Laos beforehand and meet her in Hanoi on the 28th. I am looking to fly to Vientiane, the Laotian capital, On Tuesday. This does not give me much time to prepare myself for what has suddenly become a two-week trip! But if living with Jessica over the past seven weeks has taught me anything, it's to be adaptable and prepared for anything!

I spent a while today finding the cheapest flights available online, which I will book tomorrow morning. In the process of researching Vietnamese budget airlines, I chanced to discover that VietJet, the airline I will be booking some of my flights with, was fined $1,000 this summer for staging an unauthorised dance performance by bikini-clad beauty pageant contestants during a flight. It could be an interesting journey!

This evening Jessica and I dined at her favourite downtown Vietnamese restaurant, Cuc Gach Quan, or Architect's House. Jessica told me that the restaurant came into being through the joining of a Vietnamese man and woman who had both fled the country by boat during the American War and later met, and fell in love, in France. After the war the woman wanted to return to her home country, and her partner, an architect, built several houses in Saigon where they settled together. Jessica told me that the woman longed for her grandmother's home cooking that she remembered from before the war, and searched the city to find the flavours of the Vietnam she remembered. When she couldn't find them, she set up her own restaurant with her partner, using her grandmother's recipes and basing it in the building that her partner had originally designed as an office for himself. Sadly, the couple split up and the architect took over the business.

The interior was very intriguing, divided into private spaces over two floors. We had to eat outside as we hadn't reserved a table, but venturing inside to look around I crossed a wooden floor over a fish pond and climbed up a nauseatingly steep step-ladder to the second floor. From here there were several rooms accessible over steps and under low doorways. It was not a huge restaurant but space was used effectively to give the impression of each room being a secret cavern, giving a lovely sense of privacy and uniqueness. Particularly unique was a table for four beneath the canopy of a four-poster bed, complete with a headboard and cushions along the wooden benches. But the nicest spot to my eye was the lone table on a terrace on the second floor, a little corner between the outside wall and the sloping tiled roof of the adjoining part of the building, open to the vast starry sky. It looked very romantic.

Unusual but intimate, the 'bed table'

The food wasn’t bad either. I particularly liked the fruit juices that seemingly everybody was drinking. A wide range of fresh juices were available, served in tall bottles corked with a rolled-up banana leaf, and drunk from a glass with ice and honey, through a straw made from a hollowed-out stem of morning glory (a vegetable with spinach-like leaves). I chose Vietnamese cherry juice, simply because I hadn’t seen it on a menu before. It was actually a green juice and tasted exactly like apple juice, but I was assured that this was the flavour of Vietnamese cherry. Either way, it was delicious and I finished it quickly. Unfortunately, after one more juice and more than my fair share of the honey, I felt very sick and we had to cut the evening short in case I barfed in the jazz bar we were planning on going to next. Luckily I managed to hold myself together and I now feel fully recovered.

Tomorrow will be the start of two days of preparation for the trip, a wide-ranging venture that will include city sight-seeing, a spa break in Cuc Phuong national park and climbing the highest mountain in Indochina. Considering I have very little experience of camping, don’t currently own a pair of walking boots and have only recently been on a trip by myself for the first time, it will be a bit of an adventure. I'm feeling nervous!