Tasmania to Tokyo – Chan May / Hoi An – Day 48 can be found here.
Today’s Chronicles can be found here.
No late night e-mails last night. No late night anything after our long day in Hoi An – we just collapsed in our beds and fell asleep.
We slept til around 10 am, when we made a bleary forage up to Arts Cafe for yoghurt parfaits and croissant. I think some homework may have happened after that? These sea days really do vanish into a blur.
Our usual lunch routine – La Terrazza for my wife and son, Kaiseki for myself and our daughter – followed by a cooking class. We’re making Vietnamese drinking food, which means preparing Bò Lúc Lắc, also known as shaking beef:
We start by frying the egg until crispy:
Then we stir-fry the beef:
Spring onion and garlic get chopped – but won’t be added until the end to preserve their flavour.
We pause while Chanelle prepares some Vietnamese iced coffee. This recipe has egg yolk in it, which gives it a lovely froth:
We carry on with stir-frying – adding soy sauce, sugar and butter and cooking for a while before adding the spring onions and garlic near the end:
And then we put it all together, along with some very hot chilis:
Delicious! We all love it – it’s probably my daughter’s favourite dish after the laksa.
Here’s the recipe:
More homework time, then bingo followed by trivia. We correctly identify the name of the most expensive Easter eggs (Faberge) and the constellation with the fewest stars (the Southern Cross). We learn that Bingo was invented in Italy and that people have the most allergies to apples, then peaches, and then kiwis.
There is some debate as to the town with the longest name – I initially suggest the formal name of Bangkok, but Zaid did specifically say town so that honour goes to the Welsh town of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. We still earn a third-place podium finish.
My wife and I then carve out a bit of time for a Singapore sling on the verandah:
It’s getting cooler as we move further north. The temperature is now in the mid-twenties Celsius, and we are finding it much more bearable.
Dinner at SALT Kitchen this evening. Tonight’s menu:
I start with the pork skewers:
While our daughter has the pho bo:
My wife and I then move onto the ginger chicken:
Very tasty.
And for dessert, the banana cake:
This isn’t my favourite – I’m not a big fan of the coconut underlayer, and there are some larger chunks of brown banana in there. The crispy top of it is nice, though.
We stay up late tonight to see the magical performance of Sunny Chen:
He does a great job of blending humour and magic, and performs a mixture of card tricks, rope tricks, sleight of hand and much more. We are unfortunately not able to stay for the full length of the show as we have an early start tomorrow, but we will attempt to see next voyage’s show if at all possible.
It is now incredibly late, and we have an early start in Ha Long Bay tomorrow. We will be doing one of Silversea’s included excursions – going on a junk boat tour of Ha Long Bay and visiting Thien Cung cave, weather permitting.