This post was written by Margaret.
“Give a girl a fish; you have fed her for today. Teach a girl to fish; and you have fed her for a lifetime”
“Give a girl a fish; you have fed her for today. Teach a girl to fish; and you have fed her for a lifetime”
Hoi An was a delight – partly because of our very
entertaining guide and part because we were able to participate in Vietnamese
life rather than just observing it as you feel you do most of the time when you
are a tourist.
On our first day in Hoi An we took a trip on the river that
started with a basket boat ride out to the fishing boat.
Then starts the fishing.
There are many ways to catch fish. Very large nets, tied to
four large poles in the water, connected to an apparatus on shore that you
climb on in order to pump these pedals that shorten the ropes that attach the
net to the four poles, thereby raising the net from the water. If you are lucky there are fish caught
in the net. You pluck them out one
by one! and throw them in a bucket.
Then there is the net you throw from the boat. Harder than
it looks!
How it is supposed to be done.
Carol caught on very quickly
to the net throw though we could not have survived on her catch that day.
But no problem, Captain Cook lived up to his name. Back on
our own boat again we sat down to one of the best meals of the trip. Several
kinds of shrimp, spring rolls of course fresh out of the pan, egg pancake also
with shrimp, calamari, rice crackers, a great Larue beer, and a picture is
worth a thousand words. It was just all so fresh – and the captain had brought
all the ingredients with him in a cooler and cooked everything on this boat
that didn’t even have an obvious galley.
I can’t leave this post without mentioning the artistic
talents of our guide who was with us throughout Hoi An, the trip over the pass
to Hue including the marble mountain and around Hue. In addition to providing us with an impromptu ride to town with both of us on the back of his motorcycle, Nguyen loved (old) pop music and loved to sing and when we
met he immediately began humming a tune that we thought sounded familiar but
the words didn’t seem quite right.
Before he left us in Hue – which was several days after the fishing
trip, we begged for a recordable rendition of the song, so here it is.