As I wrote about some months ago, while I was in Ben Tre province in February, I went on a bike ride. This was no ordinary bike ride however, but one on which I not only got to see the cutest baby in the whole wide world, but also...

Yes, that's right - chocolate! Little did I know, but Vietnam is actually one of the world's largest producers of cacao, almost all of which they export. I doubt that this is particularly high quality cacao, but at the time, I really didn't care - I was just beside myself with excitement at actually seeing chocolate in its rawest form. Above are the beans, spread over bamboo colanders to dry in the sun by the side of the road - this method of drying is also very commonly used in China, where everything from soy beans to sesame seeds are dried in this way.

And here is an individual bean in the palm of my hand. In fact, the chocolate bean itself is inside another thin layer of skin that is discarded before use - in the photo above you can see the bean with the skin sill on, split almost in half.

And of course I had a taste. Bitter, gritty and somewhat akin to coffee beans, I wouldn't like to eat chocolate in this form everyday, but it was definitely a memorable experience. For me though, the real icing on the cake was the sheer beauty of the cacao pods, just harvested from the trees - a positive rainbow of yellow, orange and pink.

And finally, at the beginning of this post you will find (or may have already found) a very short audio postcard that I recorded very close to where these photographs were taken. Please excuse the awful sound quality!

As a seasoned traveler and obsessive foodie, I like to think that I can suss out where the good food is wherever I am. Sometimes though, it pays to have a little local knowledge, a fact that I very pleasurably experienced earlier this year in Vietnam’s third city, Da Nang.

Known to most Westerners for its American air base during the war (which, in the words of John Pilger, eventually turned the town into ‘a small American city’), today Da Nang is little visited by foreigners. Though this is probably part of the charm of the place, it’s also a shame more people don’t go to Da Nang, for this relaxed port city has some of Vietnam’s most beautiful scenery on its doorstep – and, as I discovered, some of its most delicious food.

Originally, I’d planned to go to Da Nang just for a day trip from the nearby beach where I was staying, and arranged, through the wonderful Couchsurfing.org, to meet up for dinner with a local young man by the name of Kent Lee. With a couple of hours to kill before I was meeting Kent, I decided to check out the city’s central market – and realized very quickly that I had vastly underestimated Da Nang.

The place was heaving, full to the brim with families doing their shopping for the upcoming New Year festivities. Da Nang-ites, I now appreciated, were serious about their food. A colourful (and delicious) snack outside the market only whet my appetite for more, and I looked forward to dinner with mounting anticipation.

Thankfully, within minutes of meeting Kent, I discovered that I was in excellent hands. As well as being fantastic company (he is, among many other talents, the Vietnamese translator of Bridget Jones’ Diary no less!), Kent is also a consummate foodie, and as soon as he learned of my interest in food, resolved on showing me Da Nang’s best.

We started with one of the Central coast’s most famous dishes – My Quang, a beautiful bowl of springy, bright yellow rice noodles, served with beansprouts, herbs, shrimp, quail's eggs, chopped peanuts and crunchy flatbread. Kent took me to an utterly undistinctive-looking corner restaurant, but whose brisk business and fresh ingredients (above) attested to its quality.

This is my mixed-in My Quang, waiting to be devoured, which it duly was. I could easily have eaten a second bowl, but Kent advised me to keep some space for dessert –

Che, a kind of cross between a drink and a pudding, of which there are countless varieties – ours contained mango, coconut milk, and (joy of joys!), durian.

After a quick drink with Kent’s friends in a surreal bar full of fortune tellers and snake-charmers, I went back to my beach-side hostel pleased to have seen a side of Vietnam unknown to most tourists – so you can imagine my delight when Kent called me the very next day to invite me back to Da Nang, this time for lunch with his family.

As you can see from the photo, it was a sumptuous spread. My favourite dish was the one you can see to the right of the soup – a salad that I guessed contained, among probably many other ingredients, fresh herbs, raw onions and chicken. I was overwhelmed by my hosts’ generosity, but when I thanked them profusely for it, was told by Kent that the best way of showing my appreciation was by eating a lot. I was, as you can probably understand, starting to fall for Vietnam big-time.

But the delights of Da Nang didn't end there. After a couple of hours swimming at this beautiful nearby beach,

Kent took me for a dinner which was probably one of the best I ate in Vietnam (but which sadly I have no pictures of): at a street-stall down a tiny, scruffy alley, we ate snails and salad – the former which I am not normally a big fan of, but whose flavours I was so overwhelmed and delighted by that I completely forgot to ask what was in them, or their name. Which at least gives me a good excuse to go back to Da Nang one day.

My Quang restaurant
Corner of Le Hong Phong and Nguyen Chi Thanh.

Che cafe
Tran Phu Street.

Snail and salad vendor
Unknown alley.

The day I arrived in Quy Nhon, this already supremely chilled out seaside town was in the process of shutting down for the New Year celebrations, meaning that the vibe was so laid-back it was almost horizontal. Almost nothing was open, nearly everyone was at home with the family, and one's options for eating and drinking were severely limited. So thank god that, as I arrived in town on the back of a motorbike taxi, I glimpsed the Kim Dinh through the palm trees on the seafront.

Though nothing more than an open-front unit with chairs and tables on the pavement out the front, something about the place immediately appealed to me, and sure enough, it became my default hangout for the duration of my stay in Quy Nhon.

Like all the best cafes in Vietnam, the Kim Dinh does not make a song and dance over its operation. The only things sold here are coffee, tea, sinh to, and the classic central-coast region snack, banh beo. All of which were done to perfection.

The banh beo, above, came bathed in a unctuous, vinegary (in a good way) sauce, which worked wonderfully with the glutinous chewy texture of the pancakes. Great with an iced coffee, but even better with the Kim Dinh's signature sinh to, which, like the amazing sinh to that made up The Best Breakfast of my Life, was a combination of fruits rather than just one or two, including avocados, papayas, and dragon fruit, among others.

What took this sinh to to even greater heights, however, was that the fruits were not blended as is usual with sinh to, but arrived at my table roughly chopped, along with crushed ice and - oh my - a generous dollop of condensed milk.

The photo above is of the many glasses of the fruit, minus the ice and milk, which the Kim Dinh staff prepare in advance for when there's a rush of customers (because almost EVERYONE orders the sinh to). The opening photo is of after the whole lot has been mixed together into a delicious mess and is waiting patiently for me to devour it.

Just the thing before a stroll along the seafront at sunset.

Kim Dinh
18a Nguyen Hue,
Quy Nhon,
Vietnam.

Banana lady.

Passion fruits, I think.

Three varieties of limes.

Chilli powders.

Unknown green vegetable or fruit.

Mushrooms and garlic.

Red shallots.

Coconut lady.

All from a sunny morning in Hue, Vietnam, February 2010.

The boat cuts through the calm water like a knife, sending symmetrical ripples out towards the trees that line the narrow canal. Above me, the rotund coconut fruits are gathered in crowded clusters, the palm fronds cast lazy shadows, and the sun shines hot on my back. I am blissfully happy, and can't think of anywhere I would rather be.

This was the scene when, almost exactly 3 months ago, I went on a boat tour of the the Mekong Delta in Ben Tre Province, Vietnam. It was probably one of the best things I did in Vietnam, because not only was I the only passenger, but also because my wonderful guide (and fellow durian-lover) Dai at my request made the tour as food-oriented as possible.

The day was punctuated by many little snacks of tropical fruit, including my first taste of milk fruit, but it was coconut that was the real star of the show. In Vietnam, Ben Tre Province is famous as 'the island of coconuts', and it seems as if the whole local economy revolves around these trees and their many products.

Something that surprised and impressed me was how much of the tree is used. The fronds are used for roofs, the husks are used for firewood (more on this in the near future), and the fruit, of course, is used for food - coconut oil, coconut milk, coconut cream, shredded fresh coconut, and the famous Ben Tre coconut candy.

Like most of the boat tours of the Mekong Delta, mine included a trip to one of the local workshops that make this candy, and though it was of course a bit of a tourist trap, by the time Dai and I rocked up (sleepy mid-afternoon) we were the only visitors. Dai happily explained to me in great detail the process involved in making the candy, most of which, sadly, I've now totally forgotten, but I did manage to take a few good photos of it: here is the lava-like, pre-cut (peanut variety) candy...

...here the simple but effective contraption used to tease said lava into neat squares...

...and here, the finished product itself.

But though the candy factory was undoubtedly interesting, my favourite coconut moment of the day came when we were out on the boat, meandering through the countless, tranquil waterways that crisscross the land, and I saw this:

This is, Dai told me, the fruit of the water coconut, which is not harvested commercially. I've tried verifying this info via Google but with no luck, except for this photo, whose Vietnamese caption I put through an online translator with hilarious results ('Coconut water, broken, collecting firewood, food such as jelly dua. Neu Bui bui quazzzz pale, slightly more for the road. Jueju delicious cat' - Kent, if you're reading this, can you shed any light???).

Anyway, the fruit of the water coconut actually bares very little fruit as it turned out. After hacking it off its stalk with some difficulty, Dai separated each of the spiky kernels one-by-one from the rest. He then decided, by eye and weight, which ones were likely to contain any fruit (the smaller, lighter ones were discarded), and those deemed worthy were sliced in half...

...to reveal this:

That little translucent white thing in there is about the size of a quail's egg and is the only edible part of the whole pod (no wonder they're not grown commercially). Taste wise it hinted rather than screamed its membership of the coconut family, and textually was an intriguing blend of glutinous and rubbery - like a cross between jelly and mochi. I wasn't an instant convert, I have to admit, but the novelty of eating something that you can't really buy, and not 10 meters away from where it had until just now been growing, was pretty cool.

And here's the man who made it all happen! Huge thanks to Dai for a truly memorable day, and look out for more tales from Vietnam in the coming weeks...