Asia 101

We’re back at it.

After the first world comfort of Australia and New Zealand (and Chile and Argentina, for that matter) and the privacy and freedom of camping, we are back to backpacking in the developing world, with all of the craziness that goes with it.

And, even better, we’re in Asia.

I’ve been ridiculously excited about going to Asia since we started planning this trip. It was the last continent that I’d never been to (except Antarctica, but I’ll get there one of these days) and the culture is of course unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t wait to experience the people, the colors, the religions, all of it.

But there was one reason above all others that made the continent particularly enticing; a reason that can be summed up in two words:

Street Food.

Now, if you’ve been reading this blog for a while (and if so, thank you!), you know just how much I adore street food. I love that food is the only focus, unimpaired by the rest of the stuff that usually comes with a dining experience. At a food stall on the sidewalk, there are no decorations, no mood music, no friendly wait staff to distract you. There is nothing for the food to hide behind, which is why street food is often the best food. I would even go as far as to say that often the best dishes you can find while travelling will be eaten either standing up or sitting on a plastic stool on a sidewalk. When you see someone, usually an older someone, making their living serving only one dish that they have probably been serving for years, you know it’s not going to suck.

Illustrating just how deeply I adhere to this belief, you should know that we were in Singapore and Malaysia for six days and did not step foot in a restaurant even once.

We started our Asian adventure in Singapore, which, I think I can now safely say, is one of the best places to eat in the world. Singapore’s vast mix of cultures- Chinese, Malaysian, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean and so on- make it the perfect introduction to Asia, and, of course, Asian cuisine.

Singapore is a country, a city and an island all in one, and its cultural diversity is evidenced everywhere you look. While it remains very Asian, its official language is English (a throw-back to the old days of the British Empire) and it’s an international economic powerhouse. The country is very clean and famously rigid with its rules: drug smuggling carries a mandatory death penalty and chewing gum is outlawed. There are bustling cultural enclaves- Chinatown, Little India, Arab Street and the like- but its cosmopolitan culture extends beyond the East. American and European chain stores crowd out local shops in the giant air-conditioned shopping malls that seem to be on every corner and skyscrapers tower over the city in every direction.

Just a few of Singapore's many rules on its Metro. No stinky durians is my personal fave.

Really? The root of ALL evils???

Yet despite its obvious globalization and modernity, Singapore was a delight to visit.

And by visit, I mean eat in.

Years ago, as in the rest of Asia, Singapore’s food vendors operated out of carts on the streets. Then, in a stroke of visionary genius, the city officials moved all of the vendors, or hawkers, into indoor food courts called hawker centers. With this one controversial move, the city managed to clean up the congested streets, raise the level of food hygiene among the hawker stalls and create temples of eating where you can find any food your heart desires. From experience, I can say that the result is glorious.

Imagine walking into a food court with immeasurable eating options, only instead of McDonalds, Taco Bell and Sparro’s, you have stall after stall of specialty dishes from the best cooks in the area. Everything is fresh and flavorful and made by someone who has been perfecting those dishes for decades. And since it is all in the same place, you can mix and match as you please to create a diverse, delicious multi-course meal without ever leaving the food court. And lest you be thinking that the hawker centers are just sterilized, colorless bastardizations of real eating communities, please see below.

Hawker center in Little India with people lining up 10-deep for delicious Mutton Biryani

No chance of getting our own table in the busy centers, so we needed to share

Can you spot the white guy who is super excited about his chicken rice?

My wonton noodle stand

I was a hawker center convert. That is, until we went to Malaysia.

While one can find a food court here and there, Malaysia’s food vendors are still in the streets with their carts, and, as we found out, are still making awesome food. I could go on and on describing all of the incredible things we have been eating in the past six days, but this is a travel blog, not a food blog, so I’ll restrain myself. If you do like to dabble in food porn every once in a while, visit our Eating page to get your fix.

I may have spared you the food play by play, but I won’t stop myself from indulging in pictures of the places we have been eating and the people who have been feeding us in Singapore and the Malaysian cities of Kuala Lumpur and Georgetown in Penang.

Waiting patiently for my coconut curry grilled corn

Durians, the famously stinky SE Asian fruit. They are so smelly that they are banned from confined public spaces!

The adorable little lady who made our rojak, a salad of fried tofu, cucumbers and pineapple tossed in a sweet soy and shrimp sauce and topped with crushed peanuts, lime juice and scallions.

The chef of an amazing fish dish we had with spicy black bean, chili, garlic and ginger sauce.

328 Katong Laksa, home of the best laksa in Singapore (and that's our rojak lady behind the stall to the left!)

Loving his hawker stall mutton biryani.

Malaysia, like Singapore, is extremely ethnically diverse: only about 55% of the population is Malay, while the rest is Chinese, Indian and others. The result is a crazy cohabitation of religion, culture and cuisine.

In both Singapore and Malaysia, Buddhist and Hindu temples sit side by side on the same street, as if competing for the architectural awe of passersby. An adhan, or Islamic call to prayer, rings out from the loud speaker of a minaret, while across the street, I kid you not, a Thai streetwalker shimmies to the melodic chanting. 

Apart from the occasional blaspheming hooker, all of these cultures coexist in a fascinating, colorful, mashed-up harmony. It's incredible.

We awkwardly stumbled into a Buddhist ceremony at a temple in Singapore

A wall of the Buddhist temple lined with hundreds of Buddha statues, all of them unique.

The temple's exterior

Dried sea creatures at the Chinatown market in Singapore

A dance group at a Malay heritage celebration in Singapore

A Hindu temple in Singapore

The heavily-adorned roof of a Hindu temple

 

 

 

 

More Hindu deities

A mosque in Singapore

Despite the undeniable Asian-ness of both countries, Singapore and Malaysia remain very modern, developed and Westernized. There are 7/11’s on the corners and KFC’s in the shopping malls. This is still Asia 101.

Next up, Intermediate Asia.

From Penang, we took an overnight train to Bangkok, which, as long as you stay well away from the tourist ghetto, is much more of a culture shock than any of the Asian cities we've been to so far. After Bangkok, we hope to head to Advanced Asia: Myanmar (formerly Burma), Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, pending visas and monsoons.

Now if you would excuse me, there’s some street food outside with my name on it.

Tweet

Heaven is in Chile (but so are Earthquakes)

It’s times like these that we feel guilty.

Backpacking is supposed to be uncomfortable. It’s supposed to be difficult. We should be in a run-down hostel in a nasty part of some third world city, right?

Instead, we found ourselves in a tiny Chilean fishing village renting a studio apartment with a massive balcony high on a cliff over the Pacific Ocean. 

I'll just throw it out there now: this post might contain a lot of bragging.

And this after three relaxing, fun days in Santiago, basking in the hospitality of our friend Devin, a buddy from Columbia who has been living in Chile for two years. I’ll cover our time in Santiago in a later post, as we are going back there again this weekend.

For now, I want to wax poetic about Valparaiso and brag about our stay in Heaven, I mean, Horcon.

From Santiago, we jumped on a bus heading to Chile’s 2,700 mile (4,300 km) long coast. More specifically, we went to the city of Valparaiso.

A few months ago, we met an American guy, a travel writer (lucky bastard…), who had fallen in love with Valparaiso and told us to spend as much time there as we could. Apparently he had found a welcoming home in a nice hostel there and stayed for two weeks. He told us about eating local fish every day, drinking too much wine on the hostel's patio at night; there had been a girl- you know how that can be- and the city for him was as its name implies: paradise.

Our time there was less paradisaical, but still interesting enough. 

First off, it’s a genuinely cool city. Think of Valparaiso as that hippy girl who is actually average-looking, but whose cool, quirky personality makes her seem really pretty. She is nice to look at, but more for her unique style and colorful airs than for her aesthetic beauty. She’s natural, and as a result, can be a little dirty, even stinky at times, but somehow that rawness only makes her more attractive.

Beyond the cheesy metaphors, Valparaiso is a coastal city that flows up into the hills just beyond the port in a colorful, crazy, jumbled wave of brightly-painted houses and buildings. Ugh- why can’t I stop writing in metaphors?!

Just a random salsa band playing professional renditions of Buena Vista Social Club songs on a sunny Wednesday morning in Valparaiso.

For us, the few days we spent in Valpo (as the much-cooler-than-us locals call it) was defined by two things: graffiti and an earthquake.

First, the graffiti. Valparaiso is covered in it. I’m not talking about small-minded, anti-establishment tags. You know, someone’s name scrawled sloppily in spray paint on the side of an historic monument as if writing in cursive makes it any less trashy. 


No, I’m talking about art. Intricate, creative, unique public art. Everywhere. I’ll let the pictures do the talking, but it was vibrant and intriguing and made the whole city come to life. 

Tell me you don't want to dance down those stairs. 

Now that's my kind of civil disobedience.

Did Dr. Seuss live in Valpo?

And as I said before, we had an something of an earthquake situation in Valparaiso.

We were in bed in our thankfully sturdy hostel and had just fallen asleep when there was a deep rumble all around us as our bed started shaking, waking us up immediately. The entire world was moving: the walls, the groaning doorframe, the rattling stain glass skylight right above our bed (Helloooo, safety hazard…). 


You all know by now that I’m a giant drama queen, so I’ll just say it: it felt like the world was ending.

It lasted about 30 seconds, which doesn’t sound that bad, but believe me, when you think you are going to die, 30 seconds is a LONG time. We were both just paralyzed, pinned to the bed with fear and confusion. I had vague ideas of getting under the bed or moving to the supposedly-more-stable doorframe, but instead I just lay there, frozen, repeatedly yelling, “Oh my god. Oh. My. GOD!” until the shaking finally stopped.  Heroic, I know.

We felt two aftershocks in the minutes following the quake (which ended up being a 6.8 on the Richter Scale) and those slight rumblings, coupled with my waning adrenaline, broke my nerves completely.

I cried.

Kind of a lot.

But enough about natural disasters, let me tell you about our little slice of heaven that we found after that!

To counterbalance Valparaiso’s craziness, we took a bus up the coast through a series of small towns until we came to Horcon, a tiny, tranquil, colorful fishing village with absolutely nothing to do that would attract any other tourists. We rented a studio on a cliff overlooking the ocean and were the only gringos in town.

It was what we had wanted Valparaiso to be: paradise. 

Horcon

The view down the coast from our balcony

Horcon was heaven. Every morning, we woke up to the sound of the waves below and to the view of those waves through the floor to ceiling window at the foot of our bed.

After coffee and breakfast on our balcony, we would meander down to the port to watch the fishing boats come in (and then be pulled up onto the beach by horses!), knowing that our dinner was aboard.

We bought the freshest shellfish from a beachfront fisherman’s shack and if we were feeling especially decadent (which we usually were), we would grab some seafood-stuffed empanadas and a cold beer from one of the nearby food stands before heading back home. Evenings were spent on our balcony and in the kitchen, cooking up and devouring our daily purchases.

We basically didn't move from here for four days.

A little too excited about his seafood feast

One of our few restaurant meals: Paila, a Chilean seafood stew

Basically, we did absolutely nothing besides eat seafood, sleep, and bliss out on our balcony. Actually, that's not true, we did go to a deserted beach one day, which was nice except that within 30 seconds of being there, I almost literally stumbled across the decaying corpse of a long-dead seal, half covered in sand and rotting in the sun. Charming. We ran back to the seal-free safety of our balcony soon after that.

Our four days in Horcon was perfection (minus the seal). It was like vacation, only instead of having to go back to work afterwards, we had to go to Easter Island.

I’m trying to think of something humble or negative to say to soften my bragging, but I got nothin'. 


Dead seal, anyone?

Tweet

Rosie's House

I have been meaning to write this post for several days now, but I just couldn't seem to get it done.

It may be because I haven't had the time. When we weren't working, we were usually at the table having leisurely meals full of excellent food, wine and conversation with Rosie, our host. It may also be simply because I didn't know what to say. How do I explain this experience in a way that does it justice?

Someone recently asked me what has been the highlight of this trip so far, which got me thinking: what do I consider a "highlight" among a collection of experiences, sights, people and moments that are all memorable, whether they are good or bad? Trekking to Machu Picchu was certainly unforgettable, but so was the night in Sucre when we sat around our hostel courtyard with new friends and drank a case of wine, laughing and sharing stories until early morning.

Our most recent highlight falls into the latter category, that is, the experiences we have that are memorable because they are so human.We spent the last two weeks volunteering in the same region of Patagonia where we worked previously, but this time, at the home of Rosie, a middle-aged British woman who has been living in Argentina for over 30 years. Rosie lives by herself in a small wooden house on four remote acres of land and takes in a few backpackers a year to help her with gardening, fruit picking and landscaping. As "payment" for the work, she provides room and board.

But that exchange, manual labor for basic hospitality, isn't the point. Far from it.

Yes, we worked, but that part of the experience was largely forgettable. What made this place, and this person, a highlight of our trip was the exchange that went far deeper than work or meals. The true exchange took place when we would all cook together, Vincent and I clumsily learning to fold the dough to close our homemade empanadas, or watching as Rosie took yet another of her fresh fruit crumbles out of the oven. The exchange happened at the end of the meal, as one of us would serve the others another glass of wine, the conversation flowing easily. It happened when the three of us went out in town to watch a Spanish guitar concert at the small venue run by one of Rosie's acquaintances and then discussed the musical styles we like on the drive home. At those times, no one was counting work hours or making sure everything was perfectly equal. It wasn't a work exchange; it was a friendship.

And it was an opportunity for us to learn. We learned about a lifestyle that is far removed from our own- one of simplicity, little waste, sustainability and community. Rosie lives in a house smaller than our old apartment; a house heated by a fireplace enclosed in brick so as to radiate heat throughout the little area. She cooks on a wood-burning stove, which also acts as a heater, as well as an oven. She line-dries her clothes and doesn't own a TV, a dishwasher or a microwave. Her car is old enough to vote.

Rosie produces only one small plastic grocery bag of non-recyclable trash a week. Organic waste is composted, paper is burnt, glass and aluminum re-used or recycled. Her sink and bathwater are drained directly back to the land for irrigation. She and the neighbors in her small, rural community swap and share the various goods they produce: homemade jams, chutneys, juices and beers.

Rosie eats almost exclusively whole foods, often organic and mostly local, but not because it is a current trend. She doesn't buy these products to feel self-righteous about being a responsible consumer. She buys them because it's economical and ecological, and in doing so, she is supporting local producers, like herself, who are trying, often in vain, to live off the land. Her lifestyle is not easy, and part of its simplicity is a result of necessity, not ideology. Yet despite its perceived discomfort or inconvenience, there is something deeply appealing about the idea of only having what you need.

Witnessing Rosie's lifestyle and the simple comfort of her home has made us re-evaluate what we need in order to have a good quality of living. Do we really need a microwave? A dryer? Do any of us really need two or three guest rooms in our house? More than one car per adult, or a new car instead of a used one? It's so easy to confuse what we want, or what other people have, with what we actually need, and often, the more we have, the more unsatisfied we are.

While traveling, we have witnessed whole populations living with much, much less than what we consider necessary in our own countries. We have had a taste of living more simply just by backpacking with the bare essentials. But living with Rosie has been our first opportunity to experience the reality of it. It's the first time we have been able to ask about the benefits and drawbacks, to really understand what it means to simplify. And it has given us a lot to think about.

That's not to say we are going to go all Thoreau on you and go live an isolated life in the woods. It's not even to say that we will change the way we live or consume when the trip is over. It is certainly not to say that you should change your habits. I don't have the answers for myself, so I won't even begin to pretend that I have the answers for anyone else. But it has made us reconsider the way we live and the way we want to live.

Our time with Rosie taught us countless other things too. We have learned about Argentine and British culture, as well as how this particular region has changed over the last few decades. We have learned about the effects of tourism and immigration on a place, the tensions that run deep among a diverse population. We have learned a new style of cooking, which, I have to say again, is amazing. Rosie is truly a superior cook and after two weeks of eating her masterpieces, I have the thighs to prove it. We have learned the art of conversation from a host who is intelligent, funny, engaging and thoughtful.

But above all, above the endless conversations about politics, religion, environmental awareness, wine, Facebook, cooking and every other topic imaginable; above the cultural exchange and the appeal of the simple life; above everything else, we have learned that true hospitality, in its purest, most generous form, is possible.

Rosie welcomed us into her home in the fullest sense, making us feel comfortable immediately. Within a day, we felt like we were visiting an aunt or a family friend, someone whom we had known for years. Some days, when we would come in from work to find tea and cake sitting out for us or when Rosie would rub clay on my wasp stings to draw out the poison and soothe the pain, we felt like little kids at Grandma's house. It was comfortable, and comforting, and was the most "at home" we have felt since we started traveling.

To realize that this complete stranger opened her house and herself to us so readily was to witness a kind of humanity that one rarely, if ever, experiences. It is humbling and inspiring, and it makes us realize just how much potential there is by simply opening oneself to other people.

We could all stand to learn a lesson or two from someone like Rosie. I only hope that we have been able to share with her even a portion of what she has taught us.

Although if we haven't, I know she isn't keeping score.

Hard at work bunching lavender

One of our daily lunches in the garden (homemade vegetable tart and salad)

Purple Peruvian Potatoes (say that three times fast...)

The empanadas we helped make

Tweet