We eat breakfast at a local café. All you can eat for $3.00 including Pho (Vietnamese Beef soup), Omelette, pancakes, banana fritters, fresh fruit and small squares of delicate cream filled sponge cake. The coffee is passable.
Ping is waiting for us outside our hotel. She is barely visible in the mist. It is 10am. She assures us that visibility is better in the village below. I ask if we need to bring umbrellas. She looks up into the mist and then back at me. “No.” she says with conviction.
“It will not rain.”
“We will go to the markets first” she says. The produce market in Sapa is all abustle. The aroma of fresh herbs is intoxiating and fortunately the freshly slaughtered meat doesn’t smell at all in the still cool, morning air.
“Do you eat Tofu?” Ping asks me. “No” I say, thinking of Stan’s dislike of the tasteless stuff. We are standing in front of the Tofu lady. Pieces of fresh Tofu the size of house bricks are piled on a tray, still warm, wisps of vapor trailing off them and joining the mist that shrouds all of Sapa.
It is then that I realise with horror that Ping is shopping for us, that she is planning to make lunch for us in the village. “We’ve brought our own food.” I stammer, remembering the coconut bread and bananas we’d bought earlier. Ping looks a little crestfallen, but determinedly presses on with her shopping. She buys fresh broccolini and shallots and heads into the meat section of the market. She tells me that she can only afford to buy meat, (usually chicken, sometimes pork), for her family once a week. Normally, they just eat rice and vegetables or clear noodle soup.
She points to a table that has very dark red meat on it, there is a small neat pile of paws and a disturbingly familiar looking head. “Dog.” she says simply. I ask if she eats dog and she tells me she doesn’t like the taste. I tell her that people in Australia think it is wrong to eat dog. She just smiles and shrugs. The dog looks like it has been partially cooked. “They cook it a little to remove the hairs.” she informs me. It is hard to make a judgement call, when the local people are so poor and can barely afford to serve any kind of protein to their families. Sure the dogs are cute, but then so are lambs.
She buys pork and I try and reassure myself that the meat is fresh. It is too late for me to play the vegetarian card, I have already told her I eat meat. The voices in my head start to converse. The paranoid voice protests and leads me to consider the parasites that might be still living in the host. The rational voice tells me that the local restaurants would buy their produce from these markets too. The paranoid voice warms me I’ll get sick. The rational voice says its OK, the food will be cooked and kill all the parasites. I double my resolve to stay vegetarian for the remainder of the holiday and start to seriously regret the Tofu decision.