Do Son and Duck

---

A beautiful Sunday morning means a day trip with the other expats and some Vietnamese friends.

The sun was shining so we thought what better way to finish off the weekend than to head for the beach. The trip was much quicker than the first time we went as this time we could drive ourselves. We must have looked like a motorbike gang of strange foreigners speeding down the road.

Instead of wasting the whole day lazing on the beach we decided to explore the new resort being built and the mountain around it. It was a good climb up, but the beautiful sights from the top were well worth it.

It was a strange place up the mountain. Everywhere in the wooded area we could spot weird statues of animals, monsters, disney characters and dinosaurs. No reason for the odd collection, it just was. Funnily enough all of the statues included rather large genitalia.

There was also a little zoo area with monkeys, bears, peacocks, hedgehogs etc but it was hard to look at them in the tiny cages.

After the lovely day out we made our way back to the bikes to head back to Hai Phong for dinner. But then ... DISASTER STRUCK ... Nadine had lost her ticket for where we had parked the bikes, and the security guards were refusing to let us leave. In the end, one of our Vietnamese friend had to leave her licence overnight with the guards to allow us to leave.



When we finally got back to Hai Phong we went to a place specialising in duck dishes. It was a little place with normal plastic little chairs and tables. For a while I thought the place looked quite reasonable with tiles on the wall but it was actually table cloths like lino stuck to the walls.

We tried like 5 different dishes, with different types and spices over the duck, each one of them as delicious as the last. Along side the meal we were given free rice wine which tasted like vodka. We toasted to a great day by taking shots of the rice wine before finishing off our night with a few drinks at Julies bar.

---