Delicious veggie food

There is sometimes a tendency with veggie food for people to try and make something that looks like meat but is in fact veggie. This regularly perplexes me and several of my veggie friends, as we reckon the best veggie food doesn’t bear any resemblance to meat, and is none the worse for it.

Today I had a great example of veggie food that was just veggie. I guess the tofu maybe looked a bit like a meat substitute, but actually this was tofu done deliciously and definitely to be celebrated as a thing in its own right. I followed recommendations from Maps Me and Trip Advisor and went to a restaurant called Claypot. They cooked the food in a clay pot and had a note in the menu saying to beware it would take half an hour to cook to allow the flavours to all intermingle. It was truly delicious. Tofu and Eggplant (aubergine) claypot, preceded by a banana shake and complimentary salted nuts and followed by iced sweet coffee:

I was only too happy to take my time over this meal, having cycled 7km to get there, and after my night train and crazy huge backpack on a motorcycle ride. It was very welcome indeed! The lady also recommended things for me to do in Hoi An.

On her recommendation, I cycled from here to the Pottery Village, where I enjoyed a wander round and another shake and doing a crossword before heading back by a more direct route.

Note the bamboo straw 👆🏼 good use of local resources!

Altogether I reckon I cycled nearly 20km today, which after my challenging journey to get here and on a bike with no gears was pretty impressive I think! I had to stop several times on all the journeys to drink water, and because it felt safer negotiating some corner junctions on foot. By the time I was 1 minute away from the homestay I was pretty exhausted and had to stop again!

Then I arrived to a welcome from Dzung who fetched me a big bottle of water and perched on my bed while I asked her if she could book me a taxi (CAR, not bike, I hastened to add) to take me to the airport on Sunday morning. Thank goodness for Google Translate, which enabled us to communicate. And also for her ?grandson who helped as well. She’s so tiny, she sat on the bed and swung her legs merrily during this whole exchange, ringing another relative to find out the cost of the taxi to the airport for me as well.

Tomorrow I have booked tours for both the morning and afternoon and they will pick me up and drop me off as part of the tours. On motorbikes. But at least this time I won’t have a huge backpack on! After all the cycling today I am glad for that, too, to be honest.