The Magical Fruits of Southeast Asia

While in Vietnam and Cambodia, we ran into some amazing fruit. Many were familiar, but with extra pizzazz, while others were completely new to us. So, this blog post is about the fruits we encountered at the dawn of summer.

Dragon Fruit

Ubiquitous in Vietnam. It was available at every breakfast buffet and in every fruit plate. It grows on a vine and has a gorgeous fuchsia exterior and a foamy white interior with small black, kiwi-like seeds. Our previous experience with dragon fruit was the imported variety in the US and was definitely lacking. The taste and texture was more akin to styrofoam than a tropical fruit. In Vietnam, we had the pleasure to try "excellent" examples of dragon fruit. They were much better than the US version, with a certain vibrancy and their own flavor. Unfortunately, it wasn't all that different from a light squirt of meyer lemon on a near-sugarless meringue filled with poppy seeds. In other words, not much different than a bland and slightly acidic kiwi. So it was different, but still, not worth searching out unless you are really into different textures.

Mango

So many varieties. So many choices. We tried about half a dozen different varieties (of the dozens that actually grow where we traveled). Some green ones, you eat the rind too, while others you just scoop out the deliciousness. The best one actually dropped from the sky. I was swimming in the pool at the hotel in Siem Reap, when plop. Right in front of me is a small green mango about two inches long. It came from the tree overhanging the pool and since it just dropped, we figured it was ripe, so we ate it. It had a vibrancy that made you want to belt a trill.

Durian

The love it or hate it fruit. Some say it smells like hell and tastes like heaven. We thought it was just pure hell when we tried it in Hoi An. The smell is so strong and gag inducing that you're not allowed to eat it indoors. Really people should know better that something the size and and weight of your head, covered in spikes, that falls from a tree, shouldn't be trifled with. No more durian for me.

Chocolate Pudding Fruit

This was an interesting fruit. On the outside, it looked like a brown, soft mango, but you open it up and inside is a gushy pulp that does actually taste kind of like chocolate pudding. We saw it in the markets both in Hoi An and Siem Reap.

Watermelon

The third leg of the fruit triumvirate while we were there that included mango and dragon fruit. It was on every fruit plate and available by the mound in every market. Basically the same as the north american red version.

Bananas

Available everywhere. Many different varieties. Some long. Some short. Some green. Some yellow. Most of them very tasty ranging from a hint of apple blossoms all the way to the cavendish bannaishness that we are used to. There were also a lot of banana flower salads to eat.

Pineapple

We saw a lot of pineapple and pretty much all of it was a just more delicious example of the dole variety found in supermarkets and bodegas throughout the US.

Jackfruit

Definitely one of the gems of the trip. We tried it cooked, freeze dried and fresh. Cooked and freeze dried, it takes on a consistent flavour that's enjoyable, but it's nothing like fresh. You usually buy fresh in little, plastic wrapped packages because a jackfruit is an extra large, non-spiky version of Durian that nobody could eat before it went bad. The taste is like a party in your mouth. It starts vibrant and acidic and then moves towards sweetness, only to taper off into a tropical, floral medley. This flavour symphony takes a good 30 seconds to progress, so savour every bite. 

Custard Apple

A fist-sized green fruit made of scalloped wedges. You pull apart the wedges with your hands and inside each wedge is a big black seen surrounded by a white, custardy pulp that sort of tastes like apples, but it's a stretch. I enjoyed it, but Catherine wasn't a fan.

Green Orange

Some of the oranges have green rinds. They are ripe, but the pulp is orange and can look very alien to our eyes. Still tastes like an orange though, although the extra sweet, mandarin-like flavours were fairly common.

Rambutan

Very much like a lychee but looks fuzzier. It tastes like a lychee too, but with a milder flavour. I could even eat it. Contrast that to longan, which has an extra strong flavour that I can't stand after the unfortunate mistake of buying a kilo in Hawaii and then sitting down to eat it all in one sitting.

Mangosteen

We tried mangosteen twice. The first time was a purple, unripe mangosteen in Hoi An. The lady at the market warned me not to buy it (which begs the question why it was being sold in the first place), but she was right. It took a pocket knife to saw through the hard outer shell and inside was a fruit that tastes like a raspberry, but with the acidity cranked up to 11. It was in edible. We also tried a ripe, white mangosteen at Cuisine Wat Damnak in Siem Reap. This specimen was amazing and did sort of taste like a tropical raspberry but with a more complex flavour profile.

Tang Fruit

Ok, so I don't remember the real name of this fruit. It was served to us at the end of the meal at Cusine Wat Damnak in Siem Reap. It's a two inch pod filled with about 20 seeds, each surrounded by a neon orange pulp. The pulp tasted like orange tang, except without the chemically aftertaste. It grows wild in the Cambodian rainforest.

Sunny Soon Dong Cave

Hang En Camp

The trek through Hang En and Soon Dong cave was pretty bloody mind blowing. You would think these caves, which are the work of monsoon rivers gushing through very pure limestone, were the source of inspiration for Jules Verne (minus the Molemen). However, Soon Dong was only discovered in 1990 and not officially mapped out/explored until 2009. To put the cart before the horse a little bit, the picture album is up.

We arrived in Phong Na (sp) midday via a flight on a small plane to Dong Hoi. After getting our hotel room for the night, we went over to Oxalis, the outfitter, for our trip briefing and for dinner. There, we met our fellow trekkers: Jeff and Lauren from Maryland, Alex from the UK San Francisco, Audrius from Lithuania via Belgium, Giang from Vietnam via Singapore and Dao, Vu and Hoang, all from Ho Chi Minh City. We also met our head guide Binh as well as the two British cavers who were coming along: Dick and Adam. Adam was part of the 2009 expedition to explore Soon Dong and Dick has been coming to Vietnam since the early 90s for caving expeditions. Adam gave the briefing, which included useful information like packing list, expected timelines and so on. For the record, this trip is definitely glamping as there were 20 porters for 10 guests so that all we needed to carry was some water and a camera. That’s not normally our MO, but this is the only way to get into Soon Dong right now as Oxalis is the only operator that the government lets into the cave and they just started tours last year. That being said, there were definitely places where it would have been very tricky with an extra 50lbs on my back. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Exiting Hang En Cave

The next day, we set our after breakfast into the national park. The hike started around noon. Temperature was a balmy 35 degrees Celsius with 80%+ humidity. Perfect conditions to go tromping through the jungle. The hike start with a 40min descent down a fairly steep hillside and then we stopped in the only village in the park for tea. People are very poor in the village and are basically subsistence farmers with a little bit of extra money from Oxalis for keeping the trail in shape. Oxalis also runs a foundation that helps to educate children from the village as well as other minority groups in the country.

Formation made by water dripping on the sand.
It will be erased in the wet season as the river rises.

After the village, we walked out into the open sun and walked along the river bed until we reached the entrance to Hang En cave (about 10km total walking). Approaching the cave, you can see a big entrance up the side of the mountain, but it’s easier to actually enter by walking along river off to the side and then up over some boulders to get a view of the Hang En camp. It’s a breathtaking sight with a sandy floor at the bottom of a monstrous cavern and two pools of water: one blue-green of cold water that comes from underground and the other brow water of the river flow past. Entering the cavern, we immediately heard a cacophony of chirping and you could see a few of what looked like bats. They are actually little birds called swifts that come back to the cave at night to sleep up in  the ceiling. The local people actually have strung up a number of vines up the side of the cave in order to climb up to the birds and catch them, but they don’t do that anymore because it’s too dangerous being about 100m off the ground for a half mouthful of meat.

Catherine entering Soon Dong cave.
Dick is perched on the left to help with clipping in to the ropes.

After dropping our stuff, we freshened up after the very hot walk by swimming and showering in the cave water. Dinner was probably the best camping dinner I’ve ever had (if you don’t include the other nights of the trip). The chefs prepared a smorgasbord of vietnamese dishes and a few american ones. There were about 15 different dishes including fried chicken, french fries, green mango salad, braised tofu in tomatoes and peppers, sautéed morning glory, etc. They bring in frozen meat for the whole trip in styrofoam containers to keep it fresh, which worked amazingly well. Unfortunately, due to some communication issues and a change of policy, there was no rice wine for after dinner socializing so we just chatted and got to know each other better. Some of us stayed up a little late because around 10pm, the full moon came across the opening of the cave to case moonbeams across a small portion of the camp.

Fording the river in the cave.

The next day, we popped out the other side of Hang En and trekked following the river to the Soon Dong lunch camp. There, we had lunch and donned some harnesses that we would need to safely pick our way down the 80m drop in to Soon Dong. The camp is actually always manned by at least one porter because the local people kept stealing the ropes. Entering the cave took a while because we are not experienced cavers and the portions were a little technical so Dick, Adam and Binh were being very conservative moving people along so that everybody was safe and felt comfortable. 

Stalagmite that's about 80m tall.
Light from Doline 1 is in the background.

The rest of the hike for the day was walking through/across a dark wonderland of crystalline formations, razor sharp rocks and large boulders. We stopped a number of times to take pictures and once to shower up because there is no source of water to swim in at camp 1. Camp 1 is right before the first doline, which is an area where the roof of the cave has collapsed, letting in sunlight. It's created by an eddy in the river slowly swirling around and cutting up until the ceiling is too weak and it collapses. So there is a large mountain of boulders underneath the hole and we camped just to the side of that mountain.

Adam standing atop Hand of Dog formation in the distance.

The next day, went up into the first doline to stand on ginormous stalagmites and then made our way down the other side. There, we had lunch and waited for the sun to go overhead in order to capture some sunbeams streaming into the primitive green wonderland. Most of the vegetation is fairly small because the hole up top isn't that big, so it has the feeling of being near the time when life first evolved. For example, there are many square meters of this rare formation of spikes that reach towards the light. They are created by algae growing on the rock and then bacteria eating the algae and secreting acid. That acid then breaks down the rock very slowly. The doline also appears to breath as a fog with roll in and then clear out in cycles that were lasting about 10min. Apparently later in the summer, the cycles speed up.

Standing atop the formation in doline 1

After lunch, we made our way to the second doline. The light for it is actually visible from where we stopped for lunch, but this opening created a very different landscape. First, coming into the light are perfect terraces holding small ferns and other plants that are tilted in order to catch the most light. As we climbed up doline 2's rock mountain, the vegetation got denser and turned into a full fledged jungle supported by the larger opening above. Apparently there's actually species in the jungle (and elsewhere in the cave) that are new to science, but we didn't see any.

View back into doline 1.
If you look very closely, you can
see one of the guides atop the
formation to the left of the sunbeam.

Unfortunately, on the way down into camp 2, Catherine twisted her ankle so she was done for the day and had to hang out at camp while the rest of us kept going deeper into the cave. After climbing down from camp two, the cave flattened out into a sandy path, which was about the biggest contrast possible with the rest of the cave we had seen thus far. No more boulder scrambling.

In the end of the cave, we took some pictures of some interesting formations and stopped at the cave pearls. These are another very rare formation that's created one drop at a time as crystals are deposited, forming perfectly round spheres. Then, we continued on to the great wall of Vietnam. Depending on the water level, you either take an inflatable boat, or you trudge through a mud trench. It was the trench for us, with the mud up to the knee in the places. After a long 500m, we then climbed a mud hill in order to see the wall which is about 50m tall and has a waterfall formed from the river flowing over it into the mud trench. There is another opening to the cave above it, which we could see from the light when we turned off our headlamps, however we didn't go up. Instead, Binh challenged us to surf down one of the mud slopes while staying on our feet and then try to get back up. Given how slippery the mud was, hilarity ensued. After becoming thoroughly dirty, we made our way back to camp for dinner and a nice sleep. 

Formation reaching towards the light.
It's made by bacteria eating algae and secreting acid.

The next day was a long trek from camp 2 all the way back to Hang En cave. However we didn't really stop to take pictures this time since we had been on most of the terrain before. The hardest part was Catherine's ankle, which was still very painful, especially if it landed on uneven terrain. As you can image, bouldering tends not to be flat, but she trooped on like a champ with some help from me and the guides.

Terrace of ferns entering in doline 2.

Back in Hang En, there was a film crew sharing the camp setting up for a live shoot in a few days. We were actually warned this would happen 24 hrs before our trip, when we were forced to sign an all encompassing NDA or not go on our trip. A little bit of a hostage situation that set the tone unfortunately. So, the film crew was there, which wouldn't necessarily that big a deal because it's a very large campsite but we were told that they would not interfere with our trip (and vice versa I bet). However,  they were running their generators (including a 6am wakeup call) and there was only one table, so they were trying to work on it and we were trying to eat/hang out. So it was an awkward situation that got on everybody's nerves. Furthermore, hardly anybody tried to make nice with the other group, which didn't help things.

Inside doline 2.

The next day, we trekked out of Hang En in the morning. The film crew had a helicopter dropping off supplies as we were leaving. Apparently this is fairly common and it's also common for tours/Oxalis folks to hitch a ride out on the (now empty) helicopter going the other direction. So, the Oxalis people talked to the pilots and we boarded. However, the film crew was not happy about this because the chopper was contracted to them and felt that we had been rude the night before. Apparently, they were willing to let us hitch a ride if we were willing to pony up $20,000, but shy of that it wasn't going to happen. So a little bit of a sour note at the end of a truly mesmerizing trip. I didn't really mind the hike back out since it just gave me time to mediate over the amazing sights I had just seen.

Cave pearls

One of the caverns past camp 2

Here’s the GPS track for the trek (or at least the outside parts).