Weasel Words

Day 48: Hanoi (VN). Steam filled the air as the early morning sun burned away the overnight rains. Through the mist, a well ordered crowd of several thousand people filed by to pay their respects to their cultural and spiritual leader. We had witnessed a similar thing in Red Square for Lenin, in Tiananmen for Mao. Now we were in Vietnam, it was the turn of Ho Chi Minh.

The Vietnamese are a fascinating and intriguing people, having earned their stripes in successive skirmishes with the world's mightiest powers during most of the second half of the 20th Century: First it was the French, then the Japanese, then the French again, then civil war, then the might of Uncle Sam, then civil war again, then Cambodia and then China...

But as Karen and I watched over a large party of school children at the Ho Chi Minh Memorial Complex, all we could see was an incredibly friendly and upbeat nation that wanted to move on from the past. It appears that all Vietnam's new generation want is a place to succeed. A place to have fun.

Taking time out to soak up the atmosphere we stopped by a café in the Old Quarter and at the recommendation of our hosts ordered a cup of 'Weasel coffee'. The beverage finished we enquired as to the origin of the unusual name (always a dangerous thing to do after you've drunk something!) Our waiter was only too pleased to tell us that this was a special blend of coffee where the beans are selected and fed to a certain species of weasel, which in turn passes the beans through in its excrement which are then ground – hence the unique flavour! “Oh, well. Look on the bright side”, I said to Karen, “At least we haven't got the job of collecting the beans from the weasel!!”