Monday 11th January 2010, 2am, The Bus - somewhere between Nha Trang and Hoi An.
We went for dinner the other night in Dalat with Hitan and a cute German couple Julia and Chris, and the five of us had a rather strange encounter with an inebriated American man named Mark. Over our dinner of vegetable curry and mashed potato (I'm just so sick of rice, I can't bear to even look at another grain, plus when I order mashed potato it gives me an excuse to do my Bodger and Badger voice - my sister appreciates this reference I think!) he chatted away incessantly about a company he started up whilst he was still at business school in America. This company is called Hufu, and this abbreviation is short for, wait for it... Human Tofu. His business was advertising tofu, shaped, flavoured and textured to resemble human flesh as a healthy alternative food product for cannibal communities. Minute taking and shorthand practice at work were suddenly useful - I unashamedly scribbled in my notebook as he pattered on... "I think that a lot of the pleasure of eating the Hufu product, is imagining you're eating human flesh. For that moment, you can join the fraternity of cannibals. If you really want to come as close as possible to the experience of cannibalism, Hufu is your best option." Uh-huh.
The whole concept and creation of the company was a joke, a marketing scam, an exercise in self-promotion and manipulation of the press to see how much interest and media attention he could amass from claiming to have produced this foodstuff. Mark told us that he received nationwide coverage in the US and even a small article in a London paper; his experiment worked - be crazy and inflammatory enough and people will accordingly sit up, take notice, and ask to interview you on TV. Apparently when he made his televised appearance on The Daily Show the interviewer asked him how he knew that his tofu tasted like human flesh and he told her he'd carried out ''extensive market research". He even went to the trouble of manufacturing Hufu t-shirts, he was modelling one on the evening that we met, and told us that he'd sold 3000 of them. So I guess this proves conclusively that at least 3000 Americans are either gullible or deranged.
On returning to our room after our meal with Monty Python's answer to Hannibal Lecter, Ella and I got to talking about the "characters'' we've met on our travels. As opposed to imagining a fantasy dinner party of famous guests that you would want to spend an evening with, we discussed the slightly more unsavoury or just eccentric oddballs that we've met who we would like to force to have dinner together, in order that they could inflict themselves upon each other, rather than us. Obviously we'd want to be able to watch through mirrored glass, it would be pure car-crash voyeurism. As a side note I thought that they should be served snake wine on this occasion, Ella and I both tried a drop on the Easy Rider bike tour - rice wine stored in a substantial glass jar with the huge, dead coiled bodies of 10 different pickled snakes fermenting in the alcohol. The snakes are meant to offer supernatural health and libido benefits but to be honest I'd rather take a lifetime of illness and celibacy than ever drink that fiery poison again. I think that's what ethanol tastes like, or bleach, reptile flavoured bleach. Am I selling it?!
The reason I mention the encounter with Mr Hufu and our cruel yet entertaining little game, is that on reflection, for every person who might justifiably earn a place at The World's Most Excruciating Dinner Party, we've met another 10 who we'd take to dinner and foot the bill ourselves. Hey, I'd even drink rancid snake wine again if they wanted to, purely for the pleasure of their company. Take the last few days in Nha Trang for example; Mark and Mark from Holland, Olivia and Sophia from Sweden, Joanne from Hong Kong, Phil and Treno from Australia, Dave from Canada - we've been hanging out, having fun and mucking around with some achingly cool, funny, interesting, just purely likeable people. I loved Nha Trang anyway, the bustling little seaside town with a beautiful coastline, hip nightlife, fresh lobster on the beach for a dollar and opportunity for island hopping, but it was the people that made it for me. The reason I was so miffed to be getting on the bus 5 hours ago is that once again, as hit me particularly hard after Koh Phangan and Sihanoukville, I didn't want to say goodbye. I wanted us all to stay there for another week or so, going to dinner together, dancing on boats to live music from Vietnamese "Indie Rock" bands, swimming out at sea whilst drunk on a concoction not dissimilar to cigar scented sherry, requesting Michael Jackson medlies at the local D-I-S-C-O, or just mooching around town and lazing on the sun-loungers slurping banana shakes and winding up the street sellers. I didn't want us to go our separate ways, people I like are just so selfish what with their refusal to cancel their own itineraries and accompany me to places they've already been purely for my happiness and amusement. It is getting rather intolerable that no one I meet is wiling to sacrifice their own plans and follow me to the ends of the earth. Humph. Selfish and intolerable.
Yes, I know, I didn't cancel my plans to follow them either did I. Ella, attempting to boost my spirits on our departure from Nha Trang, suggested that I take solace in the fact that fate had ordained our paths to cross with these people at all, that even for a brief period of time serendipity thankfully placed us all together thereby unexpectedly enriching our lives for a few days. But I didn't want to listen to all this reassurance and rationality, I was busy having a strop. I know she's right though. If we'd not met them I would have loved Nha Trang anyway, had a riotous old time and never known any different. As it was, I was additionally blessed with cracking company. I also know that in terms of travelling companionship and friendships, lightning definitely strikes twice, and more than twice, because it already has for me. Somewhere in the Southern hemisphere as I write this now, there are future friends and companions of mine whom I am yet to meet, what a comforting and utterly lovely prospect. Who knows, if I'm really lucky then maybe my path will cross over again with those of the acquaintances already made in Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. I do hope so, 'goodbye' can be weathered so much more temperately if I believe that it is really only 'so long for now'.
So, 3000 Americans are gullible or deranged, there's nearly always going to be one person at the table whose drink you'd like to spike with snake wine, and after 6 weeks of travelling you could organise a whole dinner party of people who really deserve each other. But so much more important than this, by the law of averages as we've seen it, there are far more good people in the world than bad. And to my mind, that is a blog worthy statistic if ever there was one.
Yes, I know, I didn't cancel my plans to follow them either did I. Ella, attempting to boost my spirits on our departure from Nha Trang, suggested that I take solace in the fact that fate had ordained our paths to cross with these people at all, that even for a brief period of time serendipity thankfully placed us all together thereby unexpectedly enriching our lives for a few days. But I didn't want to listen to all this reassurance and rationality, I was busy having a strop. I know she's right though. If we'd not met them I would have loved Nha Trang anyway, had a riotous old time and never known any different. As it was, I was additionally blessed with cracking company. I also know that in terms of travelling companionship and friendships, lightning definitely strikes twice, and more than twice, because it already has for me. Somewhere in the Southern hemisphere as I write this now, there are future friends and companions of mine whom I am yet to meet, what a comforting and utterly lovely prospect. Who knows, if I'm really lucky then maybe my path will cross over again with those of the acquaintances already made in Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. I do hope so, 'goodbye' can be weathered so much more temperately if I believe that it is really only 'so long for now'.
So, 3000 Americans are gullible or deranged, there's nearly always going to be one person at the table whose drink you'd like to spike with snake wine, and after 6 weeks of travelling you could organise a whole dinner party of people who really deserve each other. But so much more important than this, by the law of averages as we've seen it, there are far more good people in the world than bad. And to my mind, that is a blog worthy statistic if ever there was one.
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