Dave and Jen For Oxfam

It’s a scene from a movie where the protagonist has been introduced, gone through some ordeal and come out the other side with a purpose, with intent, with direction, with… with a montage! If we had a montage there wouldn’t be much of an ordeal so it would simply show us riding, planning, riding, fundraising, riding, reading and, just to keep the theme, more riding. It would also be a somewhat cliché montage with one of those flipping calendars The best I could find in a quick search online was this one, which is really quite naff I’m afraid, so you will have to use your imagination. See where I’m going with this? Calendar? Time? Flipping? Five weeks to go? Five weeks to go!!

As usual on the eve of the spent remains of a weekend when our thoughts turn to the trip ahead there is a mixture of excitement and curiosity. The excitement is obviously enough the fact that we are going but also that we seem to be well on target to smash our fundraising target. The curiosity however is mostly as to whether we are hassling enough people in enough interesting ways for the fundraising side of things, whether we are getting fit enough for the ride and even whether we are learning enough about the places we are going. Whilst I consider myself a “reader”, I have nothing on Jen’s ability to consume books like pistaccio nuts, eating their knowledge and throwing the paper shells back into the bookshelf. I tend to take more time, which is why I am currently surrounded by a pile of Cambodia and Vietnam books ranging from history and cuisine to wonderfully out-dated travel stories that pre-date jumbo jets, resorts and tourist buses. They do tend to focus on elephants, Colonialism and frigates full of French people so the accents might change, but the general “getting around and screwing things up” theme seems to be a standard.

So as we swim around a pile of books that paint a fascinating picture of the history of the region we are increasingly aware that there is so much we had never considered about either Cambodia or Vietnam. The obvious plots on the timeline are the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge but even these events can spin into endless directions. Armed with disparate facts and getting hungry, we sneak past my mountain bike (sitting on the balcony with puppy dog eyes, eagerly waiting for its next ride) and head over to West End and wander into the nearest Vietnamese restaurant that we haven’t already eaten at. This time it was Chi Chi Pho on Gladstone Road, which was a fare typical of West End. Cheap, basic tables, no frills and one of those great menus that seems almost a list of basic ingredients. Beef with curry powder. Beef and noodles. Beef and vegetables. Tell it like it is. We settle on Sichuan Beef and Curry Chicken and continue our rambling about the trip.

Chi Chi Pho stands up to but doesn’t exceed my expectations, which is to say it’s exactly what you would expect from any number of similar restaurants in West End or Fortitude Valley. Indeed the notorious Kim Lam in the China Town mall in Fortitude Valley has kept an incredible amount of music and arts students alive over the years, with a great mix of Asian costumers and hungry gaijins perched on plastic chairs to drop $8 on a massive bowl of warm goodness. In the same way restaurants like Chi Chi Pho may not have spectacular shop fronts, may have menus that consist of A4 binders and cheap seats, but they do encourage a consistency to the idea of catching up with friends for a quick dinner without need for reservations or any forethought. The staff are always pretty cool too, given it’s likely to be a family run affair with the potential for some interesting stories. The only negative I can think of given that context of available and simple restaurants is that we can imagine vats of Hoisin sauce, packets of powder mix curry and pretty much instant mix flavours. Imagine… and taste. 

Again this is par for the course and the food is still hearty and satisfying. If we wanted exceptional servings of regional cuisine we would head to exceptional restaurants (we do and will) but we speak on the happy flipside of the incredible food we expect to eat on our trip. In our various separate travels we have eaten our way around the world. From Jen’s roadside Thai feasts to painfully elaborate corporate dinner treat in Tokyo, to my amusement at listening to French folk music in an Italian restaurant owned by a German in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Most of our favourite bookmarks in the remembrance of our travels seem to relate to food. 

I for instance had the pleasure of briefly befriending two British girls staying above a restaurant in Seville in Spain, where a delicious side effect of one of the girls repeatedly sneaking the waiter upstairs for “cultural lessons” was that the other girl and I would be kept occupied by a table-defying collection of tapas. With the clock spinning lazily on the wall and endless plates being served amid appearances of an increasingly tired looking waiter, a bottle of Orange Wine was opened on the same moment I remembered the train ticket in my pocket. Travel does this to you, you see. With the weight of my backpacks gravitating towards the door, it was a lingering pause to consider the revelation of sticky sweet wine and bitter chocolate. As any travel tale will tell, the best impressions are the brief and elusive, even if they are greedily gulped and swallowed with a particularly Australian ability to quaff. 

So, soon sitting in what was to my surprise a hilarious solo overnight rail journey listening to a shirtless old Catalyan man argue with an equally old shirtless Andalucian, I peered through sudden sleepiness at the old portable radio and decided to my own amusement that the radio presenter had to be shirtless also. I resisted the urge myself, unsure if the act would entrap me in my bunk with shirt around my head. Smiling as much due to the orange wine as to the fact two half naked old men with differing dialects gestured wildly at me to referee their enthusiastic battle over the sound of an unintelligible soccer match, I filed away another confirmation that travel can contain the most obscure moments of thrilling oddity. 

Sipping Chi Chi Lemonade, Jen listened attentively to this tale but seemed to have fallen away from joining my enthusiasm, if the dropping of her eyebrows upon the description of “two half naked old men” was anything to go by. So with the memory of really good food, the taste of happily average food and the promise of new flavours to come, we pay our bill and wander back out into the perfect Brisbane-in-Spring evening. With only 5 weeks left there seems to be an endless list of things we want to do before we leave. A big list. Hopefully by the time we fly out the only lists we have left to tick off are food to try, things to eat and flavours to pass curious judgement on.