Apparently almost all tours of the Mekong make this requisite stop at a snack factory on the river. Not everyone was thrilled with this stop but anything to do with food and I’m hooked!
Making a huge rice paper wrapper by swirling around the rice slurry on a stretched cooking surface.
There’s a real knack to lifting up the rice wrapper/paper once it has cooked.
The rice ‘paper’ is laid down on woven bamboo to dry.
Here they were making caramel over a fire fuelled by the left-over rice husks, a clever way to re-use waste products.
The caramel was cut into squares and packaged.
Puffed rice strips. Both rice and these rice flour strips were puffed in a wok filled with very hot black sand, an amazing sight to watch. Once everything was puffed the cook strained off the black sand into the wok leaving a basket of puffed rice without a single grain of sand in it.
Slicing up a tray of puffed rice sweets.
Packaged with nuts and other goodies, these strips were turned into either savoury or sweet treats.
We were served tea with a variety of sweets: the same puffed rice with a syrup coating along with dried fruits and other nibbles.
Once we were filled up with sweets they led us out to meet the hungry SNAKE!
We survived the snake but I wasn’t so sure whether I would survive the snake wine!
In fact, there was a wide selection of wines with embedded snakes. I guess you could say that these snakes didn’t survive the wine either!
When she saw these mini-bottles of snake wine the woman next to me exclaimed, “Wouldn’t that be a great present for the kids!” I gave her an odd look and she explained, “The grandkids, they’ll love it!” I wasn’t sure how old these kids were but the woman was thwarted in her gift-giving plans when she was advised that the US did not allow such things into the country.
Cobratox Cream made from cobra venom.
More on our December 2013 trip to Vietnam.
