At night in Hoi An, the tide rises and the river extends itself up the streets. Some of the buildings in town are used to having their whole first floor completely filled with water during the wet season!

B and I head to the other side of the river in search of a snack that makes no sense to me: banh dap, a sticky rice cake stuck between two crunchy rice cakes, served with a shellfish dipping sauce. “How the hell does that work?” I would think every time B reminded me of this snack we had to add to the long list of mad shit we needed to eat in Vietnam. “Is it like a sandwich?”

“No it is not like a sandwich at all, good sir” I think to myself as I snap the above photograph. Banh dap is a big sticky glob of rice batter, squashed between two thin, toasted rice cakes. It’s tasty as fuck and the dipping sauce rules too. It’s hardly big enough to be our lunch though, maybe we should go back to that amazing banh mi spot we had those life changing sandwiches at yesterday. Yes let’s do that!

OK LOOK AT THAT! Amazing right?! Now look at the pic of the banh mi we had yesterday – this one is bigger and better! You can check out what Bianca had to say about it here. She breaks down all the ingredients we think were stuffed into the baguette: Processed pork, roast pork belly, fried egg, pate, onion, cucumber, tomato, lettuce, mint, coriander, soy sauce and 3 kinds of home made sauce.

We took a video of the awesome sandwich being constructed which I’ll put up soon, it’s so awesome to watch! In the meantime hopefully these photos will satisfy our banh mi lust (yes that is a thing now).

Since heading back to the banh mi stand ended up being so goddamn awesome we decided to pay another visit to the lady who sold us that killer bowl of cao lầu. She was happy to see us again!

The day before we ate our bowl of soup while the vendor next to us bugged us to buy banh xeo from her stand. We bought one of her little fried pancakes today and I’m glad we did!

Banh Xeo is different here to what it was like in Ho Chi Minh City. Here the pancake is much smaller and you roll it in rice paper before you dip it in sauce! It is as crunchy as it is delicious, although I definitely prefer the banh xeo we had in Ho Chi Minh. This one is a great little taste to have before a big bowl of yesterday’s great memories is plopped in front of us.

Is it as good as it was the day before? Of course, maybe even better! Will I be able to have another bowl of these beautiful noodles again before I kick the bucket? I hope so!

Thanks for the good vibes, Hoi An. Thanks for the fresh beer. Thanks for the cheap suits and shirts. Thanks for letting me laugh at the young locals desperately forcing flyers for the one nightclub in town into my hands every day. Thanks for wetting my shoes during high tide. Thanks for that fucking sandwich! And for the two fucking sandwiches I had after that! Thanks for those noodles too, can you please send us a few bottles of your magic water so we can make them here? Thanks.

A week into our trip we fly into the pretty city of Hoi An. The brightly painted, old style architecture and small streets made it feel like a Vietnam themed Disney park. We marveled at the town’s beauty for a few hours and soon enough our tummies were rumbling again. It was time to eat one of the main reasons we came to Vietnam.

I have obsessed over this youtube video since the day I saw it. I have eaten banh mi’s on the reg for years and easily rattle off my favourite spots to eat them in Sydney but when I saw that video I lost it. I had never seen a banh mi that looked anywhere near that delicious! I had to have it, and on this glorious day Bianca and I got to have it!

The directions on this blog post lead us to the entrance of Hoi An’s market. We order the ‘Banh Mi Deluxe’, a crunchy, spicy, porky affair – complete with a fried egg on top! It is AMAZING, beyond anything any rival banh mi has ever dared to offer me in my life so far.

Merciful heavens this sandwich was perfect. We had to fight all urges to have another (we had one the next day instead!) because in the market around us we could see and smell a crazy dish that you can only get in Hoi An.

Cao lầu is a bowl of noodles made with water gathered from a well just outside of town. The noodles are thick, brown and can be seen drying in the sun all over the market.

They serve the noodles with roast pork, pork cracklings, greens and an amazing sweet and spicy soup. Holy balls does this dish taste good. Of all the dishes we ate in Vietnam that I wish I could recreate at home, this one is at the very top. The soup is so sweet and bold and the noodles are perfect for slurping. The chili paste we’re given to mix in to the noodles is awesome and fresh too. Of course we had to come back here for lunch again before we left!

That night we had dinner with our pals Sunshine and Andee who were visiting from Melbourne. They took us to Morning Glory, a restaurant they’d eaten at least once every day for the whole week they’d been in Hoi An!

After staying in ridiculously big resorts in Ho Chi Minh City and Nha Trang, it was nice to rest our heads in one of the sweet little villas at the Southern Hoi An Hotel while we were in Hoi An.