One More Thing

As a general rule I try to write one post for every location I visit. At times this has turned out to be harder than expected. But, on rare occasions, there is a little more to tell.

Waking up from my one night stay at the Lakehouse on Tuyen Lam lake, I prepared myself for what was likely to be a long and uneventful day. I had the morning to relax and in the early afternoon I'd take the long bus ride back to Ho Chi Minh City.

I got talking to a digital nomad from Hong Kong who was traveling the world while teaching English and Spanish online. She asked if I'd like to join her and a Vietnamese man who was also staying at the hostel for a vegetarian lunch. Naturally, I accepted.

We began walking up the hill from the lake towards the cable car station and Buddhist monastery overlooking the lake. With so many vegetarian restaurants to be had in Vietnam, I was keen to see which one we were going to in the sparsely populated area around the lake. Perhaps one of the restaurants under the cable car station or maybe some special, local place not listed on Google Maps?

Nope. Long, the Vietnamese man was leading us, but wasn't saying much about where we were going. We approached the Buddhist temple and began walking around. But Long didn't seem so sure about where we were going. "Hmm, not here," he said, with a quizzical look on his face. We walked down some stairs from the main temple and around a fish pond. "Hmm, not here," Long repeated.

We passed by a garden and in the distance I could see rows of wooden dining tables in an open space under a raised building. "Ahh, here," Long exclaimed, pointing at the table. We continued around the fence and went through a tall, metal gate. It turned out we weren't having lunch near the monastery, we were having lunch in the monastery.

The monastery was composed entirely of female Buddhist monks with shaved heads, walking around in grey robes. Long and myself were the only males in the compound.

Long wanted to introduce his two foreign guests to his master but she was asleep. So instead he regaled us with stories about her influence on his life including the words of wisdom she had given him over the years and her battle with brain cancer. I didn't mind that we couldn't meet her. After all, I initially thought that we were getting the sixty-nine thousand dong vegetarian hotpot at the cable car station so free lunch at a monastery was a lot better, master present or not.

Long, myself and the Hong Kong digital nomad removed our shoes and took a seat at one of the long wooden tables we had seen from the other side of the fence. After slipping away for a few minutes, Long returned with a tray of food for us to share. Speaking in a soft whisper, he began serving up the food and insisting we finish everything whilst he took us through what was on offer. There was rice, fried tofu skins, dried seaweed, a small portion of fermented tofu, salted peanuts, a fermented vegetable salad and a cold, soy-based soup with pumpkin, Vietnamese mint and peanuts.

It was simple food in a peaceful setting with swaying trees, chirping birds and old women in grey robes silently sweeping the leaves off of the veranda.

We took a brief stroll around the monastery after eating and then returned back down the mountain to the lake.