My Short Career as a Smuggler

Duong Dong market place egg shop

Fish sauce is the very foundation of Southeast Asia cuisine. Thai people call it nam pla, Cambodians teuk trei and in Vietnam it's called nuoc mam. It is somewhat close to soy sauce, at least when it comes to its culinary role as a substitute of salt. It also adds its extraordinary character to Southeast Asian food. Like so many world class delicacies, instead of being just your ordinary, common, regular, everyday fish sauce, it just has to be something weird. I mean, say, haggis is basically ground innards, and oysters look like living snot. Fish sauce's weirdness comes from the making process.

The fresh catch of anchovies is put into giant containers where it is let to ferment for months ending up - not so fresh. Lots of salt is used. The process extracts liquid from the fish, and its slowly pressed so that very old, very pungent dark fluid oozed down through small plastic hoses. There are actually several ways to make fish sauce, the time of fermenting and ingredients varying a lot, but that's about the way I saw it being made when I had a chance to visit a fish sauce factory in Vietnam.

Factory gate

Phu Quoc island in Vietnam produces nationwide famous fish sauce. The factory is set in the harbour of the island capital, Duong Dong. Just walk past the vast piles of eggs, meat, fish and fruit at the market place, pass the body shops and the little booths selling souvenirs, toys and household supplies, cross the little bridge, turn left and you're there. We could hardly recognise anything resembling a fish sauce factory, but a small group of westerners puffed out of a gate nearby, so we got a quick confirmation that this was the right place.

Fish sauce barrels from below...

The only people inside the factory were two little girls, probably watching over that stupid tourists won't do anything... stupid. Otherwise the hall was filled tens of huge (and I mean HUGE) wooden barrels, which, judging by the appalling stench were filled with rotting or, um, fermenting fish. At the feet of the barrels there were small plastic buckets collecting through small hoses the end product, the praised Phu Quoc fish sauce. There was no shop beside the factory to buy the sauce itself after the fascinating visit. Back to the streets, then. At the crossing, near the small river bridge at the corner of the market place there was a shop, a real shop-like shop instead of an ordinary small-time booth, that seemed to be focused on selling mainly fish sauce. I purchased three bottles of about 2 dl each. What a great culinary gift for friends, huh? Pure Phu Quoc fish sauce straight from the crime scene!

...and from above.

Speaking of criminal activity, I was well aware that Vietnamese airline forbids having fish sauce in your luggage. Yes, that includes also the hold luggage. But alas, I strayed from the straight and narrow. I carefully wrapped each bottle in plastic bags so that any leakage should stay inside the plastic. Then I used jeans and other heavy clothing as wrappers for shock-proofing the fish sauce containers. I placed the heavily stuffed bottles in the middle of the suitcase so that they didn't touch each other and weren't near any inner surface. Additionally, I used other stuff like footwear to prop up the contents of the suitcase so that nothing could move much but there would be some elasticity to absorb possible shocks. I could have beaten the suitcase with a baseball bat not being able to break the fish sauce bottles. And surely the other containers (shaving foam, deodorants etc.) among the luggage provided perfect camouflage for the puny sauce bottles, in case they X-rayed the luggage, right? But who would search any fish sauce in anyone's luggage? Of course they have more important things to look for, eh?

The end product

At the tiny Duong Dong airport, end of the island part of the trip. We checked in the hold luggage, went through the security check and waited for our flight back to Saigon. An announcement crackled in the low quality speakers of the passenger hall. Wait a minute? Did I hear my name mentioned? I thought the announcement was spoken in Vietnamese, can't be my name. Wait, there it comes again. And is it English? And there my name again! Please come to the... somewhere. Shit, they must have found my precious fish sauce, what do we do now?

We went back to the security check, and I explained I heard my name in the announcement. The clerk pointed a lonely door at the end of the lobby. 'Staff only', it read, but we entered a area with big machinery and conveyor belts criss-crossing the room. A man in the distance was clearly waiting for us. There was a familiar suitcase on the table next to him. Again I said I heard my name in an announcement and he, hands crossed, asked me if that was my bag. After I admitted it was, he inquired, with a slight grin on his face, if I had any fish sauce inside it. Aw busted!

I conjured a confused expression on my face saying:
- Yes I do sir, why, is there a problem with it?
The grin on the man's face grew wider, as though he knew I knew it was forbidden. Which I knew, of course. We both knew.
- It's forbidden to carry fish sauce in your airline luggage in Vietnam, he confirmed.
I went on with my 'dumb tourist' act saying
- I thought it was ok in the hold luggage as long as it's not in your carry-on. Why on Earth would it be forbidden also in the big suitcase?
- Because of the smell, sir, gave the man the reason I already knew. Too many cases of broken fish sauce containers in airline luggage made Vietnam Airlines forbid transporting the stuff for good. It makes the whole cabin smell like... fish sauce, which made people more or less sick.

The correct way to do it

I removed all the three bottles from the suitcase. The man seemed impressed of my careful packing, but no can do, no means no. The bottles had to stay aground. The plaque on the wall forbade also transporting durian fruit for the same reason. I said I had durian only in my belly so I got away with that. It seemed there were no further sanctions for attempted fish sauce trafficking, so I wished the cheerful chap and his colleagues some tasty moments with my confiscated fish sauce and we left Phu Quoc without it.

In the plane I was already planning my next scheme to bring the stuff from Saigon to Finland.

HR Giger Tourism I - The Museum

We really made the effort to reach the Giger Museum back in 2002. We were traveling with Interrail tickets around the Central Europe. Our tickets, however, didn't help us further from the Swiss city of Fribourg, so in order to reach Gruyères where the Giger Museum was supposed to be, we were adviced to take a bus to Bulle. There we should hop into a local train which stops at Gruyères. It sounds more complicated than it actually was, and before too long we were treading uphill towards an idyllic medieval hilltop village famous for its cheese.

It was yet another boiling hot cloudless dead calm summer day. Most of the people in the village were swarming groups of sixty-something or older men and women moving in groups with little stickers on their shirts marking them as members of their tourist group. Many of the guides herding them had little flags or something else to hold up in order to get their group's attention. As we approached the end of the village, where Château St. Germain looms just before the upper castle of Gruyères, we overheard a tourist pensioner asking his guide about the museum door nearby.
- Oh no, you wouldn't like that, it's a museum by one of 'those' artists, you know, the guide replied merrily, leaving the man somewhat baffled, and unable to ask more. Eyes rolling we entered the museum, which still is one of my best museum experiences ever. The old castle suits perfectly to Giger's off-putting, dark, macabre and (thought-)provoking art.

Unfortunately the Giger bar right next to the museum was under construction at the time. We peeked in through the dirty windows and amongst the scaffoldings, dusty plastic tarpaulins and halogen work lights we saw already half finished spinal vault arches in very Alienesque surroundings. A pity we couldn't grab a cold pint at that time. But one of the greatest things of the whole visit in Gruyères was the contradiction between the village and the museum - who would have guessed that deep in the picturesque beautiful medieval village swarmed by happy old cheese tourists there lurks a dark pit of bizarre and perverse art straight from the outskirts of hell?

Check out also my other Giger adventures:
The Giger Bar

Callos - An Andalusian Cow

The Gorge

The Andalusian city of Ronda is the home of bullfighting and also famous for the amazing gorge splitting the town. That's where we went to a typical Spanish tavern for some tapas for lunch. On the menu there stood something called callos. I wondered what that might be.  
- Oh, you wouldn't want that, said my sister-in-law who had lived in Spain for years. It's stew-like stuff, quite heavy, rustic food. The Spanish folks often eat it during the wintertime. They chop in practically everything from cow: tripe, udders, everything. Get it? Choose something else.
- Una tapa de callos, por favor, I instantaneously said to the barman.

The earthenware bowl of callos I got in front of me was relievingly small. At least I wouldn't have to spend hours trying to finish a huge portion of this notorious stew. I stirred the stuff with my spoon and indeed, callos consisted of very obscure shaped objects. At least one of them was some kind of a tube, a bump of a kind with a hole in the top. I didn't want to speculate in my mind if it was a nipple or something else. Most objects wiggled in suspicious way when I lifted them in the air with my spoon, to a great annoyance of my company. But the scariest one was was the huge round thing found in the middle of the bowl. Since it was covered in the sauce I couldn't quite tell what it was, but it appeared to be partially hard. Please don't be gristle, don't be gristle I prayed when I shoved it in my mouth.

An Andalusian Cow

The frightening round object turned out to be a generous slice of local delicious chorizo sausage. The sauce was equally good so I dared start spooning in the rest of the callos. The onions, chickpeas, tomatoes, garlic and a variety herbs gave the stew very heavy, stocky taste. I bet they had thrown in some marrowy bones too while cooking. And as for the scary wiggly objects, fortunately they were quite easy to consume, as long as you didn't think where in cow they were originating from. No surprising crunches from between your teeth, no gristle, no probelm.

The most important thing, the taste was after all pre-panicking no less than excellent! The small bowl I had was, with some salad, bread and olives, quite enough to satisfy a small hunger. I'm positive if Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel had had callos during their brainstorming sessions when planning their infamous film An Andalusian Dog, they would have named the film Une Vache Andalouse instead.

Arnold Schwarzenegger Museum

What could be more bad-ass a museum than an Arnold Schwarzenegger museum? That's easy: a Chuck Norris museum. There even is said to have been one in Wilson, Oklahoma in the early nineties. But as everyone knows, Chuck Norris is his own museum, so let's take a look instead in the brand new Arnold Schwarzenegger Museum, which was opened last July in his birth home in the village of Thal, nearby the city of Graz, Austria.

The museum was easy to find by car. We were staying some 40 km away, and the signs pointing to the museum started quite early when approaching Thal. Arnold's 200 year old childhood house is situated next to idyllic castle ruins dating back to the 13th century. The museum is open on four days only per week, and this sunny Wednesday morning we seem to be the first visitors of the week as we pull to the small empty parking space in the front of the house. A white paper note is hanging from the front door knob. For a few dreadful moments I fear that the museum is closed, but the note tells merrily that they're open.


Some of the museum rooms are left like they were in Arnold's childhood. The kitchen table has an old newspaper on it. Original pans and kitchenware are hanging on the walls. By writing this I curse myself for not having taken enough photos there. Otherwise I would have included a picture of the Schwarzenegger family pit toilet. Damn! There is also Arnie's original childhood bed, his first weights and bench press. Please, don't touch, said a note.  One room is a copy of Schwarzenegger's governor's office. A video greeting of the governor of California himself is running in loop on the window sill. It was cool to hear Arnie for once speaking German language with Styrian accent. Griaß euch mitanond! A life-sized statue of present-day Arnold stands in the room, giving the visitors a thumbs-up. 

Soon after us a group of three men in their thirties come into the museum. We help each other for some photos with the Terminator. Oh yeah, there are two life-size models from the Terminator movies, a damaged T-800 with most of Arnold still on it, and a whole T-800 endoskeleton. Additionally, also the original Harley Davidson motorcycle from Terminator 2 is displayed. Video screens loop Arnie's movie trailers and one can play a Terminator game with an Xbox console.


We actually barely evade seeing the man himself. He has been here less than two weeks earlier to open the museum. Lots of fans were there clad Terminator-style in their leather jackets. A giant bronze statue of bodybuilder Arnie was unveiled in the garden. Before we leave, I just have to buy Arnold's own red wine, Hasta la vista, produced by relatively famous Burgenlander wine estate, Willi Opitz. We have tested the wine already - it was a bit like its paragon: the structure was broad, straightforward, and the body was meaty, even weighty. The general impression was a bit simple. At least the wine wasn't named I'll be back - not very good name for any food or drink.


When walking towards the car with our liquid loot we hear a sudden burst of laughter from behind the garden hedge. The three visitors have found the bronze statue. I bet poses became photographed.

More photos and some video footage in this small video clip: