I giggled as I eyed up the pretty floral dishes filled with goat's blood and peppered with sesame seeds. I'd asked to try the local delicacy, so here I was in goat country, north-east Vietnam, staring down at the innards of a mountain ungulate. I ordered a large bottle of Hanoi beer to help me stomach the stomach. Tam Coc, three hours south of the capital, Hanoi, is famed for its goat restaurants, thanks to the hardy mountain animals that teeter on top of the limestone shards which stud the region.
It is also at the heart of one of the newest Unesco World Heritage Sites, as of this summer. Many travellers overlook the area, heading straight to the limestone stacks of Halong Bay β or simply skim the surface on a day trip from Hanoi β but the new Trang An Landscape World Heritage Site and its surrounding attractions warrant further exploration. I boarded a small boat, rowed by a woman using her feet, to journey along the Ngo Dong River which wriggles through this landscape of soaring peaks.
Limestone towers emerged from rice paddies like karsts in a landscape silk painting. We paddled past the fat pads of lotus leaves, banks lined with longan trees, mooching water buffalo, riverside graveyards and flurries of fleeing geese, before emerging into a flooded canyon of sheer limestone walls. This is one of the prettiest spots in Vietnam, often captured on film, including in scenes from the movie Indochine. Neighbouring Trang An is less popular than Tam Coc, but offers a similar experience: foot-paddled boats take visitors through the water wonderland and under cave arches to remote temples hitched to tiny wedges of riverbank.
Knobbly peaks tower over the Trang An river, which is sewn with a peculiar furry river grass. Bamboo sprays lurch and feral riverbank plants drink deeply at the river's edge. The intense patterns of green are broken by the tiny pink eggs of a river snail.
It's all impossibly beautiful. The savvy 10th-century kings of Vietnam must have recognised this back then as they built a citadel amid this primeval landscape. The gardens are planted with kim giao trees, the bark of which was used to make royal chopsticks because it would flush red in the presence of poisoned food β a method of assassination that King Dinh Tien's eldest son and officials dispensed with in favour of using a cudgel to topple the dynastic line.
