A Moveable Feast

I can tell you the exact moment i reached maximum sensory overload at Ho Chi Minh City's sprawling Ben Thanh market. It was after the epiphany that came from tasting my first-ever mangosteen-surely the world's tastiest fruit, with its rapturous lemony-guava flavor-and just before we saw the crates of giant frogs, the platters of live soft-shell crabs, the tanks full of squid, octopus, and, well, I could not identify every creature swimming in those tanks, but they represented more varieties of allegedly edible sea creatures than I ever knew to exist. It was like going to an aquarium with an eye toward turning it all into a giant bouillabaisse.

I was bumping my way down the narrow, bountiful aisles with Jochem Lambrechts, the curly-haired, dimpled chef de cuisine of the Seabourn Spirit, the splendid little cruise ship on which we were traveling from Hong Kong to Singapore. We had arrived in the city formerly known as Saigon early that morning and beelined from the ship to the covered warren of stalls just west of the Central District, hurrying past cute Vietnamese shop girls selling knockoff Louis Vuitton bags, TAG Heuer watches and black pearl earrings. We were anxious to get to the heart of things-the food.

Like me, it was Lambrechts' first trip to Ben Thanh market; and within minutes we both wore the happily dazed expressions of kids set loose in a candy shop. Only it was like a candy shop on another planet.

"What is this? What do you call that?" Lambrechts kept asking as we moved from vendor to vendor, confronted by strange fruits and vegetables, even stranger nuts and roots, some truly bizarre mushrooms, all kinds of things we had never seen before.

Fortunately, we were accompanied by Tina Pham, the ship's Vietnam-based provisioning agent, who could identify all the good stuff displayed before us. Pham would reach into a vendor's basket and pull out, say, a shredded, fermented banana flower. We would munch on it. Then Lambrechts would say something like, "Hmmm, that would taste good on soba noodles with ground peanuts and a soy-lime vinaigrette. I'll take some."

Then we'd move on to the next vendor, who might be selling fresh water chestnuts, which are not even remotely like anything that comes out of a can. For me, it is enough to say I have eaten a water chestnut that has just been peeled before my very eyes. But for Lambrechts, a 30-year-old Belgian who started cooking professionally when he was 14 and trained in some of Europe's finer kitchens (the Michelin-starred Sollerod Kro in Denmark, among others), a fresh water chestnut is merely a suggestion of something grander.

"I'll glaze these with honey and serve them with braised beef ribs," he said.

And then we came to what I will always remember as Lotus Land-a cluster of vendors who sold lotus in all its many forms. There were dozens of kinds of lotus blossoms and lotus stems and lotus roots. Smells I had never smelled before, the din of bartering in Vietnamese, so much to see, so much to taste, too much to take in. This was exactly why I had traveled here-to get out of my everyday skin and experience the world anew.

Lambrechts finished off a handful of germinated lotus seeds (inspiration for a chilled soup we would eat on board two nights later) and took stock of the scene around us.

"There is not another market like this anywhere, a place where you can find so many different exotic things all in one spot," he said. "At this exact moment, I cannot think of a place that I would rather be."

At that exact moment, I spotted another vendor selling mangosteens, and it was ditto for me.

I do not want to give the impression that our trip aboard the Spirit was all about eating, a two-week-long exercise in overindulgence, because that's not the way it was, that's not the way it was at all. There was lots of drinking, too.

I have never seen so much champagne. No sooner had my wife and I boarded the ship in Hong Kong and started getting our documentation in order than a waiter handed us each a flute of Mumm's. All the better for dispensing with the necessary paperwork, don't you know. There was Mumm's in our suite and Mumm's in the dining room; and on the days we left the ship the waiters would set up a little bar under an awning by the gangway just so we could have a spot of Mumm's the minute we returned from the rigors of sightseeing, along with a chilled face towel.

On days at sea, while we were lounging on the deck (probably mulling over whether our dinner entrée should be the seared scallops with coconut curry broth or the rosemary double-cut lamb chops with eggplant potato tart), the waiters were forever coming around asking if we needed anything; and we felt obliged to ask for champagne, you know, just to be polite. The official flag of the cruise line shows one of its ships against a white background. For accuracy's sake, it should include a popping cork.

In my experience, well-executed feasts and truly attentive service are rarely possible on giant cruise ships. It helps that the Spirit has a maximum occupancy of just 208 passengers and Seabourn typically prefers not to book more than 180, which maintains an almost one-to-one ratio of passengers to crew. The crew, for its part, hails from all over the world. Lambrechts' 31-person galley staff represented no fewer than a dozen countries, including a sous chef from India, an assistant chef from Scotland, and other talents from the Philippines, Indonesia, France, the Netherlands, and Italy.

"It means we can make anything at any time," said Lambrechts.

No idle boast, as was proven during the remarkable Galley Market Lunch. A behind-the-scenes buffet served in the stainless steel confines of Chef Jochem's inner sanctum, this international tour de force started with shots of icy Russian vodka and proceeded straightaway to 10 kinds of sushi, roast suckling pig, pasta Bolognese, Southern fried chicken, fish and chips, lumpiang ubod (a Philippine spring roll), mie goring (an Indonesian seafood noodle dish), a dozen different kinds of cheeses, and don't even get me started on the desserts.

Such temptations challenged us to sample shoreside offerings, but the cuisines of Thailand and Vietnam could hardly go ignored. Bangkok is among the world's greatest cities for street food; and I tried a little bit of everything, from fiery pepper fish cakes outside the Temple of the Reclining Buddha to hot banana fritters on Silom Road, the city's main drag for buying anything silk. We also took a two-hour cooking class at the Shangri-La Hotel's Salathip Restaurant, which overlooks Thailand's main river, the busy Chao Phraya, and where diminutive chefs Tussanee Putkaew and Nongyao Markpol taught us everything we

needed to know to create a Thai meal of tom yam kung (spicy prawn soup), the ever-popular phad thai, and tab tim grob, flour-ball porridge with coconut milk, which, trust me about the porridge, tastes much better than it sounds.

There were times when, out of a sense of propriety, I showed uncommon restraint. Case in point: the day the Spirit anchored offshore the palm-luscious island of Ko Kood, along the coast of Thailand. While we were marveling over the awesome white-sand beach, several of the waiters loaded up a surfboard with bottles of Mumm's and a two-kilo tin of sevruga and waded it out into the water so that we could nosh away while standing waist-deep in the water. It was decadence on a divine scale, and I could easily have made a boorish pig of myself. Let the record show that I held the line firm at a dozen caviar-schmeared crackers and required only three glasses of Mumm's to wash them down.

Seabourn Cruise Line has three ships-the Spirit, Pride and Legend- each with a maximum capacity of just 208 passengers. Itineraries are offered throughout the world, from the Caribbean and Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and Pacific, at various times during the year. For more information visit www.seabourn.com.