One Year Away

Penny

After only a few days in big cities, Joe and I were once again craving the slower pace of towns and villages.  We decided that the Mekong Delta would be a perfect place to get away.  We would make our way across the delta until we reached Rach Gia where we would take a ferry to the island of Phu Quoc for some time on the beach. So we caught the bus to Vinh Long.

Vinh Long is a town of 124,600 people and offers many excursion possibilities to travelers.  We  spoke to a local travel agent (Mekong Travel) and hired a boat, driver and guide for 2 days for about US $48 (our 1 night accommodation and some meals were also covered).  It was odd and somewhat of a waste to have a entire boat that could have easily seated 10 other passengers to ourselves.  It did, however, offer us more freedom and the undivided attention of our guide, Trinh who was a wealth of information and who spoke English very well. We hopped onto the long wooden boat and off we went into the delta to visit some islands around the area. 

The first stop was the brick and pottery factory.  It was surprisingly interesting.  The terracotta bricks and pottery is made from clay “harvested” from the rice fields.  The factory produces bricks that are mainly sold locally and made-to-order pottery that they export internationally.  It made me think that some of the pots that I had on my tiny little balcony in Toronto may have been produced here!

After lunch and a siesta in a hammock, we went for a bike ride.  Riding the rickety old bikes over 1 foot wide bridges with no railing made for a hair raising hour.  Along the way we stopped in a few homes and visited some of the tropical fruit plantations including longan, pineapple, coconut and durian.

That night our guide left us at our “home-stay” family in a house built on stilts. Joe was particularly looking forward to having dinner with the family and listening to their stories about life on the Mekong.  Unfortunately, it became clear that none of that was going to happen.  Instead of a “home-stay”, we had more of a “guesthouse-stay”.  We ate alone and only exchanged about 10 words with the man of the house.  The dinner of local fish was excellent and their home was beautiful… but was not what we expected.

The next morning, we headed to the floating market.  Since the market is most active in the early morning, we were ready to go at 6 AM.  With barely no sleep because of the croaking frogs and other weird noises in the night, I hopped back on the boat with Joe for our 1 hour ride to the market.

The floating market turned out to be a wholesale market for local produce.  Large wooden boats advertise what they are selling by putting a sample high on bamboo poles at the bow.  Each boat sells only one product; pineapples, mangoes, rice, sugar cane… Local merchants go to the floating market in their own small boats to purchase directly from the wholesalers.  The products are then transferred from the wholesaler’s boat to the buyer’s boat; often by tossing it over.

Having left so early in the morning, we had not had the chance to have breakfast, so we had it delivered to our boat!   At the floating market, there are smaller boats (more like row boats with engines) that go around and serve things like noddle soup to the buyers and sellers who are camped out on the water.  Our guide signaled to a man and after some maneuvering his boat was alongside ours.   He had a mini kitchen set up where he made pho bo (rice noddle soup with beef).  Eating rice noodle soup on a rocking boat is no easy task as Joe found out when he dropped a chopstick into the water.  It was really good soup though.

After visiting a coconut candy factory and a popped-rice  factory (like rice crispies), our guide left us on the bank of the delta where she arranged for 2 motor bikes to take us and our packs to the bus stop where we would catch the bus to Rach Gia. 

The Mekong Delta is an interesting place.  The river is the source of life in the area; used for transportation, bathing, fishing…  Unfortunately, it is also at times the garbage dumping ground. According to many in Vietnam, people living on the banks of the Mekong are “rich” not because of material wealth but because they are lucky that anything can grow in the area.  Although the Mekong Delta is the largest rice producing area in Vietnam, many of the plantations that we saw had moved from rice to exotic fruits due to higher profit margins.  The delicious fresh Mekong fruit have made a great desert at the end of each meal.