We escaped Ho Chi Minh city first thing after and early breakfast and headed to the Mekong river delta. The locals call it the Nine-tailed Dragon as there are 9 main rivers that make up the delta that flows into the sea. Today we spend most of the day on 2 of the largest of the waterways, and little time on a smaller one. The big ones are so incredibly wide, while some of the smaller canals just barely fit two small rowing boats side by side!
We started the river cruise by visiting an orchard where the locals sang a little welcome song and treated us to some exotic tropical fruit and fresh tea.
This was followed by a rowing boat excursion down a small tributary. This time the lady who was rowing the boat did so standing up rather than sitting down and using her feet like in Ninh Binh. We got to see a lot of how the local live along the water ways. Today is still a public holiday in Vietnam and many people are at home with their family, and participating in a very common Vietnamese past time, Karaoke! Actually, it is probably the one place where Mish's signing talent could fit in!
After rowing down the small tributaries, we got picked up by a larger boat that took us up the river. You could see how people have settled on the river in their stilted houses. What made Mish uncomfortable was that many of the supporting stilts were not braced at all and quite wonky. There were plenty of examples of houses that collapsed into the river to justify the discomfort. We also learnt that a lot of people living on the river are unable to swim, which leads to a number of deaths each year, unfortunately, mostly children. The government recently made swimming lessons mandatory for all school children to help tackle this issue.
Our next stop was a family business that made popped rice cakes, coconut fudge sweets and Snake wine. We tried the fudge and pop rice cakes, and passed on trying the snake wine! The really do use snakes to flavour the distilled rice wine, in big glass jars. The Vietnamese version of the Mexican worm in tequila.
At this stage we were hungry and hence popped across the river to a little local restaurant before embarking on a long river journey to Can Tho. It was a relaxing river cruise. One thing that Robyn noticed was that there were a number of houses that had missing windows and doors, and in some cases roofs. We learnt that the owners of those houses built a new house and took those things with them to the new house. We suspect that they also took the kitchen sink as well.
Eventually, we got to Can Tho, and left our boat to check into the hotel. Once we dropped our bags off and cooled down, we headed into down to find some dinner. We found a street food vendors and just had a mix of various street foods. It was a mixed bag of good and not so great dishes, the good news is that we just kept on trying until we were full.
Tomorrow is a 6am departure as the floating markets only are open early in the morning.
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