Today we headed to the Mekong Delta in south west Vietnam.
We ate an early breakfast at 7:00 AM and were promptly picked up in front of our hotel. As the bus coursed through the thick throng of motorcycle drivers the guide told us there are four million registered motorbikes in the city. After a while you just become accustomed to the hum of the engines and the high-pitched honks. It’s as much a part of the audible fabric of the city as anything else I can think of.
Although we’d just arrived in Saigon it was nice to get out of the city. One can only take the motorbikes and exhaust and commotion for so long. As we left the city we drove through patches of torrential rain and scintillating sun shine in the same ten-minute period. The weather here is quite capricious.
We drove for about an hour when we came upon the Vinh Trang Pagoda which featured two massive Buddha statues, one sitting and one standing (probably 30 and sixty meters tall, respectively). I have to admit, if I never saw another temple or Pagoda I’d be okay with it. Seeing the temples was amazing, but since Stephen and I are neither Buddhism experts, nor Buddhist / Vietnamese art work / architecture connoisseurs…the only thing we can appreciate is the aesthetic beauty of the pagodas but like I said, there’s only so much you can appreciate.
After driving over countless rivulets, tributaries and rivers we arrived in the Mekong Delta.[1] The heat was oppressive – you could feel the power of the sun and density of the humidity weighing down upon you, pressing against your skin. You are sweating profusely from the moment you step out of air conditioning and you don’t stop sweating until you step back in it.
We got into a dilapidated boat and as we pushed off the boat sauntered back and forth with the waves. It started listing to the left and the guide yelled at people on the left to go to the right side of the boat so we wouldn’t tip over. As with all boats we’ve taken here it didn’t appear to be the most sea-worthy of crafts, but I suppose that all part of the fun.
The water in the Mekong Delta is a light-brown opaque’ish hue with various pieces of detritus floating in the water – discarded soda bottles, shoes, plants, coconuts – the stuff of life.
After touring around in the boat we ate at Turtle Island, one of the larger islands in the delta where fisherman live. While eating we had the unfortunate experience of watching children from the village basically torturing baby turtles. Hard to know when to step in and interfere with the kids when their parents are there watching them do it. Stephen and I figured it wasn’t our place, we were the guests, so we just kind of looked away.
After lunch we went deeper into the bamboo stalks of the Delta. The little tributary we followed got narrower and narrower and as we left the hustle and bustle of the main river behind it started to feel like we were in the movie Apocalypse Now, our rower carefully guiding our craft through the narrow pathways between the bamboo shoots. The guide told us we going to see where they make coconut candy, but our guide missed the bamboo stalks driven into the ground and our boat slammed into a concrete bridge. We weren’t going that fast, so there was never a fear we were going to sink or anything, but it was still unnerving.
I turned to Stephen, ‘If this thing sinks I hope you can swim.’
He nodded, ‘I hope you like leeches.’
We saw the whole coconut candy making operation. A girl asked how the villagers got the coconuts (which are about 40 feet in the air) and the woman said some children were trained to climb the trees and get the coconut, in lieu of a traditional education. The coconut candy was not that good. Stephen and I didn’t like it nor did many people on the tour. Apparently its big in China.
Afterwards Stephen and I tried liquor that was fermented using the carcass of a snake and a scorpion. Yeah…I normally would think it would be wise to try such a thing…but a few people before me had it and they didn’t die, so I figured it would be okay. The liquor tasted like what I imagine gasoline might taste like. Not the most pleasant stuff and definitely the weirdest thing I’ve ever drank.
Afterwards we took a hand rowed sampon through even smaller capillaries of the delta. The woman rowing the boat looked to be about 80 years old We were taken to another village where the villagers played traditional music for us. There were three instrument players and a few different singers. One of the men had the same instrument that was used in the water puppet show we saw in Hanoi. The music was nice, but for some reason all I could do was focus on the older man, playing a banjo-like instrument in the middle of the group. He was old and graying with a bird-like, sunken frame and looked like he’d been through hell. He just had a pair of eyes that seemed to look through you, not at you. Our tour guide had told us that the people of the Mekong Delta are very proud of the fact that they were never beat by the French or the Chinese. They are very proud of their fighting skills and they have an adage, ‘they can kill two birds with one bullet.’
Anyways, I found myself wondering if this man had fought in the Vietnam war, and what had been done to him, and when he had done to others, and all this was completely in my head and I don’t know what his story is…but I thought that maybe if my intuition is correct, and he did fights against America, then its sad that his livelihood is playing instruments for a bunch of American tourists.
After the concert we headed back to the bus and headed further into the Mekong Delta. We stopped at one point and I bought what I thought was a steamed pork roll, but when I bit into it I realized it was filled with quail eggs. Not the tastiest thing I’ve ever had, and I didn’t like the consistency. Only had a bite or two before throwing it out.
After driving for two and a half hour we arrived in Ben Tre and were guided to our, heavily advertised ‘one star hotel.’ (why would you advertise a one-star hotel?) It was a pretty seedy place and definitely the worst hotel we’d stayed at in Vietnam.
We dropped our bags off and headed out into the town to get some food…but most of the places were closed so we went to the place next door to our hotel. It’s facade covered in (seemingly) hundreds of newts or salamanders The inside of the restaurant was also pretty gross – they served rat, snake and other assorted creatures. At one point I went to the bathroom and walked past a row of snakes and eels in dirty green tanks of water. The smell was not too nice.
I was, to be quite honest, a smidge unnerved by the fact that they cooked and ate rat at the restaurant. I told Stephen that even if we didn’t order the rat, they would be cooking our dishes in the same pans and with the same utensils as they cooked the rat. Since there was nowhere else to eat we decided to stay, but I couldn’t get over the whole rat thing and didn’t eat much.
We had a few beers, were joined by four Germans (one of them obnoxious) towards the end. All in all a good day and a nice departure from the cities we’d explored on our way through Vietnam.
[1] The Mekong Delta (“Nine Dragon river delta”) is the region in southwestern Vietnam where the Mekong River approaches and empties into the sea through a network of distributaries.
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