M&C: Mekong Delta

On the evening of Feb 18, we took an extremely short and cheap flight to Can Tho, the principal city of the Mekong Delta region in the far south of Vietnam. The Delta, like most deltas, is known for its river culture, fertile agriculture, and proliferation of trade along literally thousands of fen-y waterways. In our imagination, Can Tho was a quaint town of lazily meandering streams and quiet provincial life. But nope, it's the fourth-largest city in Vietnam at over 1.5 million people with some hustle and bustle to show for it. We got to our weirdly-way-too-nice-for-us hotel well after midnight and finally fell asleep close to 1:00AM.

We had arranged to jump on the last two days of a three-day/two-night tour, and we met the group at their hotel at 6:30. First, we all walked a few blocks to the riverfront and boarded a boat, riding about 45 minutes upriver to a large floating fruit market. This market was very unlike our preconception of a floating market: tourist-centric reed paddle boats selling mostly Chinese-made tchotchkes and other trinkets. This market was thoroughly active, not at all romantic, and quite interesting. Hundreds of motorized riverboats milled around, most of them selling a single kind of fruit to much smaller boats that then sold the fruit in smaller surrounding communities as well as at various markets in Can Tho city. We were told the market is much smaller these days than even 10 years ago. But even so, it was very impressive to see the number of people still making a living this way along with the variety of produce on offer.

From there, we putzed another 10 or 15 minutes upriver to visit a small rice noodle factory. Again, we had low expectations that were far surpassed. We saw how they make large vat-fuls of a kind of batter-like paste from rice flour, tapioca flour, water, and salt, which is then spread across a two-foot hot plate (heated by a fire fueled by rice husks), carefully rolled onto a bamboo stick, and laid on a large bamboo pallet to sun-dry before being cranked through a small gas-powered noodle cutter. We were told that nearly all of the rice noodles consumed in Vietnam (which is presumably an absurdly huge quantity) are made in small family operations using this same process. I don't know if that's true, but if so, that's pretty amazing.

After another stop at a totally underwhelming old fruit orchard turned tourist trap, we boated back to Can Tho city where we had a very nice seafood hot pot and pork noodle lunch provided by the tour and also dropped off about two-thirds of the people in our group (for which we were very grateful). The remaining 10 of us got on a much smaller bus and drove about 3 hours north to Tra Su Bird Sanctuary.

Tra Su consists of a huge swampy flooded forest crisscrossed by little canals, dykes, and bamboo boardwalks. It's famous for its huge bird population as well as the gorgeous scenery. We spent about two and a half hours there with the group, but could easily have spent much more. We took two boat rides, one motorized and one human-powered, climbed up to a 100-foot canopy observation deck and also walked almost 3 kilometers along one of the boardwalks. Despite the mid-afternoon lull and the loud boat engines, we still saw a lot of birds, including many grey-headed swamphens, an oriental darter, some kind of brilliantly blue kingfisher, and a bunch of herons, bitterns, and egrets.

Then another hour in the bus to the much smaller town of Chau Doc, very near the Cambodian border on the Bassac River, one of the innumerable tributaries and distributaries of the Mekong. By the time we got there, we were quite happy to have a little independence and be away from the others on our tour (mostly 50-somethings) and our guide, whose inefficient communication and overly-cutesy mannerisms were starting to wear on us a little. We grabbed a bite to eat at a surprisingly good nearby sidewalk restaurant and crashed early.

5:30 AM wakeup again the following morning, and we were back on the river by 6:45.We first stopped by a small fish farm operation, where they keep the fish in a netted area underneath a kind of floating house, before continuing on to a nearby Muslim Cham village, one of southeast Asia's ethnic minority groups. We feared this would be an exploitative-feeling or overly-fabricated experience and were again pleasantly surprised to find a very real and thriving little village behind the touristy textile storefront. The entire community is raised up on stilts some 10 feet, since the river level fluctuates many feet during the monsoon season. We walked around a little bit, trying to imagine the village fully engulfed by the river that was currently several hundred yards away, and passing by (but not permitted to enter) a local mosque.

Several of our group were taking the boat to Phnom Penh, so there were just three of the original group on the bus back to Can Tho, where, like a tributary of the Mekong itself, we merged back in with a larger group for the nearly five-hour bus ride to Ho Chi Minh City aka Saigon.

Next up: HCMC.