The Mekong River and Delta isn’t to far from the heart of Saigon, but with the roads and traffic the way they are in Viet Nam it would be a two-hour drive to our boat. The road was in bad shape. On top of the traffic, every bridge transition was like driving over a speed bump. Trash lined the roads in front of the shops and beside the shops. I couldn’t take my eyes off of the sights.
All the way to the Mekong the road is lined with little muddy shops. It seems that every house is a small business: bricks, coal, motorcycle repair, caskets, flowers, steel railing, marble counters, roofing, rice wine, pineapple, restaurants, coffee shops with tables and hammocks, toy shops, dress shops and everything. Every place I looked, there was someone selling something. The houses didn’t appear to have front walls or back walls to them. They were tunnels from the street back to the back fence. Stores occupied the front parts of the houses, bathrooms, bedrooms and kitchens could be seen further back.
We pulled into a dirty little town on the edge of the Mekong and entered a house that fronted the road and had its back to the river. It was full of tourists who had signed up for a boat tour. Minh had arranged a boat for just Chrissy and me.
We climbed aboard the narrow wooden boat and were on the Mekong. The houses on the river were the same as the ones on the road. You could see through many of them to the streets on the other side. The sides facing the river were plastered with life, clothes drying, food cooking and people cleaning themselves. Our first stop was a small candy factory. Inside the factory we watched a woman
making rice paper on a small rice-husk fired stove. Other women were wrapping coconut candies with the rice paper. The factory was run by a family and the factory was actually their house when they weren’t open for business. They had a bamboo play pen set up near the women wrapping the candy and a little boy scampered around between the tourists. Minh had us take a seat and one of the ladies brought us a sample plate of their candies and some tea. While we sampled the candy, a young girl came
up to me and asked if I wanted to buy some post cards. She flipped through them showing off each picture. I bought a set of cards for 20,000 dong ($1.25). With her sales complete she picked up her kid brother and began to squeeze him mercilessly, it reminded me of my treatment at my sister’s hand.A hundred meters upriver from the candy shop was another shop that produced popped rice.
Again this was someone’s house. In the front of the house they sold clothes and artwork. In the back, they had their popped rice factory. We were able to stand and watch a man dump rice in a wok, pop it, catch it in a basket and sift out the rice husks, leaving only the popped rice. From there they mixed the rice with sweetened coconut and mad a coconut caramel coated type treat. This factory, too, had tables set up for customers to sample their products with tea. We sat and tried what they had. We also sampled some dragon fruit and jackfruit. The jackfruit has a pungent smell, which most people find repugnant. To me it smells like rotten cantaloupe. It tasted ok. The dragon fruit, oooh, it was slimy and nasty. I sampled one of the seeds and that was enough.
From these homes we went back to the boat and around the top of the island and through a floating marketplace. In the morning farmers will gather their boats to sell their produce. To identify what they sell, each boat hoists a sample of their produce up on the mast.
After the floating market we followed a small canal through the some of the farms that grow a lot of the produce. The area felt remote. There were no cars on the islands, just bicycles and walking on paths. The houses were small. There were a couple of bridges that crossed the canal. Some of the bridges were merely two bamboo poles mounted on pillars. One or two bridges barely cleared the canopy of our boat.
Once through the canal we turned back upstream over the head of the island to another wider canal. At this canal we turned back downstream. This canal was wider and most of the bridges were higher. Some of the bridges were wide enough to support motorcycles or bikes.
Along the banks of the canal we saw large brick kilns where some families would fire bricks. We had seen many of these bricks along the road from Saigon. The people would harvest the clay along the river, mold and fire the bricks right on the bank. These bricks seem to be used in most of the construction throughout Viet Nam.
On our cruise through this canal we met a large boat carrying rice husks used to heat the kilns. Three men sat on top of the husks sweeping the husks aside to clear some of the bridges. When they passed the smaller bamboo pole bridges, the sailors would lift the bamboo pole and walk it back to the aft of the boat as they passed.Further down this canal, an unlucky tourist boat had met a bridge that they couldn’t fit under. Their boat was a little larger and taller than ours. They had actually wedged under a wood and concrete bridge next to a school.
Several people from the island stood on the roof of the boat trying to add enough weight to the craft to keep it moving upstream. As we passed, our pilot told Minh that I should hop over to their boat and help, too. While I added 100 kilograms to their boat, it wasn’t enough to drop the boat further into the water. We wrangled the boat for several minutes before our pilot turned our boat around and Minh and Chrissy were able to hop on the boat as well. Their weight and Chrissy pointing out that the higher part of the bridge was to the starboard side allowed us to move the boat under the bridge.Our final stop that day was at a restaurant in a garden behind an old Japanese/Chinese styled house. A Japanese benefit group has reconditioned this structure on this one little delta island. On the far side of the house from the channel there is a garden with a couple of gazebos housing a restaurant.
Minh had arraigned our meal at this restaurant the night before. The menu was set, all Chissy and I had to do was sit and eat the food as it was laid out before us. This meal set the trend for the rest of the trip, not the meal with the cat in the kitchen. We had a vegetable soup, stir fried noodles, vegetables, spring rolls, rice, and fresh fruits. It was too much. That was the same menu that we would have for each of the rest of our lunches in Viet Nam, with fried eggs added to some.While one gazebo was filled with tourists, Chrissy and I had our own section of the garden to ourselves. The Owner of the restaurant served us and in her limited English tried to ask questions and tell us what we were eating. It was at this restaurant Chrissy fell in love with rice from the Mekong Delta region. It has a very pleasant aroma and taste.
Back on the boat I told Chrissy that I would love to move to the delta for a summer, live on a big rice boat and just let the river flow by while getting to know the delta islands and more importantly the people.
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