Wednesday, November 13 - Mekong Delta

Wednesday, November 13 - Mekong Delta

We were on the road again this morning, with guide and driver for the next couple of days.  We were headed to the Mekong Delta, southwest of Saigon.  After about two hours on roads of varying quality, we reached a departure point for boats venturing onto the Mekong River.  We first toured through a wide area of the river where fishing boats depart for the sea, about 50 km away.  They return with their catch, which is distributed throughout the country or processed into the ubiquitous fish oil at riverside plants or readied for shipment to the US!  In the same area of the river, we saw floating fishing shacks with nearby pens for their catch.

Then, we left the wide river and rode down a narrow tributary with banks of dense coconut palms.  It brought to mind so many newsreel films of what our GIs experienced during the war here and it was easy to imagine how terrifying that must have been, more so when our guide told us that we were in an area where many Viet Cong had been.  

 We stopped for honey tea and ginger candy and were treated by a visit by a man showing off his (non-venomous) python, which we declined to hold!  In the same area, we saw a small coconut candy making operation, walked among narrow dirt lanes bordered by all kinds of dense vegetation and scattered houses.  On a wider road, we rode in a horse cart to a pavilion where we enjoyed some tropical fruit and a short performance of traditional music.  

We boarded smaller boats for a trip to an island restaurant for an open-air lunch under a huge, bamboo conical roof.  While we ate (elephant ear fish!), there was a period of heavy rain which, for a short while, cooled the heat of midday.  That relief didn't last long, but we were soon on the boat and cooled by the breeze, as we headed back to our port.  

From there, we drove through the delta a couple of hours to Can Tho, the capital of the delta.  It's a town with a population of about a million and the major trading center between this rich agricultural area and the rest of the country.  It's not much to look at, but there is a pretty riverside park and promenade, dominated by a huge statue of Ho Chi Minh, of course.

There was another heavy downpour before we headed out for dinner, but by the time we were ready to go out to an open-air restaurant by the river, we had no use for our umbrellas.