We’re back in HCM after our three day trek up the Mekong Delta.
Sarah is off, getting a haircut, so it’s down to me to fill you in on the last couple of days.
Yesterday, we had another very early start as we headed out by boat to a floating market. Our boat pulled alongside a vendor’s boat, so I clambered from the roof of our boat onto the roof of the vendor’s boat to purchase some fresh pineapple. A whole pineapple was skinned and then presented to us for the princely sum of $0.20. Delicious!
We then visited a village where rice is transformed from the grain into thin sheets. The sheets are then cut into thin strips, commonly known in the West as noodles. Once again, the Vietnamese let nothing go to waste. The husk of the rice is used as fuel for the furnace that heats the rice paste. The rice itself is made into noodles, and the ash of the expended husk is used as fertiliser for the new rice plants. Absolutely nothing is wasted in this process, leaving the casual observer (us) in awe of the harmonious relationship it’s possible for people to have with the land on which they live and work.
Yesterday saw us switch between a variety of boats, including a mid-size vessel on which we would spend the entire afternoon navigating the branches of the Mekong.
For some of the journey, we were allowed to ride on the roof of the boat. When the boat in front of us passed under a low bridge, we observed as the people on the roof lay down and cleared the underside of the bridge with a good 25 cm of leeway. Confident that we could do the same, we began to lay flat on the roof of our boat.
Now, perhaps the boat in front was carrying more kilos of human cargo than we were and that was the reason that the boat sat lower in the water than ours, but when we came within a metre or two of the first beam of the bridge, I really thought we weren’t going to clear it. I was in a good vantage point to judge this, too, as I was at the very front of the roof and was mentally preparing myself to be ground into a pulp and sold on the floating market the next day.
Not to worry, though. We cleared the bridge with a good 8 cm of space between my nose and oblivion, and we were treated to what was probably the best close-up of the underside of a Vietnamese bridge that we’ll ever see.
Eventually, we arrived in the town of Chau Doc after dark, just 3 km from the Cambodian border. 3 km as the crow files, that is; the actual border crossing is two hours upstream by boat and a lot further by road. Apparently, there aren’t so many places where you can cross the border from Vietnam into Cambodia.
It was nice and cool in Chau Doc and dinner was partaken outside the motel-like hotel where we were staying. Corny insrumental Eric Clapton style music failed to ruin our appetite and we spent the evening talking to an Anglo-Swedish couple.
We rose again with the sun this morning and drove through Chau Doc to the outskirts of this small border town, passing many pagodas on the way. We stopped to view a particular pagoda, whose name escapes me now, but after ascending its stone steps we were treated to a magnificent view of the rice paddies, which sank away in the distance into a flood plain on the Cambodian side. Across from the flood plain, a few houses and small villages could be seen in Cambodia, although I have no idea what name those communities go by.
This rural corner of Vietnam was very lush and attractive. The town looked worth spending at least a day in and I found the sight of Cambodia a mere 3000 metres away quite tantalising. We’ll just have to save that for another trip, I suppose.
Incidentally, Chau Doc was the scene of the 1979 border dispute with Cambodia, when Khmer Rouge soldiers would cross the Vietnamese border on a daily basis and massacre the civilians. The Vietnamese fought back (as they always have), ultimately entering Cambodia and overthrowing the government.
Some museums in the area apparently document this history very well, but we had no time to stop and make a visit.
The bus took us back to the dock, where we boarded a small rowing boat for a visit to a floating village.
After five minutes, I was beginning to wonder whether my eyes were playing tricks on me or whether the small puddle of water present in the bottom of the rowing boat when I had embarked on it was, in fact, the same small pond that I was now staring at.
Glancing around the boat, I spotted a drinking-fountain like jet of water spurting into the boat on the front right-hand side. The simultaneously hilarious and rather terrifying thought occurred to me that we were actually sinking!
The waves caused by the wake of the motorised craft that occasionally passed us were lapping closer and closer to the rim of our boat, which was slowly but surely aligning its top with the surface of the water.
I shouted to our guide (who was in another boat) that our sieve-like craft was destined for a watery grave and that we, the occupants, had no desire to share its demise in the murky Mekong. Luckily, we were almost at the end of the first leg of our journey for today, so we were relieved to disembark just a few minutes later at a fish farm.
Steel nets are suspended into the river below floating, wooden houses and fish are kept and nurtured in these nets. They feed them some kind of fish and rice paste mixture. It was quite a curious site to watch them being fed through a trapdoor in the floor of this floating house.
From there, we continued our voyage through the floating village (on a different rowing boat!) until we reached another village, this time on land and home to the ethnic minority Cham people. The Cham people are Muslims, not Buddhists. They have their own language, but they also speak Vietnamese. Apart from some head garb worn by the women, I couldn’t immediately tell them apart from the everyday Vietnamese in the same area.
It was an interesting experience to visit the village’s mosque and see Arabic on the entrance; not something you expect in rural Vietnam, close to Cambodia.
Back on a larger boat, we began the journey back towards HCM City. We spent four hours on this boat, the sun scorchingly hot, the wind not even a whisper in the clear blue sky. Sweltering, it was; simply unbelievably hot.
We had lunch on the boat and made a short stop in the afternoon at a village where incense is made.
At about 15:00, we transferred to air-conditioned coach for the remaining four hour trip to HCM City. On the way, we made a superfluous stop at an ignominious bonsai garden, whose main attraction seemed to be some monkeys and apes that had been driven stark-staring mad by the confines of their inhumanely small cages.
We arrived back in HCM City in the pouring rain, which constitutes the second time the city has greeted us with a downpour. We picked up our luggage from the tour agency, checked back into our hotel, collected some laundry and then Sarah went one way to get a new coiffure, while I came here to update the home front.
Anyway, we leave tomorrow morning on an 11:40 flight to Hong Kong. As always, I’m excited to be going to the next place, whilst being simultaneously depressed at having to leave the current one.
I’m already trying to persuade Sarah to allow us to extend the trip by a day, so that we’ll have time to visit Macau, which would make a great day-trip from Hong Kong. We’ll see whether my persuasion bears any fruit.
We would like to finish this message by wishing Sarah’s folks a happy 35th wedding anniversary (on Saturday) and a fun time in New York. We’d also like to wish all of the Americans a happy Thanksgiving.
That’s it for now; more, presumably, from Hong Kong.