Vietnam: The Mekong Delta

The Mekong Delta

The Mekong Delta is the end point of the Mekong River, which runs through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and finally Vietnam. The Delta is incredibly rich in agriculture and produces thirty percent of the island's produce. The whole region is filled with picturesque streams and canals surrounded by fruit orchards, rice paddies and about every tropical plant you can imagine.

I was booked to stay in a region called Ben Tre at a place called Hong Thai Homestay, recommended to me by a friend. The nearest region of the delta to Ho Chi Minh is My Tho and is apparently increasingly crowded with tourists. Ben Tre lies just a little bit further from the city, and due to a previous lack of transport, has managed to remain mostly untouched by tourists.

After my a reasonably comfortable bus journey, I was greeted in Ben Tre by the very friendly and welcoming Mr Thai who gave me a seat on the back of his scooter and drove me to the homestay.

The homestay was really beautiful and consisted mostly of a huge garden that was completely enveloped in lush plants. There was a huge pond at the centre of the garden along with plenty of hammocks for the guests staying there. Mr Thai repeatedly reminded me throughout the stay to treat it like my home and help myself to the cold beers in the fridge.

I arrived around mid afternoon and after some negotiating my trip with Mr Thai (he offers a number of tours while you stay there), I departed on a boat trip around his area. My tour guide was a man in his seventies or eighties known as Heong, who despite his slightly difficult to understand accent (Vietnamese and English seem to share very few phonetic similarities), spoke pretty good English. 

The Mekong delta is made up of hundreds of small estuaries breaking off of the main river and main people still travel around by boats and ferries.

There were also a number of fishing nets and fishing boats around.

After a short boat journey, we stopped for a fruit break where I was able to sample some fruits from the area. The Mekong Delta is an incredibly fertile place and much of the fruit and vegetables in Vietnam come from here. We were given some honey tea and a plate of fresh fruit. There was also a small dish of salt that we could dip the pineapple in, which I was less a fan of.

A photo of Heong, my tour guide for the afternoon. He loved speaking about his life and mine and frequently wrote down words on his hand to ask me to say them and help with pronunciation. He also excitedly shared different aspects of the English language he knew, including the proverb 'The dog that barks never bikes' and the story of the contest of strength between the wind and the moon (I've heard this one countless times while in Asia). I later found out from other people staying there that he'd shared the proverb and story with them too! He told me how he'd learnt English when he was young, but then kept his English speaking abilities quiet after the Vietnam War when America was looked upon unfavourable. As time passed on and English became more desirable again, he was able to share his abilities with others and use it for work. 

On this particular boat, the woman initially gave me an oar to help her row us along at a slow pace. Shortly after, as I was getting tired, it was revealed that are boat contained a hidden motor which she promptly turned on to get us moving without the physical labour.

The river was incredibly scenic and really peaceful.

Many of the buildings in the Delta had this style of roof made from coconut leaves (I think?), which had to be redone every few years.

We also went for a walk along the river where he pointed out all the different kinds of plants that we saw (there were many variations). Every time we passed a banana tree, my guide was quick to remind me that Vietnam has both big bananas and miniature ones and that the small ones are much more delicious. He also excitedly showed me some special seeds which popped like fireworks when they got wet.

Ben Tre, the region we were in is apparently famous for its coconut candy. We went to a coconut candy factory where we sampled some really nice coconut tea and a number of coconut flavoured cookies and candies. The famous coconut candy was a chewy, toffee like candy, but my favourite was the dried sugared coconut strips.

An array of coconut themed goods were for sale.

As we left the factory, the sun was beginning to set. The trip ended with our boat driver trying to catch a firefly for me-a nice gesture, but maybe more suitable for a couple on a tour than a solo traveler. It got especially awkward as I waited for about five minutes while he made every effort to catch a firefly to personally hand to me, but admittedly the firefly was pretty cool!

My second day involved a motorbike tour of the area. I was introduced to a a new guide, whose name sound something like Ling (Vietnamese is a very difficult language to pick up on words if you aren't familiar with the sounds). Throughout the morning we drove around the small roads in the area visiting a number of different farms where people were harvesting different fruits. At each stop, I was quickly summoned to join them in picking before being given a handful of fruit.

The people were all very friendly, and the nature of the location (which had only just been connected to the main roads with a recently built bridge) meant that very few tourists were in the area. I was pretty much the only foreigner around and everyone was very excited to tell me how tall I was, or how pale my skin was. Things did go a little far once where a drunk old man on the ferry tried to pull my shorts up to expose my thigh, but apart from this, most people were good natured in their comments.

Harvesting some fruit with a large hooked stick.

I felt a little strange helping them harvest as I clearly wasn't especially helpful to the process, but it was a nice gesture anyway! Here are some of the farmers packing up their harvest of sapodillas- a fruit I'd never heard of or tried before my visit!

Along with the sapodillas, we also picked some milk apples at another farm. I'd also never heard of these before, but really recommend them if you ever get the chance to have one! The inside is full of sweet and succulent flesh that you can drink like milk and the flavour is reminiscent of custard apples which I'm also a huge fan of.

Along one of the bigger roads, we stopped at a small street side market.

(This photo of the market gave me some comfort in my days of conjunctivitis at the end of the trip. It was a friendly reminder that no matter how bad I felt/looked, things could always be worse)

There was also a snake vendor who had a huge metal cage of snakes. Every minute or a so, a different snake seemed to work out a way to escape and had to be quickly grabbed and thrown back into the basket.

The snake vendor seemed to be of a lot interest to some Vietnamese tourists as well who gave the impression snake wasn't part of their typical meal plan.

After the snake market, and lunch of curried frog, we headed to one of the floating markets in the river. Mekong Delta is famous among tourists for its floating markets, but in order to see the huge ones, you have to go pretty deep into the delta and have something like a 5am start. This market just consisted of a few boats selling fruits as well as a number of fishing boats and houseboats. 

One of the market boats displaying its huge array of tropical fruit. The way the market works is that you pull up to the ship you ant to buy things from and they use a rope to tie you to them. From there you can board their ship and look at the produce.

On the fruit ship.

After this, we headed to another market area where there was a woman making the rice paper that is used in spring rolls and other Vietnamese dishes. The process involves grinding up rice and mixing it with water before pouring it into a small bowl where it's steamed. This forms a thin paper which is hung up on large woven bamboo baskets where they are dried in the sun. 

A man harvesting some rambutan, similar to Lychees!

Me 'helping' again with the harvesting.

Many of the roads in the delta are broken up by the river and the only way across is by getting on the ferry (which seemed to charge about one US penny per journey). On my final ferry of the day, the ferry drive summoned me over and gave me the wheel for a brief period (once we were out in the open and there was nothing for me to bump into of course).

The next day was a little more of the same, with a second motorcycle tour day but in a different region.

We started with a quick stop at my tour guide's old family home where he told me a little about the history of his family. He told me how it used to be his father's home but his father helped the Americans during the war. After the North won the war, the home was confiscated and given to one of the people who worked there. My tour guide seemed pretty bitter about the whole thin, but seemed on good terms with the new owner of the house who we drank coconut juice with before walking around the grounds.

After resting a little we went on a pretty long drive along the main road towards the region of Tra Vinh which has a sizeable Khmer (Vietnamese Cambodian) population. The main roads themselves were pretty terrifying, as the Vietnamese style of driving involves just honking people in front of you to let them know to get out of the way or else you'll hit them. While this is fine when it's just scooters involved, anytime a truck or car came up from behind of us, you'd hear a huge roar of its horn before it brushed past you at high speed. Nevertheless, we made it to our destination in one piece.

We arrived at a temple which was completely empty except for the people who actually worked at the temple. Shortly after we arrived and were walking to look around, a woman slowly came up to us and started making strange hand signals to me every time my guide looked away. Whenever he looked back in my direction, she would stand up straight and try to look normal. She started pointing at her mouth while gesturing with her hands, again always stopping the second my guide looked at her, and eventually she started hitting me. At this point, I let my guide know what she was doing (I was being stupid, having initially thought when she was gesturing that I was doing something inappropriate like taking pictures, before it started to click) and he spoke to her before telling me she was asking for money, which he told me not to pay. At this point she walked off and it was just us again.

The temple itself was famous very different in style to any of the temples I've seen before, as it was built in the Khmer style.


It was pretty beautiful, although I'm finding the time I want to spend at temples grow shorter and shorter as I spend my time in Asia.

This particular temple was apparently famous for its wood carving and it contained a whole room full of giant wooden statues, tables and chairs. This particular statue was of all the different animals of the Chinese zodiac.

The colours on the roof inside the temple were really beautiful.

After the temple, we started to head back to the homestay (which by now was pretty far away) via a different route where we were surrounded by rice paddies. The Mekong Delta is sometimes known as the rice bowl of Vietnam and unlike the North, which only has one harvest a year, the delta is able to have three harvests due to its weather.

Our trip that day included numerous stops along the way for coconut juice, sugarcane juice and iced coffee while reclining in hammocks.

At the end of the trip, we stopped off at my guide's family house and after I asked him some questions about them, he suggested to me that we could hang out with them and have some snacks and beers. I thought this sounded like a pretty cool idea and say I'd like to do that. He warned me ahead of time that this wasn't included in my tour and that I'd have to pay for my own food and beer, which seemed perfectly reasonable to me. However when we went to sit down, we didn't sit with any of his family, who I basically didn't see again apart from when we left. He offered me some beef and when I asked him how much it cost, he let me know that it would be maybe 200 or 300 thousand. I was still adjusting to the all the zeros in Vietnamese currency at this point and mistook this for meaning two to three US dollars (the price of the majority of typical restaurants in Vietnam), as opposed to ten to fifteen (the price of the more upmarket ones). After I had some beef and a bottle of beer, he went to check and told me that the whole thing would cost three hundred thousand. At this point I clicked at the actual price I was paying for a pretty small snack in one of the cheapest regions for food in the country. Unfortunately, since he had told me the price ahead of time, I didn't really feel like I could argue it. Although it was only about 10 US dollars that I'd been ripped off, it did leave a pretty bad taste in my mouth.

However, we were soon back at the homestay and the hospitality of Mr Thai put me in a better mood. He'd been excitedly telling me over the past few days of the Elephant Ear Fish which we would be having and a couple of hours later, the fish did indeed make an appearance.

Although not the most beautiful of foods (nor the easiest to serve), it did taste delicious! With the elephant ear fish came the end to my final night in the Delta and the next day I was back on a bus to Ho Chi Minh with a flight booked later that evening to fly up to Central Vietnam and the next stage of my travels.