Today I travelled about 2 hours from Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) to the fertile lands of the Mekong Delta which is sandwiched between the South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand. This was all about seeing life as a local and meeting people who had lived off the land and Mekong River for generations. On arriving to the trading town of Cai Be, we transferred to a boat and began the journey down the Mekong. This river is long and I believe flows all the way from China - I sailed on part of it in Luang Prabang when I was in Laos a few weeks ago.
The Mekong is actively used as a way of living and this is evident everywhere. We first past a floating market which were a mix boats, barges and peoples homes. Many of the boats had a unique way of advertising what they were selling, by hanging their products from a mast above the boat itself…..so, i saw banana’s and sweet potatoes hanging high above one! Many of the boats also have eyes painted on the front of them looking down as a symbolic way of protecting them. We also past numerous rickety looking ferries that would transport people across from one side of the Mekong to the other, mostly those on motorcycles for a few thousand Dong (not very much at all!).
The first proper stop was a family business where they produced coconut sweets and other things made from coconut. We got to watch how they made this and then the best bit, taste it after! Around the corner was something I hadn’t seen before……snakes….lots of them and a few scorpions, in jars (dead of course) mixed with alcohol, apparently a natural form of viagra! You could also drink from them and purchase a bottle. Being scared of snakes, needless to say I passed on that one! We stopped for a brief cup of Jasmine tea and snacks before jumping back on the boat.
Next stop was jumping from one boat to another, onto a small paddle boat as a lady in a traditional rice hat paddled a few of us down one of the many canals and backwaters of the Mekong. These myriad of waterways make up the Mekong delta area and it was pretty cool to just sit back and relax and we glided along past peoples house and daily life. At the end of the waterway, about 30 minutes later, our boat picked us up where a freshly prepared lunch had already been made for us. The food just kept on coming and the kitchen on board was tiny! The soup and dishes were very traditional for the area I was in and finished with lots of fresh fruit, some of which I hadn’t tried before including Dragon fruit, Jack fruit and Longan, pretty tasty and one of my five a day!
Last stop of the day and probably my favourite was a visit to this Vietnamese lady’s house on the banks of the Mekong where she has lived all her life and makes rice paper, the same that we ate at lunch to put our food in an prepare a wrap, She was 84 years old and the loveliest, sweetest woman I’d met in my whole trip! She was laughing and smiling the whole time we were there and showed us how she makes rice paper on a hot fire stove. It reminded me of how you make pancakes at home - the mixture goes on, evened out then once cooked after about a minute you put a rod underneath and roll it onto a roller and voila, there you have your rice paper. She made it look so easy - I had a go and would have scored myself a C+……could do better!!
