Delta Days

To the tune of Up A Lazy River:

"Up the Mekong River,
So happy we will be,
Come up the muddy Mekong
With me..."

    On our final day in Ho Chi Minh City we toured the History Museum and the zoo. The museum was pretty good. In the zoo most of the animals appeared to have been put to bed by the time we got there, including a recalcitrant tiger who we hunted for but could not find, even though we could hear him expressing his annoyance at his keepers - unless, as Deborah suggested, it was just a tape recorded tiger!

    The next morning we left for Phnom Penh, in a comfortable air conditioned coach with only 11 guests and three staff including a pretty good English-speaking guide (you have to be good at accents to understand him sometimes, however). Deborah and I lucked into two of the front row seats. Our journey was essentially in two parts with respect to luxury, however, as we discovered - that wasn't clear upon departure. We rode a comfortable bus to Can Tho, looking out over rice paddies dotted with tombs of the ancestors who'd owned that land and passed it on to their children. At lunch we enjoyed such interesting things as a morning glory salad and a chive flower salad.

    We had a boat ride up one arm of the Mekong river at Ben Tre and experienced life on the river, including a floating wholesale market. The bigger boats had travelled as far as they could manage up the river, and smaller boats were purchasing goods from them and travelling further into the delta, up smaller branches to local communities and stores. The delta is an immensely fertile area of 17 million people, great for producing fruit, honey, coconuts and vegetables. We stopped at a honey farm where we bought candied ginger and drank honey tea, and a coconut candy factory. In the evening we stayed at the Van Phat, a 4 store hotel about 4 km out of town. It was very comfortable, a resort style hotel, but rooms were only $50/night. 

    We continued our journey the next day, continuing to marvel at the booming economy and the store jam-packed with produce and inventory. Deborah wants to make a photo album consisting of all the amazingly large items that people are able to carry on the backs of their motorbikes. We visited a fruit orchard and a floating village where the people live by fishing and by fish farming in tanks just below their decks. 

    Our group split up after lunch, and from then on the journey degenerated into rougher backpacker standards. We stayed on a one star hotel ($11/night, includes breakfast) in Chau Doc, and after riding a "fast boat" (we had a choice, "fast boat" or "slow boat", but we couldn't see how any boat could have gone slower than ours) up a canal, with occasional glimpses of a road above the bank which a bus could have travelled on, but from our vantage point we got to see how families lived in stilt houses on the dike that formed the opposite side of our canal.  Here are more photos from our second day, and from our third day.

    Finally we left Vietnam, but that was a bit of an ordeal: we exited Vietnam on a barge, and had to hike with our bags to a small van quite far away in the heat. We had to walk through a border post where we were yelled at for taking photos of buildings that you can already see on google images and google earth. Once in the van we turned off the paved road and rode very bumpy dirt roads to an immigration outpost for Cambodia, where the driver took our passports away to be stamped, which took a half-hour. Then we turned back west and oddly enough, found ourselves back on the perfectly good paved road...we couldn't imagine why the immigration office hadn't been right on that road - or, indeed, right at the border crossing.

    The final ride to Phnom Penh wasn't too bad, and ended up at the Sinh Tours office. The whole tour had cost us only $151 U.S. for the two of us, which included six meals, two nights in hotels and all the land and water transport, so we felt grateful and satisfied with our value for money. Our host, Kristina O'Brien, was outside of town with a flat tire when we arrived, but we got connected soon enough, and have been very comfortable staying in the spare room of her apartment. 

    Here's a coincidence: two posts ago I began by stating that Greg Martin drove us to the subway to begin our trip; he's been our friend for over a quarter century. His sister lives in Sioux Lookout and has two daughters. Kristina grew up in Sioux Lookout and taught gymnastics to the daughters, Cesan and Alix, and Kristina's parents are friends with Greg's sister and her husband. It's a small world.

Next diary post: Phnom Penh, Cambodia