Chào Viet Nam (day 2 & 3 - Mekong Delta)

Day 2: Mekong Delta Tour

The next morning, we had breakfast at the hotel and I enjoyed a bowl of beef ball soup noodles and a vietnamese sub/baguette, all made by myself (well I chose the ingredients) so I am not sure how authentic it was, but it was YUMMY!

We joined a local tour group that caters to Foreigners so we had an English-speaking tour guide and air conditioned bus, but as it was low-budget, the hotel was not the best and meals were not all included. more info on that later in this entry...

FYI, it can be a bit chaotic while waiting for the bus, there's a backpackers' area within HCM and it can be dodgy in the area if you are not careful. But as most of the local tour companies gather there, we had to go there to change to our tour bus to the Mekong Delta. After we got on the tour bus, and traveling for 5 minutes we were told that we would have to get off and change bus because the bus we were sitting on would not make it to the Mekong Delta... :s ... lol... so we got off and while waiting for the replacement to come, we spotted a piglet in the park! So cute! It totally ignored us.

I think the ride took us 2 hours from HCM to a city by the Mekong Delta, I can't remember the name. I really should have written it down. Most of the time I'll take a photo of a sign with the name of the city, but this time I couldn't find any... sorry! We got onto a river boat to tour the area along the Mekong River. Typical of the Mekong is brown water and lush river beds full of water coconut trees.

We visited a bee farm and tried some natural honey tea, royal jelly (which is a jelly from the queen bee), and saw some gigantic jackfruits and I got a chance to wrap a cobra around myself. This bee farm and other "farms" or "workshops" that we visited are really the home of families, they live and work in the same place. And they all have a mini zoo in their yard.

left: interesting way to hold a bowl

middle: Bees!

right: didn't know jackfruits knew how to climb trees

left: jackfruit twice, no, thrice the size of my mom's head!

middle: hehe, this puppy was camera shy, s/he kept trying to hide

right: traditional Vietnamese house, the wood is beautiful - I think most Vietnamese families/homes use (Chinese) redwood furniture, highly prized and expensive

My mom not only enjoyed a coconut (or more) a day, but she also really loved putting lime juice and even the whole lime in a lot of her dishes. The lime that you see here is not really a lime, it's call a Kumquat - but I guess it might not be the ripe orange kind that we see usually during CNY... it had a slight tangy flavor but also a sweetness to it. And it was really nice with the honey tea.

These two little girls lived in the traditional Vietnamese home, and if you can see, they have a huge wooden bed in the living room, which they like to lie on for an afternoon nap (I think it's similar to Korean tables in their front yard). I love how the little girls decorated their home with colourful scraps of fabric.

Then we went on ride through one of the many canals that lead into the Mekong. These canals were made three hundred years ago when a Vietnamese General went through Vietnam looking for ways to go through Vietnam. They were nice and shady from all the tall water coconut trees along the side of the canal.

above right: water coconut, did you know that's what they look like? reminds me of a bunch of star anises

below left: fish nets

I have to mention, although the heat in Vietnam is excruciating under the sun, when you're in the shade, it can be quite nice and cool. Also unlike Hong Kong, it wasn't humid, so it was much easier to adjust to. Now that I'm back in Hong Kong, I find it difficult to adjust to the humidity - it's suffocating.

After traversing the canal, we went to a coconut candy "factory". The tour guide showed us how all these industries are eco-friendly and used the natural resource and return it to earth. For example, the coconuts are cracked open, and the shells are used as fuel and once burned, they they will become fertilizer. The coconut juice is for consumption, coconut oil and milk can also be extracted. The oil is used to make soap, the milk can be made into coconut candy.

Then we made our way to lunch. We had a splendid lunch, with fried fish wrap, grilled prawns, grilled chicken and rice. Before I get into the details of the scrumptious lunch, I have to warn you not to annoy tour guides. Some of the group members complained to the tour guide early on in the trip and they also left the group and got lost and had to call the tour company to ask the tour guide to find them. So he was quite happy to find my Vietnamese friends and we did not complain one little bit.

below: Elephant Ear fish - I only learned of this from a German traveler, cuz he told us about trying this fish and I misheard when I asked him what's the weirdest thing he tried so far in Vietnam. He replied Elephant ear fish (I didn't hear 'fish') and Tien was also a little stunned too, but he meant this fish... :)

While everyone else had only a plate of rice and grilled chicken, we were treated to fried fish wrap and grilled prawns. But we didn't notice that until after we had cleared all the food on the table... we attacked the food and didn't even look at the other tables. When we finally realized that other tables had only the simple plate of rice and chicken, Tien asked the tour guide why we got such good food and he said we were VIP... hahaha....

above: cleared ALL the plates! The plate in the lower left corner is full of prawn shells.

Then we went for a performance of traditional Vietnamese music. The interesting thing is that there was an instrument that had only one string but can play different notes - Dan Bau. After the performance, the musician even taught us how to play the instrument. You pluck the string with a pick (shaped like a tooth pick) with your right hand and with your left hand, you can 'control the vibration of the string' so that it makes a funny twannnnnggg sound.... (hahaha, don't really know how to explain it).

So after this it concluded our river tour for the day and we made our way to Can Tho to check-in to our hotel. Again, the tour guide brought us to a higher-grade hotel even though we had only paid for the lower cost hotel. Although the higher-grade hotel was still not of international standards, at least things appeared more clean, although all of us suffered from mosquitos all night....

For dinner, the tour guide brought us to a restaurant and we didn't have anything very special that night. We ordered fried rice and noodles, and it wasn't that good. I think next time we will stick to Vietnamese food rather than Chinese.

Then we walked around a bit, but as the city is quite small, it felt like most of the stores closed quite early. On our way back to the hotel, we stopped by to try some street food, and my friends recommended that I try some toasted rice paper, they had been flavored with coconut, so there was a slight sweetness to them as well. They were very crispy and very fragile.

We turned in early as well, as we had to meet the group at 8:30am the next morning.

Day 3: Mekong Delta Tour

After a simple breakfast of fresh fruits and noodle soup we boarded a boat to go to the floating market. Similar in concept to the floating markets in Thailand, but as the Mekong River is much wider, the floating market is not as compact. The "stores" are on river boats and it's more of a wholesale market for fruits and vegetables.

Along the river, we saw a variety of boats, and actually a lot of the boats have a kind of painting where the bow looks like a bird with eyes and a beak... Kind of reminded me of Thomas the tank engine and all his friends.

On either side of the river bank, we saw a lot of shacks and houses, and you will see a mix of very broken and old houses and some very modern and richly decorated houses. Side note: talking with one of Tien's family friends, property prices in HCM are not cheap. A house can cost several hundred thousands to a million US dollars.

above left: each boat sells different fruits and vegetables, and to let buyers know what is available, the owners do not put up written signs, instead they hang samples of the fruit/vegetable on the pole at the front of their boat

After seeing the floating market, which was a little disappointing, we went to visit a family run rice paper/noodle making factory. As I mentioned before, many of these family run factories are actually right in their front/back yards. The process of making rice paper is actually quite simple...

1. rice gets broken and grounded into powder --> rice flour

2. a paste is made from the rice flour and steamed into thin sheets (the fuel used to steam the rice flour is the husk from rice grains, after they are burned, they will be used as fertilizers in the fields)

3. the sheets are dried by air

4. to make noodles, they cut the sheets into noodle-thin strips

This family also had some baby chicks only days old and two rabbits...

Afterwards, we made our way to a rice factory where they process grains and polish and package bags of rice for export. There's so much rice in Vietnam that this is one of their major export.

Then we enjoyed a simple vietnamese lunch which included Can Chua, a sweet&sour soup that I love! We had this the first day during dinner as well, but this one was more like the one that I had learned to make in Toronto. Also, I think it's become one of my mom's favorite dishes from Vietnam, she kept asking for that at every meal... hahaha... kind of like how my dad kept ordering Soondupu-jigae in Korea.

After lunch, we made the 4 hour journey back to HCM, on the way we stopped at a BEAUTIFUL rest stop... you're probably wondering it's weird that I would mention a rest stop, but this one is soooo beautiful that it deserves to be mentioned. The Mekong Rest Stop is lush and green, if only all rest stops in the world were this beautiful.. and clean.

Along the way to and from the Mekong Delta, we saw many farm lands, and the peculiar thing was that we saw monuments that look like graves. And they are. This is because Vietnamese believe that when family members pass away, their sprits stay around and so they bury their family in their fields, and some even right in their front/back yard.

We had dinner when we got back to HCM and then my mom and I went to walk around the neighborhood so that she would know where to go over the next few days when I left her on her own in the city and travel to Nha Trang with Tien and some friends.

right: the Opera House in HCM

HCM and Vietnam has some amazing architecture from the French colonial period, more buildings tomorrow.