March 10, 2024

Sorry for the long post.

The day started early since we had to meet our guide at 7:30. We were checked out and waiting in the lobby a little before the meeting time after spending 85,000 dong on a small cup of Starbucks coffee.

Early morning view from hotel room

Our first stop was a rice noodle factory which is also where you pick up the boat for the floating market. This factory takes the raw rice and grinds it down to remove the hulls and then adds water and tapioca to create a thin batter which they then pour onto a round cooking surface. Sort of like a giant pancake.

It only stays on the hot surface for a few seconds and then you use an elongated wicker basket on a handle to “spin” the large rice pancake and put it on a cooling mat.

Once the rice “pancake” is cool it goes out into the sun to dry. it takes about 2 days to dry depending on weather and humidity. They can also add other ingredients into the rice batter for added flavor and color. For example turmeric gives you yellow noodles. The flavor added is very minimal.

Once the “pancake” is dry it gets cut into strips and put into a machine that makes it into noodles. They sort the noodles based on color. Then the noodles get packaged into an assortment pack and either sold fresh or vacuum packed. Our guide brought a fresh pack to take back to her village for lunch today. We have been invited to meet her family and have lunch and meet some of the other people in the village.

Feeding it into the machine The different colors

After the noodle factory we boarded our boat and headed to the floating market.

Because we were on the big river with lots of traffic we were asked to wear life jackets.

A little more about the floating market, which is the largest on the Mekong Delta. These large boats, which are house boats since the families live on them, go around the Mekong Delta and collect produce grown by the farmers. They load the produce into their large boats and head to a central location where all the boats gather every morning and they sell the produce they have collected to smaller boats that come to buy for retail.

The floating market is one of the only ways that people that live deep in the Mekong Delta get their produce sold.

Since the families live on the boat this is the only life they have ever known. The floating market is a dying industry as more modern means of transport keeps evolving and can be faster and cheaper. Imagine being a child on one of these floating market boats. This is the only life you have even known. You are constantly moving around so you have no friends. No chance to go to school, no TV or video games or even internet. Your only choice is to do as your parents have done and live on the river.

Now a days there are more tourists than participants in the floating market. It is a dying economy. The way you know what the boats are selling is by looking at what they have hanging from the cane pools on the bow of the their boat.

This boat was selling melons and potatoes The tourists are the people in the life jackets

After the visit to the floating market we took a ride up the river along smaller branches that took us deep into the Mekong like we did yesterday. At one point we had to turn around and take another branch because a big boat was blocking the channel we we going down.

Thousands of people live on the river banks and the houses vary from shacks to very nice estates. What it looks like is all garbage and sewage goes into the river from the people living on it even though it is their livelihood and their food source.

Not sure if this is laundry drying or privacy/sun screens

This was the most disturbing thing we saw. There is so much garbage in the river that our boat had to stop at least 3 times to get plastic bags out of the propeller.

After the river trip we left the Mekong Delta area and headed toward another town on our way back to Ho Chi Minh City and visited a large Buddhist temple with lots of Buddha statues including some very large ones.

A very happy Buddha

It was a quick visit to the temple and then off to our guide Hanna’s village and house. She helped her parents pay for the house and there were some elements of the house that were beautiful such as folding glass doors that allow the whole front of the house to open. What is so different from us is minimal furniture. It is just not a priority to their culture. Bedrooms have mats or mattress sitting on the floor with no bed frames. They have no dressers, no living room furniture and even the dining room is a cheap round table with plastic stools that stay stacked up on the side unless it is meal time.

The dining room table with the kitchen in the background. Minus the TV nothing hanging on the walls. No personal pictures or art work. Our guide Hanna is to the left of Kathy and next is her mother, then aunt and lastly father. Her brother did not like his picture taken.

The family consisted of Hanna’s mother and father, aunt, brother and sister in law and niece. Plus tons of people that dropped by to see us that were related somehow.

They insisted on making us lunch and at one point Hanna’s brother left for a few minutes and came back with a bundle of fresh green basel that he had run to the garden to pick.

For lunch they served me beef pho, pork and steamed rive with eggs. For Kathy they had sweet and sour soup, sweet & sour fish and vegetable noodles with tons of mushrooms. It was a ton of food and for awhile they just watched us eat but then they finally joined us.

None of them, minus our guide, could speak english and Hanna had taught us some Vietnamese words such as “hello”and “my name is” and “thank you”. We got to practice those phrases a lot. All the women that came were very complimentary of us and kept saying that we had beautiful skin and they loved the color and they loved our hair and colored eyes. Kathy and I took our sunglasses off so they could see our eye color and they could not stop looking and smiling.

At one point they wanted us to see their “garden” which is really a series of huge growing fields that they all tend. Hanna’s brother and father had Kathy and I get on the back of their motor bikes to take us to the fields.

Kathy with Hanna’s dad. I rode with brother but like I said he does not like his picture taken.

When walking through the fields the first thing the family did was cut a bunch of coconuts and show us how to cut them to where there is just a small hall to put a straw in to drink the coconut milk. We all get a coconut.

Kathy, Hanna, her niece, aunt, mom and dad.

At one point another neighbor showed up and handed Kathy a small drip coffee maker and me a very pretty hand fan. We are in the middle of all these plants and she is giving us gifts.

We walked through the fields and they showed us all the different foods that were being grown. One of the big things they grow is dragon fruit along with coconuts, rice, kumquats, spring onions and even cilantro.

We went into one area where lots of women were working the crop and all were very excited to see us. They had us come over and have our picture with them.

They were so happy to see us.

The women started pulling up big bundles of crops, spring onions and cilantro and handing them to us. We kept saying “no more” but they just were not listening.

Kathy with the cilantro and me with the spring onions. We have them to our driver who has been wonderful the last 2 days.

Another field we walked through had more dragon fruit and when the women saw us she asked us to please wait and ran to get the best dragon fruit that is only reserved for family. She brought back 6 big pieces of fruit and cut 2 of them up and insisted we eat it right then. That was my first time with dragon fruit and Kathy said not to expect what I buy in the store to taste like it.

Our lips are red from eating the fruit. They all wanted their picture with us.

We also stopped to visit the grave of our guide’s aunt who passed away in 2022. They bury their family in crypts in the fields so that they re always with them. Some fields had a dozen crypts in them and some are very ornate. Hanna wanted her aunt to meet us because she loved foreigners.

Family crypts in the yard.

After our visit to the fields we went back to the house and the lady with the dragon fruit showed up all changed and dressed up and brought another bag of fruit for us. We also gave this to out driver. She could not stop touching our faces and our hair. They were fascinated with us.

Hanna’s father and brother both play instruments that are uniquely Vietnamese and they play them at funerals which can go on for 5 days. They both demonstrated their playing techniques for us.

Hanna’s father playing the horn, it was loud Her brother plays an instrument called a 1 string and you use a toothpick to make the music and the little ball gets pulled to make the sound last longer.

We must have said goodbye 500 times and finally we got back in the car to go. It really was a nice day and it was great seeing how they live. The things that are important to us are not important to them. Like material belongings.

We made it back to the ship around 7:30 and we had a wonderful and memorial time in the Mekong Delta.

Our guide Hanna and driver Handsome.

We have a half a day in Ho Chi Minh City on Monday. All on board by 1pm so we will see what we can do in that short time.