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Published: August 10th 2007
One thing we found ourselves doing in Vietnam - horror of horrors! - was getting up early, so it wasn't too difficult to be up for our 8am pick up for our day trip to the Mekong Delta. We were glad that we had only decided to do the day trip as other people we had spoken to had said the second day wasn't really worth the extra money, with most of it being spent on a bus.
We were quite excited to be seeing the Mekong Delta, apparently the rice bowl of Vietnam, but Donna was un-containable as we had been promised coconut sweets, fresh fruit, biking and seeing the real villages of Vietnam. We arrived at the jumping off point for the Mekong Delta, we got on our boat and headed off across the river (with an almost run-in with a huge car ferry!) into a channel which would take us to the coconut sweet factory. The factory was just an open air hut with lots of people working in it, with different sections - squeezing the juice from the coconuts, stirring the mixture, spreading the mixture, cutting the sweets once hard and wrapping the sweets...as soon as
we arrived we were handed some fresh coconut sweets to eat, they were still warm and were so delicious we had to buy some. We also got handed some banana wine to drink which was far too strong for 10am, so instead we just kept on walking around the 'factory' and pinching more sweets to eat as we went! We also tried the banana sweets offered but they weren't as nice as the coconut ones.
Feeling ever so slightly sick from the amount of sweets we had eaten, we got back on the boat to be ferried to a restaurant for lunch before we went cycling through some villages. Let us say that the lunch was bad, a tiny and super-hard spring roll, a bit of rice and some morning glory (spinach) with a bit of vegetable soup. Of course we could order more but when we looked at the menu there was only one chicken dish on it, the rest was turtle (we thought that was an endangered species?), snake, squirrel and eels...we don't know about you but we didn't really fancy any of those to eat! The chicken dish at 130,000 dong (£4) was a little expensive
(the price in restaurants in Saigon was 29,000 dong or 90p) so we decided to go hungry and based on the quality of the food we had been given we thought it would be a real waste of money.
After the unappetising lunch we chose our bikes, Donna was pleased that she got one with a bell, Neil wasn't so pleased when Donna started using the bell like a horn 'bring-bringing' at everything that moved! The cycle ride was great, biking down narrow stream-side paths, dodging motorbikes coming the other way and seeing villages and kids jumping up and down waving and shouting 'ello to us! Our only complaint is that the ride wasn't long enough for us, we enjoyed it so much, but we think everyone else on the trip had had enough of the biking by the time it was over!
We then headed off to see a bee-keeping and honey making - we'd say factory but it was a family's house that kept bees and a python of all things. Apparently the honey produced in the Mekong Delta area is one of the best in the world as the flowers that the bees feed are
year round, in other areas bee-keepers have to feed the bees with sugar...however this may be rubbish, we don't know enough about honey to know if it's true! After seeing the bees (actually they looked more like the wasps we get in the UK), we were told they didn't sting but we didn't get close enough to them to test that out, the owner of the house pulled out a python and offered for us all to have our photos taken with it. Donna jumped at the chance, her fear of snakes has almost gone, as everywhere else we have been with snakes like this have wanted to charge extra for photos. As you can see from the pictures, Donna had to give the snake a good talking to, much to the amusement of Neil, as it started to curl it's tail up her shorts!
The most exciting part of the day was to come, the fresh exotic fruit eating part of the day that is! Let us say now that everything and we mean everything that we encountered on this tour was geared up for tourism, but we didn't care we had fun! Our group sat at a
table and got fresh fruit delivered to us, which we both did a great job of clearing up and being 'human dustbins for fruit' when everyone else got bored after 2 pieces of fruit each. We tried logan berries for the first time and also had bananas, pointless dragon fruit, pineapple (which we dipped into salted chilli to bring out the sweet taste of the pineapple more) and rambutans (like a furry lychee). By this point we were joking that this trip was like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory for Donna! We also had more honey tea to drink whilst a group of Vietnamese women came and sang 'traditional' Vietnamese songs to us...but wait, listen to the video we took, doesn't it sound like Auld Lang Syne?
The day came to an end with us being paddled back to our boat in a canoe by an old woman in a conical hat, it was really peaceful down the channels of the delta and we spotted all sorts of lizard type things coming out of the water (yes we are sooo ignorant of nature!) but we were soon delivered back to the boat and then bus so we could get back
to Saigon, for our last night in Vietnam. Sadly, we had to leave the wonderful Vietnam, we had a great time. It was a country which surprised us, the food was better than we ever expected, the beer, well do we need to say any more about the fabulous beer? and the people were great too. Vietnam is changing and developing so rapidly we are glad we experienced it before the country changes too much!
Our next stop is Singapore, a much needed (but expensive) shopping stop-over to replace some of our worn out or, by now shrunken by bad laundry places, clothes...
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