Mekong Delta

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This first photo is the last one Fran took before her phone was stolen. It's an add-in.

Except for the accident it was a terrific day. We drove about 2 hours south of Saigon to the Mekong Delta. This is a big geographic area covering about 15% of Vietnam. Where we went there were small towns and smaller hamlets; farmers, fishermen and fish growers. We got off the bus at a local market where the girls shopped and Gary and I followed the confusing narrative of the last 2 minutes of the Superbowl. A little further along we stopped and got on a small boat. We motored down the fast flowing muddy river, past jungle covered dikes, fish traps, water hyacinth, and past small vessels docked against the shore. I thought about how dangerous it must have been during the war to be on a Swift Boat. Our sailors would have been sitting ducks for enemies that they could never see.

This area had been and could still be beautiful, but it's dirty with a lot of trash, agricultural runoff and untreated sewage fouling the river. After the 20 minute boat ride we got on bicycles and started an 8 km ride. The main road was maybe 10 feet wide, two way, with pedestrians, bicycles, motor scooters and even some cars and trucks. We stopped at a factory, using that term very loosely, where 4 women each made about 2,000 disks of rice paper a day and earned about $7. This area is much poorer than Saigon. We were glad to turn off onto the smaller road, maybe 8 foot wide. Like in the cities, when a scooter passed either way you just kept going. When you were honked at that was just to let you know that they were there. Honking is not an aggressive thing. We are learning. On we went. A little later we stopped again where Gary and I demonstrated for the ladies how to cross a monkey bridge (picture attached).

We were feeling very good and very confident, especially after turning off this road onto a smaller road, this one maybe 6 feet wide, like a wide concrete sidewalk. And it was on that narrow country lane when disaster struck. Gasp. Don’t worry, everyone is ok. Just a little blood and some what will be expensive cosmetic damage. Judi failed to properly negotiate a curve in the road, continuing straight when she should have turned left, dirt biking for a few feet before launching over the handlebars. "I'm ok," she proclaimed. "Just a scratch and a broken tooth." No tears, not even any cussing. Vietnam is turning out to be a dangerous country. The score so far, one stolen iPhone and one lost tooth.

Plan B went into effect. Our bicycle guide road away carrying Judi’s bike next to him. In a while he came back on a motor scooter. Judi hopped on. We got on our bikes and went further, crossing a small bridge onto a narrower road. We stopped at a very nice small house. A little, old man greeted us with water hyacinth flowers and insisted that we hand the flowers to our ladies and kiss them. We suffered through that. Just joking Fran. Then we sat for some green tea. The man is a tropical fruit farmer, having inherited his land from his father. It’s a relatively large farm and he walked us through it. After passing the ages with the fighting cocks, we walked down a dirt path through groves of all sorts of tropical fruit trees, many of which were ready for harvest. The fruit being harvested that day was what’s called jack fruit. Easier to look up than explain. In a grove there was a table set up with tea and all sorts of local fruit to try, including a kind of lychee, bright red in color with soft thorns all over. I asked the an why he thought this lychee had thorns and the other one which grows in the same field has none. His reply was to ask me why some men had whiskers and others never do. After a while he insisted I get in the hammock. I protested that I’m too big but he said, no, it was a very strong hammock. Photo attached. Lots of laughs here. He was a sweet and funny old guy. He was only 69 years old but he looked 90. He did have several great grand children. He told us that early in the war he was in the South Vietnamese army but he left, went back to his farm, and became Viet Cong. Apparently this was not an unusual set of events. At the end of the war it was better to have been VC.

Back on the bikes (motor scooter for Judi) we went back across the bridge into an area a little less rural, stopping at another nice house. This stop was for lunch. It wasn’t a restaurant it was just a house. We went to wash our hands in the back, scooping out water from a barrel which held water collected from cisterns. The river water is not drinkable without purification and several passes over a filtering system. We saw the pig pen in the back with the sow and a couple of little ones. Lunch was a feast. It included fried river fish which was cooked whole, skin and scales on. Gary demolished the fish, especially the cheeks. It was good but I was a little grossed out knowing where it lived before it was caught. We made our own fresh rolls with rice paper that we dipped in water and then rolled vegetables and either pork or not. There was a sweet and sour noodle soup and some chicken with vegetables too. Everything was very fresh and we were all dismayed that we felt good all afternoon and evening. Our experience in Vietnam is proving that having a bureaucracy of restaurant health inspectors is overrated. (Well, by the time of this final edit, some 36 hours later, Fran is having some "issues." Maybe I shouldn't have written that last sentence - update tomorrow)

A short walk to the van and we headed back to our hotel for a very much needed shower. Last night we went to an art gallery and had a drink with the gallerist, a young Vietnamese woman who grew up in San Diego. She was a boat person, having been adrift in the China sea for some time with her mother and two older siblings until picked up by a ship and delivered to a refugee camp in Guam. She doesn’t remember this. She was only two. They ended up in San Diego having been sponsored by an American man. this is how a lot of Vietnamese boat people ended up in the US, people sponsored them. I almost had forgotten that. She wanted to come back to Vietnam and she did, against her mother’s wishes. She had sacrificed so much for them to be Americans and it was wrong for her to reject this. She’s now been in Vietnam for 17 years. She’s married to a British man and has an adorable little girl.



We were pretty tired. Judi was still a sport. I’m writing this from the airport as we wait for our flight this morning to Cambodia.

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Photos

Pancakes
Last picture Fran took before her phone was stolen