Touring The Mekong Delta

Our second day in Ho Chi Minh City, actually our only full day in Ho Chi Minh City, wasn’t really spent in Ho Chi Minh City for the most part. Instead, we left early in the morning to do a brief tour of the Mekong Delta.

According to our tour guide, the Mekong River is the fifth-longest river in the world, starting in China and traveling through Nepal, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and emptying out into the Pacific Ocean in Vietnam. All I really knew about the Mekong Delta is that it is often mentioned in Vietnam shows and movies. As beautiful as it was, it didn’t look like it would be a pleasant place to fight a war.

The trip started with a two-hour bus ride to a little town that serves as an entrance to the delta for tourists. There were souvenir shops everywhere as well as boats for hire to venture into the area. We already had a boat rented, so we went directly there and started on our journey through the delta.

We stopped at one of the largest islands in the area, which has been converted into a tourist stop. The star attraction on the island is the ability to watch the villagers make coconut candy (there were coconut palms everywhere on the island), from husking the coconut to the final stages. There also was a chance to sample some of the local wines and I had banana wine, coconut wine and snake wine. For the record, the snake wine was the best. The highlight of the island for me, though, was being able to hold an eight-foot python and to get my picture taken with the big dude.

From this island, it was time to head to the rowboats, though we didn’t do the actual rowing. We took about a 20-minute rowboat cruise down the river to a second island. The trip was hot and sticky and all I could think of the entire time was Apocalypse Now. I kept an eye out for Charlie, but I’m pretty sure I was safe the entire time. On the second island, we had lunch, which included fish egg rolls, soup and a few other items. We finished it off with a shot of honey wine, which I found to be a little too sweet, albeit tasty.

After lunch, we went on a little tour of the island in a cart seating six people that was hooked to the back of a motorbike. We had helmets, but the ride did seem a bit treacherous as we were going down narrow roads at a moderate speed and had to constantly be on the lookout for low hanging palm tree branches and electrical wires. We didn’t see a hell of a lot and I’m not sure what the purpose of it was except to demonstrate how the safety laws in everybody’s native country were inconsistent with those of Cambodia. Whatever, though. It was a fun-enough way to kill an hour or so.

We hopped back on the boat and returned to the little tourist town from which we started the trip. From there, it was a three-hour return by bus to Saigon – longer on the return trip because of the traffic. I think that I may have about 600 words left to say about Ho Chi Minh City, so I’ll try to finish it up in my next post.