Boating the Mighty Mekong

The Mekong Delta takes up the southern tip of Vietnam, and thanks to it's lushness, it has helped make Vietnam the world's second largest rice exporter, according to Lonely Planet.

Lisa and I decided to get there by group tour. It was cheap and made things easy. It was a two day/one night tour and advertised stops in a few towns and floating markets along the way. Floating markets are made up of boats anchored in the middle of the river selling wholesale produce to buyers. It's a pretty cool sight, but the best action is seen really early in the morning.

Our tour yesterday did what tourist-tours do: We stopped at a bunch of places to buy crap and to see some educational things, like how to make coconut candy (I can just hear Dave gagging as he reads this), rice paper, and puffed rice treats (they only look like Rice Krispy treats, which was a disappointment to me). We went to the Cai Be floating market, but it was late afternoon so everything good was pretty much over.

Today was going to prove to be much of the same, so we decided to ditch our tour and do it on our own. The group stopped in Can Tho last night and we had some free time. We arranged for a nice lady to take us in her boat to the Cai Rang floating market this morning at 6am. We spent the night in a hotel arranged by the tour. I swear it sounded like we were sleeping on the side of the road. I'm convinced that the roof was just corrugated plastic with nothing insulating the noise from outside, and we were right on a main road. I think I got a few good hours of sleep there, but not much!

The departure was early and slightly painful, but worth it. The river was teeming with boats, and because we took a small motor boat instead of the larger tour group boats, we were able to maneuver right in there with everyone else.

After we returned to land, with the help of a local colleague of Lisa's, we took a "non-tourism" bus back to Saigon. It was the best air-conditioning I have encountered on a Vietnamese bus yet.

I left Lisa alone this afternoon to take a nap and walked around Saigon a bit. I went to visit the War Remnants Museum. Interesting but VERY one-sided (not surprisingly). I think the most interesting/sad part of it was seeing a special exhibit on US Vietnam War correspondents. There was a room full of photos with the stories of what they depicted as well as who took them. It was an homage to the fallen of the press corps, and therefore many of the pictures were labeled as the last photo taken before the particular photographer was killed, sometimes immediately after the photo was taken. It was an emotional exhibit.

There were some pretty graphic photos and stories of other events, usually involving the bloody torture and murder of civilian women and children, and the aftermath suffered by victims of dioxin (Agent Orange) exposure. But of course the Viet Cong soldiers were nowhere to be found in any of the horrors of war. There was lots left unsaid. Not to say that what WAS shown wasn't horrible of course. And much of it can never be justified. But I do know it wasn't always that one-sided. As Lisa put it on another occasion, we have a lot left to learn.

In between all of this, I DO plan to relax some. :-) Tomorrow we plan to go to the beach for a few days. After my morning cooking class, of course!