Down to the Delta (Days 18 and 19)

This was yet another very interesting day. 

We left Saigon first thing in the morning and headed south, to the Mekong Delta.  We went via the new motorway, which opened just a few weeks ago and is the only road in Vietnam where you are allowed to drive at 100 kilometres per hour, but that's the limit.  This highway is raised off the ground, as the Vietnamese want to protect against global warming.  Already, rising sea levels are taking out more and more of the delta.

The Mekong river rises in Tibet, then runs through China, Burma and Thailand, before reaching Vietnam.  As it reaches the sea, it flows into a huge delta, where they call it the Nine Dragons, one for each of the main distributaries of the river.  Actually, there are only eight rivers, but they also count one of the canals, since nine is their lucky number.

The delta is home to some 22 million people, a quarter of the population of Vietnam.  It is the breadbasket of the nation, producing, particularly, rice, a wide range of tropical fruits, corn and fish.  Many of the people live in houses built on stilts overhanging the river.  They look pretty precarious and I can't imagine what they must be like in the middle of a cyclone.

On the way to the delta, we stopped at a wholesale market (reasonably interesting) and yet another temple, this time of the Cao Dai sect.  In Vietnam, it has about 2.5 million adherents, with significant numbers in other countries, including the USA.  The religion is interesting in that the worshippers pray to  Buddah, Confucius, Jesus Christ, Shakespeare, Victor Hugo and Jane Fonda, a fairly eclectic mix!  Their temple is actually rather beautiful and extrememly colourful.

Talking of strange religions, the delta boasts one of the world's more obscure religions, for followers of the Coconut Monk.  This ex-engineer's only food is coconut and all he drinks is coconut milk.  Since the Vietnam war, he has been striving for peace, but generally seems to have been ignored by world leaders, although he did boast some thousands of followers until his recent death.  According to our guide, he died weighting only 47k.  I'm not sure that that speaks too highly for the coconut diet!

When we arrived in the delta proper, we were taken by boat round a floating market, then on to lunch at a pleasant place on one of the islands.  That's where I came across this large python!

After lunch we drove into Can Tho, where we stayed the night in a pleasant riverside hotel.  I hadn't realised there were very large towns in the delta and I don't know the population of Can Tho, but it certainly seems quite large.

The following day we drove to the second largest town in the delta, Chao Doc, for our last night in Vietnam.  I'm currently in the hotel, which is right on the river Mekong.  Tomorrow morning we leave by boat right from the hotel, at 7am in the morning, a bit early for my liking.

Unfortunately, our drive was somewhat longer than it would normally be as part of the main road had collapsed and we had to take a 40k detour on a rather minor road.  This led to some interesting traffic incidents, to say the least.  One of my favourite pastimes has become sitting in the coach watching the antics of the traffic.  I am just fascinated by it, but so glad I didn't do the cycling trip I had planned.  I must say I am very impressed with the level of skill exhibited by the bikers and cyclists and even more impressed by their cool demeanour.  They seem to be inches from certain death time and time again, but show no emotion and just carry on as if nothing has happened.  It doesn't matter whether there are two, three, four or even five on the motor-bike, if there are babies squeezed between the adults, if they're on the mobile phone or if they're riding two or three abreast, whatever happens, they just carry on quite unperturbed.  It's quite astonishing.

The trick seems to be to just aim where you want to go with confidence and expect the other drivers to make the necessary adjustments.  Somehow it seems to work, most of the time.  Time and again, our coach would overtake some other vehicle, heading straight towards a bunch of oncoming bikers.  They would just calmy move across, often off the road completely, to let the bus through.  But they didn't seem at all bothered.  Or we'd be overtaking a motor-bike and another motor-bike would be coming towards us, on our side of the road (i.e. completely on the wrong side).  Again, somehow the two bikes would sort themselves out and no one would be hurt.  Uncanny.

We didn't do much on the way to the hotel, other than to soak up the delta and watch the traffic.  At one point we came across one of the many wedding ceremonies they have in Vietnam.  In this case, they'd just decided to extend the party area right across one side of the main road through the village and so the traffic from both directions suddenly all converged onto the narrow strip of road that was left.  Incidentally, it's considered bad luck to see a wedding before a funeral, but good luck to see a funeral before a wedding.  So if someone sees a funeral on the way to work, they are happy as it means they'll have a good day.  They are so superstitious.

We had a good lunch in a rickety floating restaurant on the Mekong, near to where the film Apocalypse Now was shot.  I ate a local fish called basa, cooked with vegetables in a hot pot.  After we'd arrived at the hotel, we took a trip on a boat up the river and visited a fish farm, where they produce the basa.  The farms are rather small and look like floating houses.  There are some 20,000 such farms on the Mekong, each producing about two tons of fish per year.  We watched the fish being fed and what a frenzy that caused.

The ubiquitous water hyacinth was much in abundance on the river.  Although it grows wild, the locals use every part of it.  The stems are used to produce a kind of straw that they use for making some kind of basket, which is highly sought after in Russia.  The foliage is used for animal feed and the roots for fertilizer, so nothing is wasted.

As our last outing in Vietnam, we went to the top of a local 'mountain', partly by bus, partly by foot and looked out over the delta.  It was the first time I'd seen it as I'd imagined it, that is, acres and acres of flat rice paddies.  Unfortunately, it was a bit hazy as they'd been burning off the waste from some of the paddies.  In the distance, to the north-west we could see Cambodia, where we're off to tomorrow.