Mekong Delta

[Again, catching up, six months late!]

After an early breakfast we boarded the bus for a long ride across southern Vietnam. Slowed first by the intense morning traffic in Ho Chi Minh City (primarily motorbikes -- literally by the thousands), and later by narrow, winding, rutted two-lane roads congested by bicycles and motorbikes, it was an all-day journey. We had only about 30 miles of brand new, modern motorway, just outside of the City.

The countryside in the delta, as one would expect, is flat. The rice paddies are crisscrossed by countless streams, canals, and irrigation ditches. Every farm has a family tomb or tombs containing the bodies of ancestors in above-ground sarcophagi, most brightly painted and freshly washed for the upcoming Tet holiday.

Towns we passed through were decked out with flags and flowers for the holiday, with lots of busy shoppers on the streets buying gifts and food items. We are told that virtually all shops will close during the entire nine-day holiday which will begin next Monday. Thus, everyone needs to stock up in advance. No last-minute trips to the grocery store!

Many towns also featured one or more rice processing facilities -- roughly the equivalent of grain elevators in Iowa towns, but these are more on the order of large, single-story warehouses. Farmers bring their rice, often by boat, to these places where it is milled and polished. The husks are not discarded, but are burned as fuel, used as fertilizer, or as animal feed roughage. The rice itself is bagged. We saw little Asian guys carrying what must have been 100 pound (or more) bags on their backs! The bags are stored until a container arrives, usually by semi tractor, then the container is loaded for export. Vietnam is the world's second-largest exporter of rice, according to our local guide, "Chariya" (who never stops talking). Thailand exports more tonnage, but does so using a considerably larger land area than Vietnam's Mekong Delta. So this truly is the breadbasket of Asia, as it has been for centuries. That's why it's been fought over for centuries, as well.

In addition to rice, a wide variety of fruits are grown here, as well as flowers. Flowers are particularly important now, as gifts for the new year. We fields of red and green, and saw truckloads of flowering plants being loaded and driving back toward Saigon.

We stopped for a coffee break at one little "truck stop." Our tour director bought everyone a dark, sweet Vietnamese coffee, each glass (not a cup) prepared in its own tin drip coffee-maker. Hammocks are available as resting spots for rice truck drivers as they sip their coffee. We sat in chairs, instead, and bought three-dollar hats from the guy wandering through, selling his wares. We also had opportunity to admire the owner's fighting roosters (although cock fighting is officially against the law, it is widely practiced).

Another stop was a quick roadside visit to a lotus pond. An old woman in her hammock was so sound asleep that she did not hear our bus pull up next to her little roadside stand until we had been there quite awhile and were ready to leave. Another was a quick walk-around of a brick factory. The word "factory" is used loosely here, as it seemed to be the project of a few families, or perhaps one extended family. Mekong River clay and the abundance of rice husks to fuel the kilns make this an ideal spot for brick making.

At one point we had to take a ferry across one of the many branches of the Mekong, as there was no bridge. Like everything else in Vietnam, the ferries maintained a frenetic pace, loading or unloading two or three boats simultaneously on each bank, while two or three others were in transit across the water. It was all very efficient, even if the appearance was chaotic.

Lunch was in a hotel restaurant in a small city along the way. The decorations from a wedding the previous weekend were still up in the dining room. The food was a bit different -- a bit more Chinese in style. Unfortunately, my stomach upset continues and I was unable to eat much.

The Chinese style is not accidental. The farther away we travel from HCM City the more we are struck by the similarities to China: The language, the culture, the lifestyle, the architecture, are all very familiar as Chinese -- far more so than what we have experienced in Myanmar, Thailand, or Laos.

One element that certainly was not Chinese or familiar was our brief visit to a Cao Dai temple. Cao Dai is a highly syncretic religion unique to Vietnam. It was an attempt by the founder, in the 1920s, to bridge the barriers among Buddhist, Catholic, Confusion, Taoist and other traditions (Moses and Mohammed did not make the cut, however). There are about 3 million Cao Dai adherents in Vietnam  today, we were told. The architecture of the building, like the theology, was also unique.

Our hotel is also reminiscent of China: Somewhat spartan, with no carpet, basic necessities and a wall-unit air conditioner, but pretty clean. After a couple hours rest, we met the group to walk a bit in the town after dark before dinner. We saw a catfish sculpture on the riverbank that celebrates the fishing industry here, and also saw a large number of "bonsai" trees -- very popular here, particularly as New Year's gifts, and possibly very expensive (up to $12,000 US we were told), though they seem to come in all price ranges. Dinner was in a "home," though the woman doing the cooking cooks for a living, and her home, like so many in the Chinese tradition, opens to the street and doubles as a restaurant by day, becoming a living room only after her guests have left and the wide door closed. Again, the food was very good, very authentic, and unlike anything we've had to date. And again, unfortunately, my stomach allowed me to do little more than taste a bit of everything.