Day 3: Wednesday 11 Oct 2000
Mekong Delta

This entry posted on:
13 OCT 2000 at 0800	Vietnam
13 OCT 2000 at 0100	UTC
12 OCT 2000 at 2100	EDT
12 OCT 2000 at 1800	PDT

OK, it's official, we love this place. We just got back from dinner in the city of Can Tho on the Mekong River, here on day one of our two-day package tour of the Delta. If Day Two is anywhere near as cool as Day One, we are gonna be happy campers this time tomorrow. Quick story to show you what kind of place this country really is. We're walking back to the hotel with some of the folks we've befriended from our tour and a group of kids runs up to me shouting hello. Adorable little tykes with this boy about nine years old leading the pack. He pulls out a pen and shows it to me. I had no idea what he was saying, so I shrugged. He grabbed my hand and wrote, on my palm, "Ong ten gi?" Luckily, Mike was able to translate this as, "what's your name?" So I took the pen, grabbed his hand, and wrote "Lars" on it. Then they did the same for Mike. After a few minutes of pronunciation lessons from us, they shook our hands, smiled, said goodbye, and disappeared. That's what this country is like all the time... well, except when someone is trying to sell you something, but that's getting rarer as we get further away from Saigon. But wait, we need to start at the beginning. This morning, we woke up at 5 am, after not sleeping well. Both of us were a little stressed about the busy day we had planned. We needn't have been, it's been a breeze. We had a very full day, most of it without even having to stand up. We had breakfast, then checked out of The Rex and hopped a cab down to Pham Ngu Lau for our Sinh Cafe trip to the Mekong Delta. While I sat out and chatted up a couple of French girls and a young couple from Switzerland named Susan and Phillip, Mike was in the internet cafe uploading yesterday's update. Hour or so later, we found ourselves on an air-conditioned coach bus with Susan and Phillip, Swedes Karina and Chris, a big Norwegian we nicknamed Horst, Joe who lives in Manilla, but just happens to have gone to Syracuse two of the four years I was there, a foursome of Spaniards, and a German or two, all headed for "deepinahearta", Mekong Delta. As for the three hour bus ride to get us there, the real story is the driver's unusual methods for doing so as quickly as possible. Those of you who were fans of Europe '98 might remember our harrowing bus ride from Bellagio to Como... well this was a thousand times worse, and it this time it was sheer man-made terror. Our driver spent almost as much time in the very crowded oncoming lane as he did in the correct one. And it wasn't like he was doing 25 mph either, this guy was haulin' ass, and he hit the horn more often than he hit the brakes. And I guess he figured that he must've felt like if he was going to hit the brakes, well then he was damn sure gonna get his money's worth out of 'em because every time he did, we would all be thrown forward, sometimes to the point where we would have to brace ourselves on the seats in front of us. You think I'm joking? At one point, Schwartz saw the guy pass a truck that was in the process of passing another truck... a double pass!!! I missed this feat as I had long since decided that it would work out better for all concerned if I just didn't look, so I had turned my attention to the passing scenery. Which was fascinating. As we've mentioned before, the Delta is way flooded right now. The locals seem to be getting by, but as you can see from some of these pictures, it ain't exactly easy. I was struck by the thought that in two weeks, I head back home to my nice little two bedroom in Westwood. These folks are stuck here, and all they can really do about it is find a way to make do. But I'm sure they don't see it that way. If they did, I don't think they would seem so happy. Our first stop was in a town called My Hiep, where we were scheduled to hop aboard a couple of motorized dug-out canoes for a trip into the marshland. While we waited, we met a young kid with a pretty serious birth defect that had turned his right foot almost completely around on the end of his leg, but even that couldn't dampen this kid's mood. Anyway this kid, Phong was his name, was the first to introduce us to the tradition of producing a pen and writing your name on another person's hand by way of introducing yourself. Phong also caught a gecko for me, which I held until he squirmed free and scampered up a post while Phong and I tried, unsuccessfully, to recapture him. The boat ride was very cool. As we sailed deeper and deeper into the marsh, the dwellings got simpler, smaller, and more primitive until they were little more than thatched roof hootches on stilts sitting on outcroppings of black mud. As I watched this downgrade occurring, certain Delta lifestyle questions started to crop up: Like, at the end of the day, how do you know that chicken wandering our your front yard is yours and not the guy down the canal's? What exactly are the dietary requirements of a chained-up and obviously pissed off Rhesus Monkey anyway? And finally, if you wash your hair in the Mekong River, does it make your hair cleaner, or dirtier? All tough questions, and all questions which these people deal with every day. I don't know how they do it, but they don't seem to be unhappy. Quite the opposite, actually. I don't quite get it. Ah well, cultural disconnect I suppose. Waddaya gonna do? As we motored by, they would flash us their grins and wave while their kids ran along the riverbank shouting "hello" and squealing with delight when we would shout "hello" back. It's an amazing thing to be able to make people happy with such a simple thing. Does wonders for your mood. Or as Mike put it, being happy makes you smile, but smiling makes you happy. Along the way, we stopped at a former Viet Cong headquarters (read: some more swamp with a couple of thatched huts labeled VC Headquarters somewhere in the middle). To get there, we had to climb into these little three-man canoes rowed by little old ladies in black pajamas and rice hats (no coincidence, I'm sure). After the standard "water leech" warning and a quick joke admonishing the ladies "not to take us into Cambodia this time", we were off. Basically, we were rowed around in one big circle though this tiny little canal cut out of the undergrowth. The whole things had a Disney Jungle Cruise feel to it, which made me want to laugh, but then I got to thinking about Charlie running re-supply mission along this canal just thirty years ago and the situation became a little more sobering, especially given the fact that our guide had just taken us through a map that pointed out that some of the most intense fighting of the war happened right where we were standing. After a quick lunch at a restaurant on a covered pier (also very Disney-esque), we were back on the bus for another terror-filled trip to our next port of call, where our driver seemed to have used the short break to take a correspondence course in driving assholery. Mike found another way to up the fear ante this time, by pointing out that he didn't like it when the bus driver braked because he figured if the a situation is hairy enough to make THIS guy want to step on the brakes, it must be really dangerous, which pretty much blew my whole plan of keeping my head down and pretending not to notice that our driver was a crazy man! The scenery was different this time, consisting more of fields than paddies, in which farmers were standing cutting down crops with scythes and burning piles of chaparral. There were hundreds of these burning mounds and often we were driving through dense yellow smoke being carried across the street on the wind. We also passed over a very big, very well-designed bridge, which seemed very out of place here. Our third boat of the day (see? barely had to get up off our asses at all) departed from a port three hours up river from the city of Can Tho. Our tour guide Quy told us to leave our bags and the bus driver would meet us at the hotel in Can Tho... okaaaay. This boat was much bigger than the others. It was more like a big river tour boat with lots of cushioned bench seats. But we all wound up climbing onto the roof of the boat so we could get a better view of the surroundings. This was where we really started to feel like celebrities. Every boat we passed, every group of kids walking home from school, every girl riding a bike in her ao dai made it a point to wave and smile. We kept passing by these strange mills where they seemed to be shoving big bushels of long stalks into an oven of some sort. We couldn't tell what they were but whoo-doggey did they stink! Lot of things stink around here... you should try walking down the live animal aisle at one of the local markets sometime. We're thinking of changing the title of this travelogue to "Mouth Breathing Tour, 2000!" Turns out these mills were sugar refineries, which put the last piece of the puzzle into the comparison I had been making between life in the Mekong Delta and life in the Mississippi Delta. You wouldn't think there would be enough scenery to keep you occupied for three hours, but you'd be wrong. Even when there wasn't much to look at on shore, the sky was in the process of putting on these amazing shows for us. Multi-layered clouds with rainbows of color and streaks of dying daylight struggling through in striking golden beams. It was dark by the time we rolled into Can Tho City. We disembarked to the dulcet tones of the Bee Gees, which were being played by the harbor master on 11. Ya know... love... it's as high as a mountain, and harder to climb. And finally we arrived at our "hotel." How to describe The Hau Giang "B" Hotel"? Well, let's just say we went from "Rex" to "Rover." We got Room 305, which was a stark white room with a fan, a window with bars in it that passersby in the hallway could put their hands through, two beds (no top sheet) and, believe it or not, mosquito netting. The bathroom was hysterical. No shower, just two showerheads hanging in the middle of the wall. When this thing was running, it got everything, from toilet to walls to sink to mirror, wet. And why two shower heads? Well, one for hot and one for cold, of course. What we had to do was put the shower heads close together so that ice-cold and magma-hot would mix together to make luke-warm. This works about as well as you might expect though, and both Mike and I were heard to make some humorous exclamations during our showers. As a final indignity, it was too hot to use the blankets we were given and, without top sheets, we had no choice but to sleep on top of the fitted sheet without any covering at all. Funny thing is, as much of a dump as this was (and really, what more could we have expected from the hotel on a two-day tour that only cost 17 dollars per person?), we both slept longer and more soundly than we have yet on this entire trip. Which meant we would wake up refreshed and ready to go for Mekong Delta Day Two.

On to Day Four...

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