Vietnam 2000

Day 4: Thursday 12 Oct 2000
Mekong Delta

This entry posted on:

13 OCT 2000 at 1900 Vietnam

13 OCT 2000 at 1200 UTC

13 OCT 2000 at 0800 EDT

13 OCT 2000 at 0500 PDT

We started the second day of our package tour of the Mekong Delta in the dining room of the "B" hotel (a "D-" if you ask me, but of course, no one did. At least it was clean). This country is so very cheap, it's amazing. I had two fried eggs, a large baguette, and a cup of white coffee (dark Vietnamese coffee with condensed milk in it... mmm mmmm!) for 10,000 VND, or about 72 cents.
After breakfast, we walked around the corner and got on another long motorboat for another trip into the canals.
Our first stop was a floating market. Imagine one long supermarket aisle in the middle of the Mekong River with boats on either side. You steam down the gauntlet between the other boats and people in those boats try to sell you everything from drinks to fruit, to meat and fish. Pretty cool actually, although you feel bad taking a spot in the rotation when you have no intention of buying anything. I mean, what am I gonna do with an entire pineapple, I'm on a boat in the middle of the Mekong River for Chrissakes!?!?!

Stop 2 was deeper in the canals where we got out to tour a rice paper making operation. I don't know what they do with the stuff, but watching them make it is mesmerizing. They ladle this white rice paste onto a hot plate and flatten it out like tomato sauce on an uncooked pizza crust. When the disks are cooked, they roll them onto these fat little straw batons and roll them back out onto long bamboo slats, to cool. And after that... we have no idea. We weren't even sure whether this stuff was for eating or not. I took a look at some of the finished product and it looked and felt an awful lot like plastic to me.

Later, we stopped in a small cafe for a snack of bananas and pineapple. Karina bought a bag of prawn sticks. Not believing the apparent, I asked what they tasted like. She said, "They taste like prawns." Her husband Chris was quick to add that "they smell like shit." This was also where Mike discovered exactly where the Vietnamese government places the cultural immorality bar. Apparently, Nelson are a perfectly acceptable entertainment choice for the local population.

Next, we went to a rice plant. Now, no one likes to look at a modern manufacturing process more than we do, but there is something really cool about seeing the same job done on a smaller, more primitive scale. Interesting to see how folks without access to modern techniques figure out how to do the same job as the big companies, with their fancy-schmancy machinery and their uptown ways.
This factory was a dark, cobwebby facility full of ancient machines clattering, clunking, and shaking away, each one powered by a series of enormous ragged belts. Mike pointed out as we walked behind the machines that he would hate to be there when one of those belts lets go.
We shared a look, then got outta there post haste.
Outside we ran into a little girl with a cute kitten. I remembered reading in some travel book that it's a good idea to carry a Polaroid because locals love to see themselves in pictures and leaving them as gifts is a good way to build goodwill. So I decided to use the closest thing available to us, Mike's digital camera LCD. I asked her if she would like to be in a picture and she smiled real big and nodded yes. But she went absolutely apoplectic when we showed her herself on the LCD.
Later, we had a chance to do it again when we had to get off the bus to ride a ferry across the Mekong River. The ferry was packed with vehicles and locals of all kinds, selling the weirdest shee-aht imaginable. Mike actually bought a small sponge cakey-thing after the woman selling it shoved it into his face so he could smell it. It turned out to be very good indeed, and a serious bargain at a total cost of 14 Cents.
And I made a few new friends with the help of Mike and his magic LCD. We also discovered a nice by-product of the camera. One little boy was pestering us to buy postcards until we showed him his picture. I guess he figured that was just as good because he laughed, waved goodbye, and went to bother Susan and Phillip.
On the last leg of our trip back to HCMC, we stopped for a quick visit to the Vinh Long open air market. As we walked around the market, we again had that sensation of celebrity. Everywhere, groups of girls pointed at us and giggled shyly when we waved. Kids would come up just to say hello. I'm sure it's nowhere near as intense, but if you've ever wanted to get a feel for what everyday public life must be like for Tom Cruise or Mel Gibson, try walking around a Vietnamese market. They seemed to find us as much of an oddity as we did most of the bizarro stuff they were hawking.
We walked around until we found the animal aisle, which we love. Most of the stuff you see here, from fowl and pigs, to octopi, eels, crabs, and prawns as big as large lobsters (not exaggerating), is alive, though in most cases, not for long. This live/dead row began with a table of cages full of live chickens and ducks. This gave way to a series of tables full of dead chickens and ducks, followed by... just the heads.
The seacreature aisles were even more harrowing. Here we watched a woman slaughtering live frogs with a pair of scissors. First the head... snip! Then all four feet... snip, snip! Then she reached down the spurting neck, grabbed hold of something, and yanked all the innards out in one big pull.
The bodies never stopped squirming.
Should I describe the technique for slaughtering an eel, or are we about done with this portion of the show?
As we walked on, Mike stepped in a nasty Mekong puddle which submerged his right foot in gritty brown water. He was both glad he was wearing sandals, and uneasy with the direct Mekong contact. I, on the other hand, was laughing so hard, I didn't notice the old woman on my right who was about to dump out a large bucket of eel water, which she did, directly onto my foot.
Tie game.
Having checked out of the Rex two days earlier, we got back to HCMC with no hotel. Susan and Phillip told us they'd found a nice place right down the street from the Sinh, so we followed them there and were treated to a really nice room with a great view, cable TV, and air-conditioning, all for the outrageous price of 22 bucks... breakfast included.
After checking in, the four of us went to dinner where Susan commented on the Vietnamese lack of understanding of the Western tradition of making sure everyone gets their food at the same time. They bring the dishes out one at a time, with long gaps in between.
We had a very long, interesting conversation with our new Swiss friends, and after dinner, while Mike went back to fix the site, I went out with them for a few more beers at a bar on the corner. This place definitely catered to the Western crowd. It was packed with blonde people drinking beer and listening to U2 songs, one after the other. We also got to watch an older British (we think) "gentleman" in a very silly hat get very drunk and close enough to several fights that he finally had to be removed. Philip said in Switzerland they call such behavior "reaching your second spring", which he explained translates to mid-life crisis.
OK, time for bed. We have to get up very early tomorrow morning to A) update the site and B) get on a bus for Cu Chi, and the VC tunnels therein.