Splashing about in the Delta

  Mekong Delta, Vietnam
Friday, November 10, 2006

Well, day one of our pre-booked Mekong Delta tour is complete.... we're spending the night in the beautiful but hot and humid town of Can Tho. The whirlwind of candy factory, rice paper factory, get on the bus, get on the boat, get off the bus, get the bus on the boat... all that ended around 4:30 and we were left to explore the town. I took a brief lie-down to escape my headache upon arrival. The hotel room was on the 5th floor, although they lie here and call it the fourth... don't you believe them. Once I'd hauled my pack up the stairs, I would have definitely worked up a sweat if I hadn't already been drenched in it due to the heat.

Vietnam is quite a place to see, right on the edge of industrial revolution and a great leap forward in technology, but still full of older ways and traditions that are sure to start fading with the change. In the Mekong, many people still live the river life. Their homes are old wooden boats that could have been wrought centuries ago. They do their shopping and trading in floating markets. They don't send their children to school because they cannot afford the cost. We got to listen to some traditional songs today by some local villagers, and though the language and instruments were quite different, I was struck by its similarities to Appalachian music. Perhaps a common thread of sorrow at the old ways' disappearance unites them.

Vietnamese Kids

We took a walk through the town's central market tonight and 3 smiling kids in a motorcycle pulled wagon gave Cierra a chorus of "Hello! Hello!" Somehow, here that word still carries an innocence and genuine happiness that you are here, unlike in some of the previous places we've been where it simply indicates that an attempted fleecing will follow. Cierra snapped a picture of them and showed them the result to giggles of delight. The young fellow in the cafe sitting next to me, around 9 years old, just smilingly introduced himself to me and shook my hand. Earlier, he had said hello and gave me a little hug. These are the kinds of things that make me glad to be in Vietnam...

******

On the second day of the tour, we started out early for a loooong boat ride in the scorching sun. We went through the largest floating market in the Mekong Delta, where every kind of produce under the sun can be purchased.

Just another day at the office...

Each boat has a bamboo mast, and its owner advertises what they have for sale by tying one to the top. There was a watermelon boat, but no word on how they get that sucker up on the stick. Several of the guys on our tour use this opportunity to flag down the beverage boat and get beer and Coca-Cola.

We stopped by a rice processing plant and a rice noodle factory, each experience really nothing more than an excuse to get us out of the boat so our folded up legs didn't atrophy and fall off. Our new tour guide was decidedly less fun than our previous one. His language skills are about equal, but somehow the air of desperation is present when he makes a joke, and that's a bit off-putting.

Relaxation time at a fruit grove in hammocks strung between the trees. Now this is heaven. All through Vietnam, I've been seeing these hammocks, sometimes with people folded up in them like caterpillars in their cocoons. I always thought that you'd have to be insane to lay around in the heat with these heavy looking things trapping your body heat even more. But under the canopy of the tropical fruit trees, these green slings were the perfect place for a nap, and a half hour went by so quickly. We got back to the bus and our tour guide dropped us back at last night's hotel and told us we had about 3 and a half hours until the next bus would pick us up, please stay here. Well, forget that... it's bonus free time!

Cierra's a Monkey

Cierra and I decided to go our separate ways for a few hours and try to experience a little more of the real Vietnam while we had the chance. I took a stroll down a side street by a canal and then started taking every right fork, figuring I couldn't get too lost that way. What a wonderful experience! Once off the main streets, you cease to get the tourist offers.. "Motorbike! Motorbike!" and you become the outsider, the curiosity. Everywhere, little kids come out of the houses... "Hello! Hello!" As I walked out into the country, two grinning youngsters in a tree handed me a star fruit. Their father came out and offered me another one. Farther along, I stopped for a Coke at a tiny store in the front room of a home. A little family went hard to work for me, the boy chopping the ice off a big block kept in the freezer, then the older girl putting the ice and Coke in a plastic bag tied tight at the top around a straw. I was worried what all this labor would cost me, but out here the price was half of what I'd pay in town for a cold one out of the fridge.

Peace.

The encounters during this one hour were almost too many to remember. Nearly everyone gave a wave and "Hello!". A group of shirtless old men having lunch under a canopy invited me in to share their food. I refused with a pat to my belly to indicate that I was full. At a roadside family gathering, a father waved me over to speak, put his two pointer fingers together then gestured toward his family. Curious what he meant, I walked over to figure it out. He put the two fingers together again, pointed, and nodded at me, like "Ok?". I copied him, and looked puzzled. This time after comparing his fingers, he pointed at me, then more clearly at his daughter, about 17, smiling and sitting with the rest of his family. Aha! "Do you mean like this?" I said, smiling and pointing to my wedding ring. "Sorry, already got one!" The family's smiles dissolved into laughter. One hour out on my own and already a wedding proposal... guess I've still got it. (It in this case refers to my freakish paleness in this land of sweltering sun.)

***********

The third tour guide made his appearance in dramatic fashion, dashing in from a sudden downpour into the cramped hotel lobby, eyes bulging behind thick rimmed glasses, cigarette dangling from lips. He was 20 minutes late, having been held up by heavy traffic at the ferry. He explained frantically, "4 tourists, Guide to pick up here to Cambodia tomorrow, bus to Can Tho. Tourists on trip. Guide is here, we must go!"

We explained that we were here, and it was okay, but unfortanately one of the other pair of Frenchmen was in the toilet. The potential group numbering only three, our new guide was flustered, and kept repeating his explanation over and over until the missing tourist returned. This was "Soong", our new guide, who told us he had visited the US in 1972, and it had given him perspective on the poverty in his own country. We quickly agreed Soong was going to be a hoot.

We joined another group on the bus already who appeared to have had a long day with this fellow. There were groans as he announced that it would be at least 3 hours before we arrived that evening at our hotel.

It was destined to be more than that, because 2 motorcycles happened to bump into each other moments before we reached a bridge. The 2 bikes were on the asphault in the middle of the road, the drivers were arguing with each other, and a policeman was standing by passively as the traffic snarled. For a few minutes, small streams of traffic got through, but our bus and a cement truck tried to go around as other vehicles were oncoming, and nobody was moving. There we were for half an hour before more police arrived, with the crowd building and more waving to the strange tourists on the bus. Finally the police shouted at the crowd enough to create space for traffic to begin flowing again, as the clouds opened up and a torrential downpour soaked all the poor cyclists in the backed up traffic. All the people who were happy and waving now only took quick glances at the dry tourists safe in their bus, parked on the wrong side of the bridge. Whoops.

After we got going again, they turned the lights out on the bus and everybody settled in for a good long nap. About 45 minutes later, Soong, doing a great impression of a Vietnamese William Shatner, got his glasses back on, strode to the front of the bus and gave a loud speech that awakened nearly everyone aboard.

"Ladies and Gentleman! I am so sorry that you are so tired! Tour has been long day! We have just reached Vinh Lum town, being capital of Vinh Lum province! Another hour for to get to Can Tho. Let me tell you about Vietnam..."

Bewildered blinking from the rest of the passengers, but Cierra and I listened as our onboard entertainment went through several stories about the economic progress in this part of Vietnam. I can't relate a lot of it because there was too much, but he made one metaphor, though a mixed one, that I thought was particularly apt.

"My Friends, Vietnam is a dragon waking, but not yet awake yet. We warm up. We rising from negative 20 to 0. We still at zero, and zero is being cold. But you do not know how warm 0 degrees is until you have been at minus 20."

We even look good in orange.

The following morning, on a boat trip through one of the floating villages in which the houses float above vast nets holding thousands of fish to sell at market, Soong asked us to tip our boat drivers if we could at the end of our journey. (We were in a flotilla of small traditional crafts, holding 2 passengers to one driver.) He said that it might be nothing to us, but it would be something to them. When Soong said it was time for us to get on our boat to Cambodia, ("And now I must goodbye the group is going to Cambodia")

Our rower on the river.

Cierra asked me if we should tip 10 or 50 thousand dong, because those were all the bills she had. 10 thousand is about .75 US, and 50 thousand a bit over $3. I said, "Let's give her the 50, in the long run we won't miss it." I thought this woman was going to cry, she was so happy. As I passed her the bill, she gave me a big hug... "Thank you! Thank you!", then jumped up and town waving it to the other drivers, "Hello! Hello!" It brought home to me, more than all the squalor we've seen, just how little these people have to live on here in the Mekong. And though it's sad to see them struggle, it's reassuring as well that so many can be so happy with so little. I hope to take that spirit of being happy with less into my own life where I can...

Cierra in Vietnamese getup.

Our fearless leader.

That's just scaring me.