Mekong River part 1

14 - 15 March

All aboard for a river cruise on the Avalon Siem Reap! 

The boat is pretty nice, clearly designed for the wealthy western tourist market. It's very comfy living on board with our own en suite cabin, all mod cons, and all meals provided. By contrast life for the locals is a lot less fancy, and one can't not feel a bit guilty about the obvious inequalities of it all.  

All aboard!

Avalon Siem Reap, looking like a floating palace!

We set off from Ho Chi Minh City on the Saigon River and made our way across to the Mekong via various tributaries and a man made canal. The Saigon and Mekong rivers are two are separate river systems, so without the canal we'd have had to go out to sea, or more likely take a bus as our boat is not built for sea going. The Mekong is a huge river, the 12th longest in the world, and is sometimes known in Vietnam as Nine Dragon River apparently after the many distributary channels in the delta area.

It's a massive thrill to be on the Mekong River and to see all the things going on, both traditional and modern, and just to be able to wave to children on the shore and to people on the many passing boats (they always seem to take it in good part and give a friendly wave back to the strange tourists.

The river traffic is really interesting, with a constant flow of barges carting sand and stone to HCM City for construction, plus fuel, rice, fertiliser, and other goods. It was a slow trip due to barge congestion. You would not want to run into a loaded barge!

Conainer barge.

A good thing there are no big waves on the river when you're loaded to the max!

Slow going in the canal, with lots of traffic.

Two similar barges - the one in front loaded and sitting low in the water, the one behnd empty.

There's also more traditonal river traffic. Many, many sampans, and other smaller boats used by the locals to move stuff to market, to fish, and just to get around.

Locals in their boat, rowing Vietnamese style.

Classic net casting photo! Very lucky to see that.

We parked up after dark, and in the morning (after missing early morning tai chi on the upper deck!) went off in a sampan to visit Vinh Long village. This village has long been known for making rice paper, and has more recently branched out into rice wine, and traditonal Vietnamese candies as well. It seems quite common for villages to be known for a particular product, be it weaving, sampans, or more prosaic products like really tasty vegetables.

Popping rice using hot sand in a wok (yes, hot sand). It works very well.

Rice wine. 

An expensive version - note the snake and scorpion in the bottle which give it remarkable properties apparently.

Making rice paper. Janet is very good at this if you need some.

After a spell away from the heat we took another sampan trip to Cu Lao Gieng village. This one is known for building sampans and we visited a sampan maker. He learned the traditional skills of bending the wood, pinning it together, and caulking using a resin/cotton mix, from his father. But none of his children are interested in following in his footsteps so the skill may be lost from his family. His children apparently prefer to work in the fish processing factory nearby that has air conditioning! It takes him about 2 days to make a sampan and it sells for about $150 USD.

Two of the sampan makers grandchildren.

Sampan village house.

Sampan under construction.

Slightly rickety bridge to the sampan factory.

Sampan village.

Further on we visited a family making the traditional Vietnamese conical hats ("non la"). The hats take about 2 hours each to make and sell for just a few USD.

Down the road a little further (by "tuk tuk" which is a cart towed by a motorbike) is one of the first catholic churches built in Vietnam. This was funded by the French around 100 years ago in a location that had been evangelised by catholic missionaries. We met the current friar, who was previously a medical doctor in the area treating leprosy patients (leprosy has  since been eradicated from this area). About 7% of Vietnamese are Christian today, with Buddhism being the dominant faith.

Lady making a traditinal conical hat.

Catholic church.

After just one and a half days it's been a fasinating start to exploring the Mekong delta and seeing some of the realities of life for the local people.