Time Heals: Day 11 - Mekong Delta

Mekong River

It was a long ride by van out to the Mekong Delta from Ho Chi Minh City today. It's very warm and the humidity is worse than Houston on a bad day in the summer. We had 5 down pours that lasted maybe 10 minutes each during the day.

Roadside rest stop

Along the roadside were hundreds of "rest" stops were the locals grab a bit to eat and rest in hammocks that are lined up in rows right next to the tables and sometimes there were just rows and rows of hammocks. That

Checking it out

was amazing.

I didn't realize the vast amount of agricultural and handicraft production that comes from the Mekong Delta, yet the people live in the poorest conditions along the Mekong River. If there are more attractive areas, we didn't see them. Such a stark contrast from Ho Chi Minh City, which is like NYC transformed with scooters.

Life on the Mekong

View from my hotel room in Ho Chi Minh

But we had a very interesting day learning about life on the river. We took a bike ride along a path through one of the local villages and stopped to learn how they make rice paper waffles and weave baskets. I got to drive my own motorcycle by myself. The first time I started it I nearly ran over people because I was in the wrong gear. It made me anxious, and it made the Vietnamese pretty nervous, but I was OK after that. I checked out one of those hammocks at the basket weaver's shop. A boat took us over to an island where we jumped in a sampan and our rower glided us along one of the Mekong's tributaries. At one of the large shops we got to see their production of coconut candy, traditional rice paper, popped rice, and sweet rice bars. The production was all by hand - no machine production - and each person produces thousands of these foods every day. It's like stepping back 200 years.