Mekong Delta

In the Mekong delta, the rivers are huge, larger than some of the lakes that I was familiar with growing up. I left Saigon yesterday and signed up for a tour that took me by boat and bus through various parts of the Mekong delta. We transferred from the bus to boat at Cai Be and went by small motorboat around the Cai Be floating market, where people were selling vegetables and fruits on the their floating houseboats where these families spent all of their time, meaning they had no houses on the mainland. Afterwards we went through some narrow waterways to a local restaurant where the decor was more rewarding than the food. Most of the food on this trip ran together: steamed vegetables, steamed rice, fried noodles, and either stir-fried tofu or pork. All of the food had mostly the same tastes, except for the coconut candy that the Mekong delta is famous for. The candy contains no sugar but gets its sweetness from the coconut and malt. It's chewy and can be mixed with chocolate or peanuts.

Most of the rest of this trip we just spent on boats or buses watching the riverside or the shops, respectively. Some of the bridges that we walked across to get off the boat and onto the mainland were rickety, wooden constructions that felt like they would buckle if you made a wrong step with the wrong amount of weight. The region of the Mekong is incredibly water-logged, and repeatedly we were shown houses where they measured the highest water levels that occurred each year during the rainy season. The house we saw this morning had a flood that reached up about fifteen feet from the ground on which we stood, which ended up being near the top of the wooden railing on the stilt house's second floor. This was in the year 2000.

We left the border town of Chau Doc in Vietnam this morning and visited some more floating villages by rowboat. There's a minority Cham population of weavers and fisher-people outside of Chau Doc, and, surprisingly, these people practice the Muslim religion and have their own small white-and-green mosque which was about a five minute walk from where we left the rowboats.

The rest of the day was spent traveling by a slow, wooden boat into Cambodia, getting through the Vietnam exit process, the Cambodia visa application, and the Cambodian entry procedure (all successful!), and the bumpy one-hour bus ride from the dock to my hotel here in Phnom Penh. I'm glad to be on dry land and have an air-conditioned room. Tomorrow I'll start my Cambodian sightseeing.