A little touristing in the Mekong.

One of my oldest school friends from Noo Zulland was visiting from Taiwan with her South African colleague last week (Noo Zullanders are not terribly good at staying in Noo Zulland for long periods of time when they're young so we have odd scenarios like one Kiwi living in Taiwan visiting another Kiwi living in Vietnam) so we hit the tourist trail and went on a day trip to the Mekong Delta area.

We booked in Saigon the night before, handed over the princely sum of $7 US per person for a full day tour with lunch included and got up at sparrow's fart the next morning to board our magical mystery Mekong tour bus. I had done another mekong tour back in February so we picked a slightly different route which begain in another province.

After a couple of hours on a tolerable aircon tour bus we arrived in the charmingly named 'My Tho' province at the starting point for the first of MANY boat rides on the Mekong (we're pretty sure it was 8 in total). This was a short trip that took us round the corner past some very scenic riverside houses and postcard scenes (reproduced below for your viewing pleasure). I suspect we could have walked that leg of the trip but it was terribly pictur-es-Q.







We got decanted from the boat into an even more picturesque fruit and vege market - also shown below - and wandered around taking photos of fruit and engaging in equally silly tourist activities. The red fruit shown here is a dragon fruit - one of the world's most beutiful and crap tasting fruits - the insides look like a dalmation - white with very pretty black seed flecks. My mate reckons their taste is - quote - 'like dirt' :-)





After that it was back to the boat past some very cool floating houses...



...and off to a similar coconut candy 'factory' to the one I visited in February. The main difference was that this one also sold banana 'whiskey' in plastic water bottles for 20,000 dong (just over $1 US, just under $1 AUS and almost exactly $2 NZD). Not a bad drop actually - warming with slight undertones of meths.

Next up was another boat ride to an orchard for lunch - which was when the torrential tropical rain started. It eased off long enough for us to get back to the boat and then it pissed down again - leaving us sheltering in our dinky boat which had had the plastic improvised tarpaulin sides rolled down until it eased enough for us to head to our next destination. It was still raining pretty badly so the sides of the boat stayed down which meant that the boat's captain couldn't see where he was going when sitting down so improvised with some very expert 'foot steering'.



At our next desination we were treated to some traditional vietnamese folk music - the inescapable downside to any tourist trip in Vietnam. Luckily the tables we were sitting at all had some sort of clear alcoholic substance that tasted even more like meths (come to think of it, it may well have been meths!) which kept us sane and quelled the giggles a little.

By this stage we were beginning to get a little boat fatigue - especially as our next stop by boat was a place where we got to go...boating. 20-odd tired tourists were sheparded onto a rickety jetty, loaded into traditional vietnamese canoes, given conical hats and told to look stupid while being paddled up a canal - that said, it was a bloody good laugh and we have some priceless photos (NOT for blog consumption) as a result. For some reason your correspondent managed to get lumped with a paddle as well - pretty sure it should have been me who was being tipped at the end and not the other way around but hey.

And, with one more boat trip back to where we started our watery adventure came to an end. Back to Saigon and dry land creature comforts until the next visitor comes through in a few weeks' time :-)