During the day we visited a traditional folk music performance, passed the floating wholesale market near Cái Bè, stopped at a workshop making coconut candy and eventually had lunch at a wonderfully picturesque farmstead near Cai Lậy.
I met a friendly Australian family at their hotel, and we started the tour together.
During my time in Europe I never thought much about Australia. Sure, there is a bunch of amazing venomous animals there and Aboriginal cultures have some fascinating traditions around Dreaming, but I never invested much thought in Australians themselves. Since living in Vietnam, however, I had met scores of them, and they had been a friendly lot. Time to learn more about Australia, I guess.
We were picked up by our tour guide, a local named Khanh. In a small bus we headed straight for the Mekong Delta, about one and a half to two hours away on reasonably smooth roads.
The small group also meant that when somebody asked for the air conditioning to be turned down, the driver actually did it – an experience not universally shared on larger Vietnamese group tours.
Mekong – By Boat, of Course
The first station of the day was a station indeed: the boat station, to be precise.
Waterways have always been enormously important in the Mekong Delta. Even today, many houses, islands and communities are most easily reached by boat, and boats remain part of everyday transport for many people in the region.
So naturally, a fair amount of our day was spent on the water.
Of course, the second source of income at the boat station, apart from boat tickets, appeared to be hats.
Hats, hats, hats for everybody.
People get off the bus, discover that the tropical sun has no mercy whatsoever and suddenly realise that even if the boat has a roof, what they really need is a hat.
A lady led me towards a counter where headpieces were piled on top of each other, but I pulled my own trusted and thoroughly rumpled headdress out of my pocket.
That made her grin.
Once we left the larger tourist stops behind, the surroundings became much quieter, and people along the river often waved as we passed.
Uncle Ken did buy a cap, negotiated a reasonable price – interestingly, the original asking price wasn't particularly outrageous in the first place – and we boarded our boat.
Instead of a driver we now had a captain, and off we went through the land- and cityscape of the Mekong.
It is impressive how thoroughly life here is connected to the waterways. Many stilt houses face the river, and deliveries and everyday traffic that elsewhere in Vietnam would be handled by motorbikes can just as naturally happen by boat.
We slowly travelled along the river, through broad sections that felt almost like lakes and narrow channels where our captain had to pay attention to oncoming traffic.
Then we reached our first destination.
Folk Culture Performance
We arrived at an island with an old farmhouse surrounded by tropical vegetation. These days it functions more like a small restaurant and performance venue, with a souvenir stall, tables and the steps in front of the main room used as a stage.
A man with a guitar provided traditional Vietnamese music while two singers performed a selection of songs about rural life.
I particularly enjoyed the performance. Much of everyday Vietnam is filled with modern pop music – frequently played at volumes which suggest the speakers have committed some terrible crime and are being punished for it – so sitting under the trees and listening to traditional music made a pleasant change.
They served good green tea and a selection of fresh fruit.
Around the estate grew jackfruit and durian trees, together with ginger flowers of spectacular beauty.
Floating Wholesale Market
After the performance we returned to the boat and continued towards the next stop, passing the floating market along the way.
This was not the enormous floating retail market one might expect from some travel photographs.
It was comparatively small and primarily a wholesale market. Khanh explained how merchants traditionally indicate what they are selling by tying a sample of the produce to a pole on the boat, making the cargo visible from a distance.
Like many wholesale markets, it did not need to be theatrical to be busy.
Coconut Candy Workshop
We eventually reached a small landing and entered a workshop where coconuts were being turned into candy.
We watched the different stages: mature coconuts opened and processed, the coconut mixture cooked down and eventually transformed into the wonderfully sticky sweets which are perfectly capable of pulling fillings out of unsuspecting teeth.
Regular readers may remember that I actually lost a filling to Vietnamese coconut candy when I first tried it in China.
Apparently I learn slowly.
We also saw rice paper and puffed rice being made. While sampling tea with honey and kumquat together with several traditional sweets, I wandered around and discovered the inevitable snake-wine corner.
Bottle after bottle contained small cobras, roots, scorpions and other ingredients soaking in strong alcohol.
There was also a living python in a cage nearby. Jake asked whether we could touch it, but the woman looking after it informed us that the python was grumpy because of the weather change and would prefer to be left alone.
I saw absolutely no reason to dispute the python's wishes.
The workshop also sold what it produced, together with goods from other nearby workshops.
My queen had ordered me to bring back coconut soap, and we were running out of honey as well.
This was where I almost joined the python in the grumpy corner.
They wanted 100,000 đồng for one coconut soap.
WTH?
That was a lot for a bar of soap even by European standards. I had Khanh explain that my queen would kill me if I came home after paying that much.
After a little haggling we reached a considerably more sensible price, and I bought four soaps and a bottle of honey.
Jake tried the snake wine, and afterwards we headed back towards the boat station.
The life along the river was one of the most interesting parts of the day precisely because it looked so different from Saigon. Houses, boats, workshops and ordinary daily activity were all organised around water in a way that is difficult to appreciate until you actually move through it.
A Beautiful Farm and a Friendly Family
By lunchtime everybody was hungry and increasingly curious about what had been promised as a home-cooked meal with a local family.
We drove towards Cai Lậy, where Khanh asked whether we wanted to walk the final few hundred metres to the farmstead or go by boat.
We chose the boat.
Mr Nghiep, the owner of the house and a retired farmer, picked us up at the roadside, and we travelled through narrow canals until we reached...
paradise.
I am serious. The place was beautiful.
There was a fish pond, all sorts of fruit trees, flower beds, a pleasantly airy house, a dog and some pigs in one corner. It was quiet, green and ridiculously comfortable after the heat outside.
Mr and Mrs Nghiep had retired from rice farming and converted part of their home to receive visitors.
Delicious Lunch in the Mekong Delta
The lunch was excellent.
I have eaten great Vietnamese food on many occasions, but this home-cooked meal could compete with the best of it.
The rather prehistoric-looking fried elephant-ear fish was the centre of attention. It tasted wonderful, including the crispy scales. There were fresh vegetables and herbs, rice paper for wrapping everything together, chicken with greens, bánh xèo filled with bean sprouts, an excellent rice soup and sweet sticky rice with beans for dessert.
My personal favourite, however, was the barbecued mouse.
Jake and I immediately dug in, although it took a little longer to convince everybody else that mouse was worth trying.
It may sound strange if your mental image of a mouse is something living behind a city rubbish bin, but these were rice-field rodents from the countryside. Khanh explained that they feed in the fields, and Mr Nghiep showed me the traps used to catch them.
After lunch, a bicycle ride through the countryside had originally been planned. Unfortunately everybody was exhausted and the heat was considerable, so we abandoned that idea and stayed around the farm instead.
This was probably the right decision.
We fed the dog leftovers, wandered through the garden, enjoyed the shade and watched the owner demonstrate how fish like the one we had just eaten were caught.
Mr and Mrs Nghiep were exceptionally friendly people. I remember being seriously tempted to return simply to spend more time there and cycle through the surrounding countryside on another day.
Much of the meal had come directly from the property, and the freshness was obvious. Even the fruit for dessert had travelled only a few metres from tree to table.
At around three in the afternoon we said goodbye and returned to the bus, walking this time and getting another look at the countryside along the way.
Then it was back to Saigon.
What remained were a lot of photographs, a very good lunch, several new impressions of a part of Vietnam I should have visited much earlier – and the knowledge that somewhere in the Mekong Delta there was a python whose boundaries I had respectfully observed.