Mekong Day
Michelle doesn’t really like to sightsee. She’s good for one museum or temple a day. Jim, on the other hand, has a gift for manufacturing an interest in almost anything (French farm machinery museum? YES!), and always bags a few more palaces and museums than his wife. Michelle likes to poke around, look at how people live and work; she likes to eat and shop and wander through parks and botanical gardens. Jim likes all that as well, but is also drawn to destinations of educational/ historical/aesthetic significance. What this means is that Michelle now sees more sights than she would on her own—a good thing. And Jim has a more relaxed, ambling day with more eating and gawking and lollygagging than he’d do on his own. We have a happy travel marriage.
Whenever a guide is involved, even the most wonderful guide, there will be sightseeing. Saturday, with Khoi, we saw the Cu Chi tunnels, a worthwhile, thought provoking trip even given some curious touristic moments—a woman demonstrating how to make rice paper wrappers by hand next to the shooting range, not to mention those clowns working the AK 47s. Sunday, we went to the Mekong Delta. The place name was resonant to us from the war--we knew it had been a VC stronghold—but what did we expect from going there? More military history? A naturalist’s tour of flora and fauna? A scenic river boat cruise?
After an hour or more on the road, we reached a busy riverside station where buses waited for tourists to return and drivers ingeniously relaxed. Jim (ignoring Michelle’s aesthetic advice) purchased a straw hat.
Khoi guided us into a battered colorful small covered wooden tourist boat, (chairs lashed with twine to the struts), and, amid dozens of other such boats, we scooted between clumps of invasive water hyacinth, fishing boats and cargo ships, some sunk to the gunwales taking loads of sand to Singapore.
Docking on an island in the delta, we began a touristic gamut—or is that gauntlet?—which involved visiting a small, outdoor coconut candy “factory” and its gift shop; walking past various fruit trees and souvenir stands; taking a very short ride in a cart drawn by a frisky, willing pony, then having tea doused with honey and bee pollen in an enormous empty pergola where the waiters tried to sell us honey and bee pollen, and dressed up people sang old Vietnamese songs. More souvenir stands.
Along with the tourism was some harsh reality. Khoi had described how China is building a series of dams on the Mekong River, which have already drastically altered the delta’s geography. The richness of the delta’s soil comes from the accumulation of fertile silt deposited by the river. Now, the silt is held back in dams along with the water. Also, as the flow of water has been so reduced, the sea has begun backwashing into formerly fresh water irrigation canals, which is deadly to farmlands. To counter this, the Dutch have come in to help build dykes on thousands of those canals. Also, silt had formerly accumulated on the land, increasing the shoreline; without it, the land is receding rapidly as the sea encroaches with global warming. The damns serve a political purpose as well. When Vietnam does something China doesn’t like, Khoi said, even more water is withheld. More of China’s bullying and inexorable intrusion into SE Asia.
We saw one of the Dutch dams at the end of a short pretty boat ride down a palm-lined canal in a long thin wooden boat powered by a barefoot woman with a pole. At the end of that ride was a dock where original boat and driver were waiting. With him we had a three minute ride to a sprawling outdoor restaurant where we were given a riverside table and (along with several hundred other tourists) the meal of the day, which included a flat, fried fish mounted upright on supports only to be pulled apart by a rubber-gloved waitress who made spring rolls from the flesh. Not delicious. The view of the river was very good.
Michelle found the Mekong excursion at best a mixed bag: on the one hand, she liked the pony. And a yellow gecko. And seeing a man lift big black snails from a small muddy ditch with a taut net on a stick. And those huge ships with their tonnage of cargo. On the other hand she couldn’t help but feel like a marker on a dorky life-sized board game. But how else in a short vacation might one engage with the Mekong Delta? Unless one is prepared to go far into the country, can so-called cultural tourism ever be more than a canned glimpse?
For Jim, however, the Mekong excursion was his favorite day so far. Having seen the Mekong River far north in Luang Prabang, Laos, and boated on a tributary, he was happy just being in the Mekong Delta. He liked the chaos of the tourist, fishing, and transport boats jostling in the harbor. And after the Cu Chi tunnels and crowded Saigon, despite its being canned, he liked a glimpse of rural life in Vietnam that wasn’t about the war.
Back in Ho Chi Minh City we said good-bye to our intelligent, funny, big hearted guide, Khoi. So then, we were on our own in Ho Chi Minh City.