Life on the Mekong

Last weekend, Steven and I went to Ben Tre, a village on the Mekong River on the recommendation of a friend. We were up at 8:00 a.m. on Saturday and at the but station by 9:15 a.m. for our 9:30 a.m. bus. Sinh Cafe has numerous Mekong tours, but we decided to go the local transport route to avoid the back packer crowd and get a better feel for this new part of Vietnam. Our bus was a Mercedes mini-bus packed to the limit, with Steven and I comfortably packed in one seat behind the driver.

Two hours after we began, our van stopped in a line of traffic and two-thirds of the van's passengers got out. Steven soon realized that we were sitting in line for the ferry between My Tho and Ben Tre and that the other passengers left the van and walked to the ferry to cross on foot. After a failed attempt to communicate our destination to the van's driver and other remaining passengers - although one woman said, "We wait... four hours. Because........" before giving up, we decided to take our chances on foot.

We took our bags and left the van sitting in line. We followed the other pedestrians toward a waiting area and just missed our opportunity to board the ferry before a guard closed the accordion gate barring us from the dock. We watched as a line of cars and motorcycles drove off another ferry that had just arrived and were then allowed past the gate onto the ferry. We immediately climbed up past the vehicles on the first floor and the passengers on the second floor to the top of the ferry which we had all to ourselves. From our perch on the top, we had a 360 degree view of the famous Mekong River.

To my surprise the Mekong is very brown, not because it is "dirty," as we later learned from our guide, but because it is "nutritious" with all the minerals and silt in the mud draining into the river with the frequent rains. The Mekong is the 11th longest river in the world, beginning in Tibet, running through China,Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia before it gets to Vietnam where it leads to the South China Sea. As with most rivers in developing countries, the Mekong is not just a river, but a way of life. For the people on the Mekong, it is a source of transportation, irrigation for their crops, a constance source of protein from its fish, a place to bathe and a playground for their children.

Our Guest House, the Thao Nhi Guest House, bills itself as an "ecological" guest house and it at once a guest house, fruit orchard, restaurant and family home. When we disembarked from the ferry, we walked past a row of local shops, took our first left and walked down another local road to the second left, which led us down a residential "jungle" path of palm trees and a variety of small wooden and concrete single family homes, with the occasional rooster scratching in the dirt in the front yard. When we turned in the gate, we were immediately greeted by a young Vietnamese man who offered to show us to our room.

He led us over a small bridge and back to attractively tiled buildings to the left of the main gate. Our room was in one of the three buildings, the farthest to the back, with rooms built in a U-shape around a central dining area set with a table for eight. Our room was the first room on the left and was almost half the size of our current apartment. It was huge! It had a double bed and a queen, a wardrobe, a television, two lounge chairs with a table in between for tea and a small desk. All of this and a full-sized bath, we got for the bargain price of $15 US.

After a post-travel shower and a few minutes of relaxation in our air-conditioned room, we made our way out to the dinning area for lunch. While we waited for our squid and noodles, "Dai," the young man who had shown us to our room, told us about his Mekong River tour, which would take us on a five hour tour of the river including stops at the Coconut Candy Factory, Honeybee Farm, Fish Farm and Coconut Monk Temple.

I wasn't thrilled about the tour because it was the same tour that the tour agencies take that we had tried to avoid by coming the way we did, but we did want to get out and see the river and I wanted Steven to see the coconut candy factory, which I remembered fondly from my first trip down the Mekong. We bargained him down to four hours and one stop for $30 and spent the next few hours relaxing on hammocks after a tasty lunch.

At 3:00 p.m., Dai came to lead us to the boat. Accompanied by the resident dogs, Tiger and Pepsi, we walked down a twisty palm jungle path to a small dock where a man awaited us in a long, narrow covered motorboat. We stepped from the dock to the boat and took our seats in small wooden schoolhouse chairs that Steven quickly realized were not nailed to the floor. The engine caught on the first try and we were off.

The canals off of the Mekong were my most vivid memory from my first trip. The canals are about 10 feet wide and lined by palm fronds sprouting directly up from the water to heights of over 8 feet. The thick frond walls part in areas to reveal a quick glimpse of a wooden house surrounded by a muddy yard and sometimes equally muddy children, before closing up again in an opaque wall of greenery. This time around the glimpses of houses revealed more tile and concrete houses than I remembered from three years ago, possibility hinting at a more prosperous time. But the silence was the same. Apart from the chug-chug-chug of our motor, the only sound was the wind through the palms.

Our first stop was a the same Coconut Candy factory I remembered from before, but unfortunately we were too late to catch the process in the works and only had time to catch a sample of the last batch of the day. I explained to Steven that what had impressed me so much the first time around was how they utilized every part of the coconut in the candy making process. The hull was stripped and used as the fuel to keep the fire hot, above which the pressed coconut milk was cooked with sugar and other ingredients depending on the batch. The shell was used to make crafts sold to visitors. The meat, pressed of all of its milk, was used as feed for fish and chickens and the milk was processed into some of the most delicious candy I have ever eaten. We bought a package of candy and a few gifts made from the coconut shells and boarded our boat for the rest of our trip.

Even though we thought we had negotiated out of all of the other stops, it soon became apparent that we were in for a shortened version of the full tour. Our next stop was a honey-bee farm, where we were treated to a glass of tea with fresh honey and a plate of fresh fruit after touring the gardens and meeting the resident boa constrictors. We also saw our first "jumping guppies," which look like over-sized tadpoles with two legs in the middle of their body, that can't swim, but get around by jumping around in the mud. Over tea, we talked a bit more with our guide, Dai, who explained that he did not live at the Guest House, but simply worked there. He talked about wanting to continue work in the tourist business and explained how the families in the area owned the land they lived on and passed it on from one generation to the next with family members buried on the family's land to continue their part in the lives of succeeding generations.

After tea, we headed back out to the river, this time in a small canoe rowed by a woman and her daughter. Without the noise of the engine, we could truly get a sense of the natural silence of the river. As we rowed silently down the canal, I thought about how different life is for these families who live on the river compared to the average American family. I thought that these families must be so calm and peaceful just by the nature of their surroundings and how growing up in modern American society has made me almost uncomfortable with silence wanting to be constantly in motion. I was looking forward to my hammock in the garden. When we got back out to the main river, we transfered to our larger boat and the ladies rowed back to the bee farm.

As the sun began to begin its journey behind the low hanging clouds, we docked at our third stop, a red snapper farm on the river. In less trafficked areas of the river, you could make out what looked like floating houses made of wood and corrugated metal. These 'houses' were actually shelters on floating wooden frame, to which hung large nets containing thousands of fish being fattened up for someone's dinner.

The farm that we stopped at had three separate areas with fish in different stages of development. We stepped off of our boat and onto the frame of the fish farm, careful not to slip and fall into the nets. We watched as the fish farmer walked out on a plank in the middle of one of the holding areas and the fish began to gather en mass underneath where he stood. As he threw out round brown pellets, the fish swam frantically over one another to get to the food. The hungry fish formed a layer of wriggling pink flesh so thick that you couldn't see where one began and the other ended, much less the water below. As the farmer fed the little fish, his wife went around feeding the bigger fish and his son, the fish in the far net, which seemed just as anxious to feed as their smaller counterparts.

After taking leave of the fish farmers, we headed to Phoenix Island, home of the late Coconut Monk. By the time we got to the island it was almost dark and it was hard to make out the temple, which to Steven's amusement was the "amusement park" we had seen from the ferry. We walked around the temple which was a fascinating eclectic structure made of what looked like crushed sea shells formed into stairs, railings around a five story temple. From the temple we walked to the Crocodile Farm where the islands residents breed crocodiles for the lucrative sale of their skin and other body parts for food and handbags. Standing on the bridge looking down, Steven and I pondered what would happen if we fell in. Steven reasoned that they probably wouldn't know what to do with us since they are used to being fed chucks of dead animal and not killing their own live prey, but I maintained that their survival instincts would likely kick and I would be in pieces soon after hitting the water. Not wanting to give that thought any realistic possibility, I quickly left Steven and Dai on the bridge and wandered back to the boat.

The highlight of Dai's tour, which he says all of the day trippers miss, is viewing the rivers resident fireflies which are, "same same Christmas lights." As we coasted along back towards our Guest House and came up on rows of trees with what looked like tiny blinking white lights, we saw that he was right. The fireflies sitting in the trees very much resembled while Christmas lights.

Steven and I sat in the boat as Dai climbed to the bow of the boat and plucked fireflies out of the trees and put them in a bottle for us to keep. Not wanting to take the fireflies so far from their families, Steven and I wasted no time opening the bottle top and letting them back out into the night sky. We felt bad for all the effort that Dai had gone to to get them in the bottle, but hoped he would understand. Although, I felt even worse after arriving back at our hotel and seeing how he had poked holes all over the bottle to allow the fireflies to breathe.

After our trip, we thanked Dai and went back to our room to shower before dinner.

The Thao Nhi Guest House is known, according to the Lonely Planet, for its Elephant Fish and greens with rice, so for dinner, that is what we ordered. Earlier that day, we had noticed two big fish swimming in a concrete tank on the grounds of the Guest House, along with a soft shell turtle, also awaiting his fate on the plate of some gastronomically adventurous tourist. After we had ordered our dinner, we saw Dai walking over to the tank and reappear with our fish in a net. He walked over to the kitchen and dumped the flopping fish out onto the cement floor. Just before I heard the whack, I turned my head to avoid watching the fate to which we had condemned our poor fish.

Our Elephant Ear fish was served in a stand like a display, from which one of the lades working in the kitchen scraped the meat and served it on our plates of rice, then making fresh spring rolls at the table. After dinner, we went back to our rooms, exhausted from our long day of travel.

The following day we planned to take advantage of the free bikes on offer from the Guest House and explore the land portion of Ben Tre. With a parting admonition from Dai that 11 km was a long way to ride on a bike, we began our ride out onto the main street. Ben Tre is not the lazy backwater that I pictured, but rather a relatively modern Vietnamese town with modern streetlights, well-paved roads, office buildings, homes, shops and the ubiquitous impeccability landscaped parks. After a 40 minute ride in the unforgiving Vietnamese sun, I was ready to admit Dai had been right and that the best part of the Mekong is the river.

We made a quick turn around the river front and bought some fruit, my cheapest rambutan purchase to date, 4000d a kilo, or about 25 cents, and then decided to head back. I had two goals for the ride home. The first was to buy a hat, because my face, with its paltry 15 proof sunscreen was beginning to feel hot and I could imagining it frying to a crispy red right on my face and the second was to follow my nose to another coconut candy factory, a few of which we had detected on our ride in. Since our previous stop at the candy factory, I had reduced our stash of candy by at least half and Steven was staking the successful future of our marriage on the equal distribution of the remaining twenty-six pieces of candy. Knowing my lack of self-control when it comes to sweets, especially those days when I am home along and he is away all day at work..., I knew I had to buy more.

We stopped at the first hat stand we saw and I bought a "Gucci" safari hat (I didn't know Gucci made safari hats...) for 2,500d or about $1.50, giving me some peace of mind for the condition of my face, and continued on. A few minutes later, the unmistakable smell of freshly baking coconut wafted across the road and I turned immediately into a roadside shop filled with a myriad of candies, including our coveted coconut variety.

Steven and I picked out some candy and drinks and we about to get back our our bikes, when we were approached by a young Vietnamese man who asked Steven if he could speak English with him. After a polite conversation about where we were from and why we were in Vietnam, the man revealed that he was the manager of the factory and asked us if we would like a tour. We happily agreed and walked into the factory that was a larger reproduction of the factory on the river. The presses and stoves were all rustic, but sturdy and well able to perform their specific functions. The stove consisted of a long wooden box, into which were laid large iron bowls filled with the coconut candy mixture. The coconut husks were burned in a fire in the box, heating the bowls from below. When the mixtures were ready, the bowls were passed from the back to the front room of the factory through a large window and the mixture was then poured onto a long table, that served as a continuation of the production line that began with the stove on the other side. Each stove of six bowls had a corresponding table in the front room, which ran about eight tables deep.

Once the mixture had cooled, a woman would smooth it out with a plastic spatula like the bottom layer of a cake. She would then cut off chucks which she would lay in a one of the narrow rows of a wooden cast. Once in the cast, the mixture would be stretched out lengthwise into multiple footlong strips. The strips would then be passed to the next working in the line who would cut the strips into bite-sized squares and pass them on to the next woman who put them in two layers of wrapping, the first an edible rice-paper wrap and the second layer with the name of the factory.

As we watched, the factory owner asked if we wanted to try some of the hot candy. Not at all letting on that we had already tried it hot as well as having eaten plenty of the cooled version, we readily agreed. He said something to one of the women in the factory, who put a huge chunk of candy on the plate and passed it through the window. I have lost about 10 pounds since being in Vietnam, but I am sure that I gained at least half of it back in one weekend thanks to the lovely coconut candy makers in Ben Tre.

After our tour, we rode back to our hotel, where Dai had arranged for a return bus to Ho Chi Minh City in the next 30 minutes.

With a tummy full of sugary coconut, I settled into our seat in the back for a nice nap, while Mr. Steven got down to business grading papers and getting ready for another week at American International School HCMC.

(I had too many pictures to post on the blog, but you can click HERE to see pictures of our Mekong trip. If you don't have/want a Shutterfly account, you can email me and I'll give you my password).