Mekong Delta

Meandering waterways and jungles are the highlight of the Mekong. These waterways and canals are threaded throughout the Mekong with a total distance of around 3,500 miles/5000km. The jungle’s vegetation is rich and varied with trees filled with food such as; bananas, avocados, limes, papaya, guava, longan, rambutan, pineapple, durian, pomelo, dragon fruit, coconut and others I cannot name.

We boarded a boat at one of the floating markets where people sell their product from their boats. A boat owner selling jicama will have jicama tied to its mast, if selling tapioca, then tapioca will be hung from the mast. Until 1990, the boats were the only way to deliver product along the river because they had no walkways. In 1990, the government and the people living along the river financed the building of walkways which created other means of transport.

Women stand in the back of their canoe-shaped wooden boats and row with two oars. Sometimes another woman sits in front with one oar to help steer. Two women passed with live ducks in a cage and a scale on top. Our tour guide said these women will sell the live ducks by weight for someone who wishes to add duck to their vegetable soup this evening. Now that is fresh delivery.

In one area they were mixing ground rice with water and spreading it on a fibrous material stretched over a steaming pot. Upon this stretched drum fashioned tool a woman would pour a very thin layer of the rice liquid and wait a few seconds until it became slightly more solid. She would then use a wide knife to carefully peel the dried rice mix off the drum and set it out to dry. The result would become a very thin rice paper, which was edible wrapping for many of the other rice treats that were manufactured here. As fuel they would use the rice hull and constantly feed the fire under the cooking pot. Every day this one woman will make about 600 sheets of rice paper.

In this same manufacturing plant they made coconut candy (which was extremely good) from the local coconuts. This candy is all handmade and done by cooking down the coconut and sugar until it is hot enough to roll out and cut. It is then wrapped in edible rice paper and is ready to eat.
Most of the production from this particular site is sold to Saigon and shipped there.

Puffed rice is made from unhulled rice by heating sand is a very large pot over a hot fire (ever encountered a cold fire?) But the sand and the pot are fiercely hot which are added to the hot humid air of the jungle. The rice is thrown into the hot sand where it puffs up like popcorn in hot oil. After the rice stops popping, it is scooped out into a fine metal mesh to strain out the sand leaving the puffed rice and the chaff. These are poured into a less fine metal mesh to clean out the hull and smaller pieces of puffed rice. For the children, they cook sugar cane into a liquid form and pour it on the puffed rice for a sweet cereal.

For the adults, their rice treat is wine which they drink like “the buffalo drinks water in the rice field.” The rice wine distiller was simple but cleverly built. Wine slowly dripped into a plastic bottle as our tour guide explained the benefits of adding a cobra and black scorpion to the wine. These additions, he told us, will mend weak bladders, sleeping problems, and is much better than Viagra. He says that Viagra is a short solution but cobras and scorpions in rice wine is a long solution. Rice wine can be made from sticky rice or from normal rice and is fermented several days before it undergoes a very primitive distilling process. I’d bring some home to everyone but US customs doesn’t find any humor in these things. Sour pusses.

During lunch, we met Sandra from Brazil, Ester and Eliette from Israel, and Chen from China in the Guanzhou Province. While in Hoi An, Ester and Eliette, two women in their sixties, got caught in the typhoon that hit Central Vietnam last week. They were happy their room was on the second floor of their hotel because the first floor was flooded. The people’s bags and belongings were floating in the water. The wind was blowing down the trees during the torrential rain and frequent lightning that kept hitting the electric pole outside of their hotel. They could not leave their hotel for a day to get food so the hotel manager made everyone soup to eat that day. All buses and trains had been cancelled so they had to buy plane tickets to get out. Boats came to their hotel and they waded out into waist deep water to be rowed to higher ground where the airport was located. They loved it and thought it to be a great adventure.

Ester is a native Israelite, which is rare because most Jews are immigrants into Israel. She said natives of Israel are called Sabras which is named after the longstanding -native cactus plant of Israel which we would call the Prickly Pear. Ester told us that the story goes that native Israelis are compared to the cactus plant with a tough thorny exterior but soft and sweet inside. Her parents were aided in 1944 just before the end of World War II by an underground group in Bulgaria who were helping Jews to escape from the country. She was born in 1945 in Israel when it was still under British control.

Eliette's parents migrated into israel from Romania when she was a child. She has been surprised by the amazing amount of free enterprise that exists here in Vietnam which is a communist country. Vietnam's industry, production, distribution, variety, and delivery are quite impressive. She recently visited her homeland of Romania and was disapppointed to see that the people in this country could not even produce their own milk but had it imported. She said that the young people are moving out of Romania en masse because the country has no jobs so mostly older people remain there.

Going back to the scenery in the Mekong Delta; riding along in a boat gives us the chance to see life on the river. A little girl, maybe around two years old, sits on top of the boat with a red rooster and a plastic bag of bright red rambutan fruit. She calmly watches the boats roll by paying no attention to the restless rooster next to her. A woman is handing melons into the small window on the side of a boat, a dog rushes to the side of a boat to check us out as we pass, children run to the shore and shout "hello, hello" as they wave smiling broadly. Mothers are washing their children with soap and a brush in the river, some women are cutting up fish as they squat on the wooden ramps leading to their homes, men are lifting heavy baskets of fruit or vegetables into the riverside stores and restaurants, fathers and sons are laying netted cages in the river to catch fish. Families are eating a meal or napping in a hammock. People work energetically putting in a hard-working productive day in their businesses. Boat loads of fish, fruits, and vegetables display the abundance from the Mekong. A very large percentage of food for the entire country and region is produced in the Mekong Delta.

We crossed the border in Cambodia today and cannot find Wifi anywhere so getting pictures from our laptop to another computer is not possible right now. It was a miracle that we managed to get these pictures on this blog (too long of a story). We may have some challenges getting the next blog posted but will do our best. We still have so much so tell and so many pictures of the beautiful jungle in Vietnam and then into Cambodia.

We are in Phnom Penh right now where we spend the day and then tomorrow we will go to Siem Riep, Cambodia to see Angkor Wat, where we will see thousands of pagodas.