Cruising around the Mekong river delta

We had a wonderful day in the Mekong river delta on our little boat which took us from one interesting attraction to the next. Relaxation on the boat was very important:

The Mekong river has floating villages, meaning people who live on houseboats and buy their groceries from vendors on other boats. Really interesting to see!

We saw a few people swimming in the river. Our guide told us that they were “taking a shower”. So this is how the Mekong river village people wash!

There are also many houses really close to the water.We visited several little islands and saw a rice paper factory, some candy production factory and probably some others. All very interesting to see – of course it was all a show for the tourists and I assume all those products are actually made in large factories somewhere at the outskirts of Saigon or Hoi An but never mind.

One of our programme points was to take a trip in a row boat. In this one to be exact:

Funnily enough most of those row boats that we saw were rowed by women. Apparently Vietnamese women work a lot harder than Vietnamese men (this was confirmed by several people that we talked to!).

So off we went in the blazing mid-day sun. It was so, so hot! And I was really worried that our rowing lady would keel over and we’d have to row back ourselves. It seemed really hard work especially as the tide was low.

Luckily she held up and we could enjoy these views without playing Vietnamese Baywatch and having to row her back to the shore ourselves. Phew! Of course I’m also glad for her that she was fine.

At the end of the day we paid a quick visit to yet another market. This time with a lot of fish and seafood (alive – very fresh!).

I don’t mind seeing the live animals waiting to be bought and eaten, but there was one thing that really freaked me out and those were the water snakes. Kind of smallish black or dark green snakes that were wiggling around in those glass boxes… urgh! I would never go near one of those let alone eat it! We saw someone buying a couple of those snakes for dinner and the vendor just grabbed them and put them in a plastic carrier bag, as if it was a box of cereal – except that you had to fight with them a little bit to keep them in the bag.

And off we drove into the sunset. Kind of like her.