SAIGON AND THE MEKONG DELTA
After a relaxing stop of doing nothing in Mui Ne for a couple days, we headed to the bustle of the South, including the former capital of South Vietnam, Saigon, and a few days at a homestay in the Mekong Delta.
On the way, we experienced a unique Vietnamese type of transportation: the sleeping bus. Since Vietnam is a very long and thin country, plenty of buses ply the road connecting the main cities from North to South and you can hop on or off every couple of hours to break up your journey (if you would do the whole trip without stopping, it would take 48 hours!). We avoided the longest routes by flying (since there are plenty of low-cost flights), but we had a couple of shorter, 4-hour legs – enough to decide to avoid this kind of bus in the future. It’s not your ‘normal’ kind of sleeping bus, you see – I can only describe it as 3 rows of bunkbeds in a bus, where you can’t sit up fully, you travel lied down. Once we got used to the lack of height and absolute inability to fidget (they weren’t designed for people of my size), it wouldn’t have been so bad if there was anywhere other than your lap to put your small bag. Most people put everything down in the luggage compartment, but we weren’t comfortable with stowing our laptop and camera that far out of sight. Anyways, it was an experience, and it got us to Saigon!
Food, Traffic and English Lessons in Saigon
Saigon is what everyone calls the largest city in the country, as the official name of Ho Chi Minh City is too cumbersome for everyone except the official newspapers. The atmosphere in the city, or at least in the tourist district, was a lot more pleasant than what we expected: it was full of bars, restaurants and street food vendors, not to mention massage parlours. The two most famous clichés about Saigon relate to the crazy traffic and the incredibly tasty food – and with very good reason!
Traffic in the other Vietnamese cities was hectic to say the least, but Saigon takes it to a completely new level. The vast majority of vehicles are motorcycles just like most of South East Asia, but there seems to be a never-ending swarm of them which makes pedestrian life rather difficult. There are mostly no pedestrian lights, and even if there is and it is green, it is probably also green for vehicles from at least 2 other directions! However, if you wait at the sidewalk for a lull in the traffic then you will never get around to crossing. According to locals, the only way for foreigners to successfully do it, is to close your eyes, ignore the traffic and start walking. It might seem crazy and is a bit difficult to take the first step, but it kind of works – the motorcycles will weave around you and keep going! Multiple locals suggested that we check out the famous “pedestrian street” where there are no motorcycles, so we set out with high expectations, which were kind of dashed when we realised that “pedestrian street” actually means a normal street, that has a sidewalk - on the vast majority of streets, pedestrians are forced to walk on the edge of the road and dodge the passing motorcycles.
Pedestrians and motorbikes in the backpacker district:
We heard a lot about the amazing food in Saigon, and we weren’t disappointed. While we didn’t participate in any of the guided foodie tours with stellar reviews, as we found them too pricey for our budget, we tried a couple of the top-rated places. Our particular favourite was Bun Cha in the backpacker district and very close to our hostel, specialising in the Northern dish of the same name. Bun cha is a stew with plenty of delicious raw herbs (and a slightly sweet taste), meat balls, a huge portion of lettuce and noodles all in one. Also legendary was their desert: a deep-fried croquette of frozen fruits, hot on the outside, refreshingly cold on the inside, dipped in chocolate sauce! It was so good, we went back every single day we were in the city, so we didn’t end up trying too many new places.
My other favourite was a coconut desert from a street-side vendor: half a coconut, filled with coconut ice cream, seasoned with peanuts, coconut shaving and served with the coconut’s water. It’s right next to the McDonalds near the night market in case you’re stopping nearby, and it’s worth every penny – it fills 2 people for £1.5.
Across Vietnam, but particularly in more touristic places in Saigon, we were constantly approached by well-dressed, local youth “looking for 5 minutes of our time to practice speaking English to us”. One time we even met a 13-year-old boy (chaperoned from a respectful distance by his father, due to his young age) whose plan for the summer vacation was to hang around the city centre and practice English. We also met a group of university students, who, recognising the poor quality of English education in the country, created an English Club, where they spend their weekends in a park, chatting to tourists and offering free tourist information. For us, it was a great way to meet the locals and learn more about what their daily lives are like. It was also very humbling to see the effort they were willing to dedicate to learning a language in their free time, without having to pay for language lessons – not something I can imagine happening anywhere in the West! We felt good to give back a bit to the community by helping out these guys, and they really appreciated our time and patience.
Cu Chi Tunnels
The big historic item on most peoples’ tours in Saigon are the famous Cu Chi tunnels. During the Vietnam War (or American War as it is called in Vietnam, showing a different viewpoint based on who is considered to be the reason for the war), a small group of Communist Viet Cong soldiers led a guerrilla war from the Cu Chi area with the help of the local population against Saigon and the US troops on their side. The astonishing thing is that, despite huge efforts and intensive carpet-bombing, the Americans were unable to eliminate this camp, only an hour’s drive away from the Southern Vietnamese capital! Faced with the threat of constant bombings and military checkpoints, the Viet Cong went underground, and over the years, dug a 250km network of tunnels to enable them to pass undetected for communication, resupplying and organising ambushes. Conditions inside the tunnels were horrible, especially if you lived there for weeks on end: pitch black, no electricity, barely any food, hot and humid with minimal ventilation - not recommended for anyone with claustrophobia! The enlarged, “tourist” version of the tunnels that we visited were 80cm wide and 120cm tall, so even crossing 20m underground was a struggle, but you could continue going as the tunnels got smaller and narrower, closer to the original state. 20m was enough for me, and Renata changed her mind to be part of the chain of people squeezing through the tube once she saw how tiny the tunnel was and that there was no way to turn around before you got to the first exit as there were people both behind and in front.
It was incredible to see that despite the American army’s vastly inferior technology and resources; the determined Viet Cong were still able to outlast their enemy. When an American soldier was killed, every bit of their equipment was reused by the Viet Cong, from their uniforms (used to trick other Americans into believing they were allies), their high-tech flashlights (which the Viet Cong obviously didn’t have) to their soap (which they used to wash so the American dogs wouldn’t be able to sniff out where they were hiding). While the North Vietnamese suffered horribly in the tunnels, in the end they were more motivated and endured their hardships, losing simply wasn’t an option. The Americans on the other hand were handicapped by the fact that they placed a much higher value on the life of one of their soldiers than the North Vietnamese did on theirs: Ho Chi Minh (the leader of the Communists) once said he could afford to lose 10 times as many soldiers as the Americans and still win.
A bit bizarrely, there is also a huge shooting range in the park where the tunnels are, where you can try all kinds of real guns from the era, such as AK-47s and M16s for an extra fee. Somehow, we didn’t have the appetite to give it a go, especially after the gruesome history lesson we just had. Others in our group thought that £2 / shot was a deal that they couldn’t miss – but since these are automatic weapons, even 10 bullets are gone in a matter of seconds.
On the way to the tunnels, we made a pit-stop at a factory where people who were disabled by the war make a living producing various handicrafts. The ones we found prettiest were the pictures made out of tiny pieces of broken eggshells and shells painstakingly fitted together before being coloured and varnished. It’s a very work-intensive process and (besides the mass-produced majority) we saw a few amazing pieces of workmanship – however as we were limited by the size of our backpacks, we decided to pass this time around. Later on, we saw similar pieces of art in the night market too.
Homestay in the Mekong Delta
Our final stop in Vietnam was at Ms. Ha’s amazing homestay in the Mekong Delta, in the city of Can Tho. We had read great reviews about her private, authentic tours to the floating markets and to many little corners of the area where she shows the real everyday life people live on the river, just what we wanted to see! So we decided to travel to the delta on our own by public bus and stay at her guesthouse to join her trips instead of the tourist circus that is shown at many places on daytrips from Saigon.
Ms. Ha started off as a ferry boat driver 25 years ago and gradually worked her way up the ladder to doing floating market boat tours for tourists, taught herself English from listening to tourists and now even owns a 6-room homestay. You could tell that she loves what she does (she still gets up at 4am to take guests on tours!) and adheres to the principle of focusing on making sure the customer has a great experience, and then the money will take care of itself. It was astonishing that from her extremely humble origins, she is now able to provide jobs for the various relatives and friends that she cooperates with (the boat drivers, the restaurants, the market vendors), all from pure goodwill. While she doesn’t have any children of her own since she says she worked too many double shifts to have time for a relationship, she seems to have ended up caring for all the children in her extended family and helping out so many others in town!
Even if her place is not officially a homestay but a guesthouse, during our stay of 4 days we felt like we were part of the family, she took us out for breakfast with the children and made us try all the local delicacies at very authentic corners, she made pancake for us, we got invited to celebrate one of her nephews’ 6th birthday together with the family and played UNO with the children, and we tried to help her out with her computer-related questions to better manage her account on the different accommodation reservation systems. Thanks to her we learnt so much about how people live by the Mekong, what they do as a living, what problems and beliefs they have and so on, that we felt that these few days gave us truly invaluable experiences.
On our first day in Can Tho we walked around the town, and visited the local market, where we saw some surprising things, like frogs with a knot on their belly which doesn't let them move (frog is a local delicacy), fish that seemed to have legs and walked (!), other fish that were so lively that they jumped out of the bowls and the vendors had to collect them back from the street, and many-many herbs, much more than what the Western eyes are used to at a market.
We also walked through the city center with the river bank and the Ho Chi Min park, the proud of local people. We closed the day with a hot pot dinner at a restaurant where we were the only foreigners, and the local guests and waiters could not hide enough how uneducated they though we were that we did not even know hot to prepare a local hot pot! The waiter decided to give us a demonstration since we started ruining the whole meal. The local hot pot is basically fresh herbs quickly boiled in the broth together with instant noodle. We had beef meet balls in the broth. It was a new taste, an interesting one to try, but it didn't become our favorite.
Mekong Villages by Bicycle
We joined Ms. Ha’s bicycle tour of the neighbouring villages for a day with a friendly American couple, which was a lot of fun. Her nephews joined us too on the tour which made it even better. Every 10 seconds we were greeted by cheerful children saying “Hello” and holding their hands to clap them from the bike, regardless of whether they were playing in their garden or the riverside, or even swinging from trees! We weren’t sure whether all the happiness was due to seeing something new (us), or the fact that the summer vacation had just started a couple of days earlier. Ms. Ha and the kids showed us their school, where the classrooms funnily looked like everyone just got up and left mid-sentence when the bell rang for summer. We also saw plenty of different vegetable and herb fields, although a lot of the farmland has recently been redeveloped into residential areas.
We visited a rice processing and packaging factory in the area, where they showed us the 20+ different kinds of rice they grow locally and how it is ground to separate the husk from the grain. The husk is then used to fire brick-baking kilns, or mixed into pig feed. The small processing plant we visited held thousands of huge bags of rice, each of which would probably be enough for our lifetimes! The rats also thought it was a neat place, and we saw a few scurrying about (actually, we saw more of them in the cities and they didn’t feel like they were afraid of being seen). When we asked Ms. Ha, she told us that, while these wild rats are pests, a different species of rat is sold at the market for meat! We saw these types being sold from cages by the road for food, and for us they did not look much different to their relatives from the rice granary…
We also stopped by a brickmaking factory where the bricks are made in a rather manual process, then dried on the sun, and finally burnt in huge fireplaces for several days. The heat was hardly unbearable anyways despite the relatively early hour, and those people working in the factory were close to the burning fire in the biggest heat!
On our way we crossed many small canals where we witnessed that people living around these sources use the water in so many areas, including transportation, irrigation, cleaning, washing and many more. It was a beautiful phenomenon since people seem to be so close to nature here, but it also shows their alerting dependence on the river. Actually, the Mekong is the source of many international conflicts between countries living along it, as dams have been and are being built on it for energy production, which has reduced its water level on sections further South, causing significant problems on flora, fauna and locals.
We learned quite a few titbits from Ms. Ha about life in the Delta: for example, traditionally children were named “First”, “Second”, “Third”, “Fourth” or “Fifth” depending on which order they were born in (the 6th child was called First Junior and the cycle restarted). A child could also be named “Youngest” if the family felt they didn’t want any more children – although since family planning is quite basic, it could easily happen that a woman would then give birth to another child which would then be named “Youngest Junior”! We learned that even today contraception works primarily by counting days in the woman’s cycle for the least fertile days (as opposed to pills which are considered dangerous – although they might have different chemical components from what we have in the West – or condoms). Another interesting piece of commonly known folk medicine is how pregnant women need to eat at least one goose egg to help make their eventual delivery as smooth and quick as possible. Ladies, don’t worry, it can be cooked, and it only applies to the first child! To wrap up the anecdotes about the Vietnamese circle of life, people are frequently buried in their backyards (as opposed to a cemetery which often gets full) to ensure their remains can be properly cared for – so we saw plenty of back gardens with little tombstones set in them!
By Boat to the Floating Markets and to Local Villages
The following day, we had an early, 04:30am start so we would still catch the floating markets in full swing (apparently people cope with the heat by moving all activity to the crack of dawn)! Ms. Ha took us by a little boat to two different markets: a wholesale market and a smaller local one. The wholesale market was a curious affair, with about 30 large boats anchored near one bank of the river. Each boat tours the river buying from the producers and taking it to a market where they think they can get a good price. Each boat is usually selling a single product at a given time, which is piled up on the deck – and also pinned to the mast so customers could see what they were selling from far away! When two boats make business together, they get close and fixed to each other for the time of the transaction.
Next stop was the smaller, local floating market which was a much more low-key affair (probably also because we got there quite a bit later, around 07:30am). By this time some of the vendors have finished for the day and left, so we only saw a smaller bunch, maybe around 15 vendors. It was still spectacular, many of the boats were selling a mix of many types of products, and they looked like floating supermarkets. We bought a couple of pineapples (and learned how to peel them properly), but otherwise just cruised around looking at the locals and the tourists doing their groceries. By this point we’d been up for quite a few hours, so it felt like noon – it was also as hot as noon, despite it being only 08:00am! Our boatman took us on a much more scenic route amongst little canals in the middle of the jungle and rice fields on the way back.
An alternative way on the river, one of the many tiny canals. This one even had an old "hanging brudge" where people had to literally hang across the bridge using only 2 poles. No wonder why even not all locals like these.
We made a number of little detours along the way, including to a rice wine distillery and a rice noodle factory; which were both spectacular sights, the first one was together with a pig farm, a good complementary activity of a rice wine factory! If you wonder why this is the case (we also did), there are two main reasons: pigs can eat the rice husk and so the residual of the wine, and they can also drink the wine (!), which makes them slow and sleepy hence they will get bigger and fatter quicker. Well, we were wondering about how animal friendly this method was when we noticed several needles and vaccinations with medicine in a corner in the pigs' area which suggested that this method was probably not the only one to speed up their growing process... Indeed they had a tiny cage, not much space to walk too much. By the way, we also tasted the rice wine, and it was very different, much stronger than Japanese sake, I would rather compare it to some vodka. Just for an interesting fact, they burn coconut husk for preparing the wine.
Rice wine distillery:
Rice noodle factory - production and outcome:
However, the most memorable stop of all was at a python farm (yes, you read correctly!) which supplies snakeskin for belts, handbags and wallets. While snakes aren’t our favourite animals, we couldn’t help feeling pity for the massive animals living out their lives in poor conditions in tiny cages. And then we were shown how they are killed to ensure their skin can make good quality leather: their mouths are connected to a pump which blows them up with air like a balloon until they die. Then a worker jumps on the inflated snake for 20 minutes so the skin will be easy to separate from the flesh, a very gruesome business indeed. The skin is then dried for 3 days, while the meat is sold at the market as food and the intestines are fed to the chickens (which are fed to the snakes…). We left feeling a little queasy in our stomachs: farming is certainly better than hunting an animal to extinction in the wild, and it commendable that all parts of the animals are used, but it was shocking to see how these animals lived and died – we will be sure to think twice before buying anything made of snake skin in the future, and even then from certified sources! Even the shed snakeskin is reused by the way, it is sold as a mouse and rat-repellent for people to put in their houses; mice smell the snakeskin and stay clear, thinking that a 6-meter serpent is on the prowl!
Another interesting stop was at a local friend family’s house, where we were welcomed with coconut biscuits and tea, and we could see how poor everyday people live in the countryside, what their house looks like, what they are proud of and what they keep as memories around them. For instance, we saw precious certificates on the wall from the village’s major to congratulate when the old lady turned 80 years old, or when a child successfully finished a year at school. There were photos on the wall of deceased relatives and wedding pictures from couples. We were very warmly welcomed and also queried about all sorts of topics. We were guided through the house and garden that they built and looked after by themselves. It was admirable how poorly this family lives and how many unfortunately event happened to them throughout the years, but they are still so happy and grateful for what they have: a tightly knit family and the basics for their everyday lives.
Funnily enough, Vietnam was also where an interesting phenomenon started reaching bizarre proportions: as I gradually became more tanned during our journey, more and more people started thinking I was a local! The first time I was asked was in Colombia (although sadly that was before they heard me speaking Spanish), and later China too, although I guess there are so many different ethnicities in China that I could also pass for a local there. I was a bit more surprised when I was asked, on two separate occasions, if I had any Japanese relatives!? In Vietnam the whole thing reached an extreme, pretty much every single person with whom we had a longer conversation was convinced I was at least partly Vietnamese! At several occasions locals even started a conversation in the local language with me!
The Mekong Delta marked the last stop in our 2.5 week-long tour of Vietnam, and we both agreed that every single stop we made held something interesting and unique, and the people were absolutely charming wherever we went. We highly recommend it to fellow travelers, and we will also need to come back to see the North of the country someday.