Can Tho, Mekong Delta

Kim and I left Ho Chi Minh City on a $5 express bus to Can Tho.  The bus ride took about 3-4 hours, which included a stop at an enormous rest area, which I believe was owned by the bus company.  We were unable to communicate enough to find out how long the ride would be, and we’d read and heard a range of times from 45 minutes to 6 hours.  Frankly, I think the man that told us “forty-five minutes” meant “four-to-five hours.”  It made the ride interesting not knowing how long it would take.  There was a television screen in the front of the bus playing sketch comedy routines in Vietnamese and many of the passengers found them very funny.  I wondered whether they would still be annoying to me if I understood them (my guess is yes - especially the routine where the Vietnamese guy appeared to be portraying a gangsta rapper).

Can Tho is in the heart of the Mekong Delta and it is bustling.  While it has a population of 1.5 million, it is not as cosmopolitan as Ho Chi Minh City.  It is more rural and the economy revolves around agriculture and the river. 

It is the off-season for tourism, and we found a great deal at the Victoria Hotel, which is luxurious.  It is a manicured oasis with a pool and piano player at cocktail hour, hidden away from the hot, noisy and crowded city.  We had a few drinks there but not much else because the prices were astronomical and the food was mostly attempting to cater to the Western clientele.

We had an unbelievable meal at a local place near the hotel called Hoa Su.  It was a vast complex of private wooden huts, each with its own waitress.  The waitress called in our order on a land line phone and cracked open beers from a cooler.  We had deep fried pumpkin flower stuffed with minced pork meat (genius), pork ribs, sausage fried rice, a whole snapper in ginger sauce (kept hot with a sterno at the table) and 4 beers for roughly $15 U.S.  Obviously, we couldn’t eat it all and I have since regretted not eating just one more deep-fried, pork-stuffed pumpkin flower. I can't believe this place doesn't get more of a write up in the Lonely Planet guide, though it would have received an F- in a Board of Health inspection in NYC.

We left the next morning at 6:30am for the floating markets.  The floating markets are the main tourist attraction in Can Tho and they start up early in the morning.  Our guide took us to see the boats; they were all selling fruit wholesale.  To the masts of their boats, the sellers tie the fruit they have for sale.  Pineapples and bananas were the main offering that day.  There was a little boat that went around like a convenience store for the sellers, in it a little lady offered the sellers coffee and hot bowls of pho.

 

The floating market was very interesting, but the postcards in town all show a much more bustling scene.  There was a lot of activity, just not as much as pictured in those postcards.  It turns out that recent road and bridge construction has significantly reduced the amount of commerce done on the waterway in this fashion.  In fact, we were told that, in Thailand, there is a floating market that exists only for tourists; no real commerce is actually done there anymore.  I can’t help but wonder if that is eventually the fate of the floating market in Can Tho.

Along the banks of the Mekong, people live in clapboard houses made of whatever they can find – mostly pieces of shipping containers and plastic tarps.  The houses are on stilts.  One of the houses was partly constructed with a plastic advertisement for Kaplan University.  It really hits you how poor they are here and how they make use of all the resources available to them.

Our tour guide also took us to orchards where we saw many tropical fruits growing, some of which were new to us.  We went to family owned shop where they made rice noodles by hand.  We also went to a factory where they processed rice grains.  The big machines at the rice processing factory were wooden and dusty and it seemed improbable that they still functioned the way they did.  And, we were told that Vietnam is second to Thailand as the world's largest rice producer. 

It struck me how they do not have the same level of anxiety about heavy machinery as we do in the U.S.  In the U.S., we would not have been able to get that close to those rickety rice machines, and certainly not without a helmet and a waiver form.  Same goes for firing automatic weapons and renting moto-bikes.

We met up (coincidentally) with Kim’s MBA friends in town for dinner at a mostly forgettable place.  We ordered half a baby pig and it came deep fried and cut up but still assembled so that the snout, ear and hooves were all still in place.  I tried it, but mostly ate rice for dinner.  The snout and hooves did get eaten, but nobody ate the ear.  I felt a little embarrassed about leaving the ear on the table, guessing that the Vietnamese would find this the choicest piece.  I hope someone in the kitchen laughed at us and triumphantly ate it.

The next morning, a Wednesday, we took a few relaxing hours at the fancy hotel, enjoying the pool and wifi.  Then we hopped a quick flight to Phu Quoc island, where we are now.  I will post about Phu Quoc separately.