For the past 2 days we have been traipsing around the mekong delta with our guide Hien. We have been up early each day to visit floating markets - this morning we are off to a fish farm.
The river life is just so incredibly different to anything we might experience, my brain is struggling to hold onto any more images. We have been on wee boats through the floating markets, where people are buying and selling fruit and veges off their boats to others in little boats. The little boats have outboards with propellers on long arms that they raise and lower and swing about, often with their feet, to negotiate their way through the jumble of boats. Or else they row, standing up with huge long oars.
There are lots of little tributaries winding across the area - we very quickly lost track of where we had come from. Alongside the rivers are houses, often up on poles (and some very rickety looking poles), with little muddy ramps down to the water, and everywhere people are squatting on the ramps washing clothes, or dishes, or cleaning fish, mostly women, lots of them wearing floral pyjama-like clothes and conical hats. There are fishing nets hanging from trees, and boats of every description carting rice, veges, rice husks (for fires), wood, bricks, sand, and even furniture.
There are paths along beside the river most of the places we went, with people walking, biking and motorbiking along them. Hundreds of precarious little bridges, some the old traditional "monkey bridges", but mostly now narrow flat bridges of planks or concrete without sides, connect the villages across the river branches. People confidently ride their loaded up motorbikes across these!
A highlight for us yesterday was a visit to a stork sanctuary. The sanctuary itself was small, and while it was great to see all the storks nesting up high in the bamboo, the real excitement was getting there. The tide was too low for our boat, so Hien negotiated with some local to take us the 3km along a little narrow muddy track on the back of their motorbikes.
Jiggs, Charlotte, Penny and I rode with the locals, Hannah with Hien, and Cam was given the dubious honor of being told to drive, and take Bill with him! He carried it off without a hitch, thank goodness, even managing a couple of hundred yards on the main road, including crossing the road against the traffic, but was a bit sweaty-handed afterwards!We also went to see rice paper being made, and rice noodles, and coconut toffee, and yesterday had lunch of local elephant fish, at a place where they had a pet python, which thrilled all the kids.
The rice paper making was a family business in their home on the side of the river. The 75 year old woman making the paper had lived in the house, which had been her in-laws, since she was married 50 years previously, and her daughter and her family live there now with her. Her husband was killed in the Vietnam war. She was sitting in a dark, hot room spreading a runny rice and tapioca mixture onto a kind of skin stretched over a boiling pot, fed by a rice husk fire, and she would lift a cooked flat piece off every few minutes and her daughter would lay it out to dry outsde on racks. She makes about 800 a day, but I think the two that Hannah and Bill made were not going to make it into the production line!
Time for a swim. More news later when I have time - I could write a book and not describe it all.
Love to all at home. You can email us to our normal email address and we will pick them up here.
Take care of yourselves xxx
