Pretty Pretty Mekong

Christie and Tim’s Excellent Adventure

With a few days off from teaching incorrect spelling and inappropriate words to Vietnamese children to play with Tim and I decided to embark on an adventure. With limited time yet a strong aversion to jamming ourselves onto a tourist bus, full to capacity with inadequate air conditioning we bought ourselves a map, packed light and climbed aboard our motorbike. We headed south into the Mekong Delta at the bottom of Viet Nam where the Mekong River, which flows through China, Burma, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia, finally terminates. The delta is formed from the division of the river into nine channels, separating the land into a number of islands. Books away, pens down, geography lesson over.
Our map reading skills got us out of Saigon successfully and onto the main road that head towards our destination of My Tho. It wasn’t particularly tricky to keep on the same road, as long as we managed to keep the desire to swerve off the dusty road into the surrounding fields in check.
As we arrived in My Tho, a large town at the top of the Delta, we realised we had helpfully left our guide book at home. Being excellent adventurers we didn’t let this phase us and managed to find our way to the harbour. This didn’t turn out to be the bustling realm of excitement we had expected, in fact the deserted roads and the faint whiff of ghost town told a different story. Deciding this place didn’t seem very promising for our adventure we elected to push on to the nearest island, after a little lunch.
Choosing our lunch spot by our usual method of searching, indecision, frustration culminating in a snap decision we sat down in a deserted ‘restaurant.’ It was the sort of Vietnamese restaurant that offers one delicacy with only the type of ‘meat’ being your choice. The old lady who shuffled out of the gloom at the back was delighted at the arrival of the Westerners. Thinking chicken was our best bet and the only thing we could definitively identify she bustled about with a low, deranged chuckle as she filled bowls and plates with anything she could find on the counter. The chicken and rice turned up covered with an odd pink sauce we hadn’t encountered before though whose taste was quite acceptable until she arrived with another bowl of the stuff and dripped the gloopy mess from a spoon while smiling inanely and nodding for our compliance. Let’s just say lunch did nothing to enhance our impression of My Tho so we jumped on their handy new concrete monstrosity that connects the island of Ben Tre.
In Ben Tre we headed to a hotel where we were offered the VIP room for a nominal extra fee. We never got to see the basic room but if ours was luxury I can only imagine the standard accommodation was modelled on a prison cell. Escaping the smell of damp we hopped back on the bike to look at the beautiful things to see. Nature’s favourite mixture of sun and water is abundant in the Delta so it’s vividly green and as we were blessed with lovely weather the scenery looked quite the stereotypical Viet Nam of plush paddy fields with workers in conical hats. Less obvious but perhaps more satisfying were the cows grazing in the middle of a football pitch while the local played round these ordinary obstacles.
We had dinner, which I won’t comment on for fear of sounding picky, and had an early night to prepare ourselves for the next day of adventure, ignoring the whir of the rusty fridge. We were woken the next morning for breakfast by vibrations of loud Vietnamese music from beneath our room, a perfectly pleasant alarm clock. Deciding that we hadn’t done anything to deserve this we decided to change rooms and found ourselves in another VIP room, this one definitely warranting the title and the price tag – the bath had buttons and turny bits and everything.
We dragged ourselves away from the complimentary water and went to meet the guide for a tour of the Delta. Deja vous hit us hard as we followed our guide, Hung, to the dock as his smiling face reminded us of another, though Mr Chinh would never have driven so slowly. We boarded a motor boat and sat back on a pleasant chuff chuff down the river while Hung described island life and the many uses of water coconuts. Thankfully full attention wasn’t required as he helpfully said everything twice. After a tour of a coconut factory, which displayed an impressive amount of goods made from coconuts, and oohing and aahing at the different tools for opening coconuts, grating coconuts and jabbing coconuts we were treated to some traditional music. Now, I’m not sure if something had happened before the musicians took to the stage or if they had become disillusioned to the tourist trade but despite the nice music it wasn’t a particularly comfortable affair. The female singer seemed to have a penchant for direct eye contact, which at close proximity can be slightly intimidating, and as the rest of the band stared at their shoes I was worried for their state of mind.
After they stopped, we applauded, gave them a tip and they shuffled off so did we.
Walking to our next mode of transport we passed a cage holding a python. Hung suggested it would make a good necklace for Tim and one of the local woman draped it round his neck in such a matter of fact manner that she managed to take quite alot of the drama out of the event. As you can see she's not in the pictures as she wandered off bored as soon as her task was complete. To get back to the motor boat we boarded a rowing boat that took a lazy path amongst the coconut forest with Tim’s excellent help. I don’t think the local man at the back would have coped without him. In amongst the trees it was quiet and the sun leaked down through the branches and dappled the river, it was quite lovely.
Our last stop on the tour was at Phoenix island, which is the home of the Coconut Monk’s temple. The coconut monk started life as an ordinary man who went to university, got a job, married a nice woman (this is merely an assumption – she could have been evil incarnate for all I know) and had a little girl. Unfortunately he wasn’t as successful in his chosen career and his wealthy family were disappointed in him. To rectify this the pre-monk abandoned his family and decided to become a monk but for this he needed a new religion. For twenty years he contemplated this and emerged to build a temple and recruit cultees for his religion, which amongst other things I’m sure, required the women to pray with no clothes on. It didn’t go well and he was arrested and the religion was tragically disbanded. Shame.
We left Hung, who had to retract his invitation of drinks with his friends as in the half an hour that had passed since the offer they had got too drunk to meet us. Impressive.
We had dinner in a floating restaurant that resembled a factory that didn’t float and left the next morning. Our successful navigation back up the motorway concluded the trip and our unusual patterns of sunburn served as a pleasant reminder of another excellent adventure.