Early wake up and scrumptious elaborate buffet breakfast before being picked up by our Buffalo Tours guide, Tam, and driver for our private tour. She is absolutely delightful with fluent English and proved to be a wealth of knowledge helping us to improve our perception and appreciation of this amazing country and its beautiful people.
Our drive was approximately two hours to Cai Be, the village from where we departed on our Mekong River adventure. Although this area is looking forward to needy rain for start of wet season almost anything grows here due to the rainfall, richness of soil and heat.....not like in central Vietnam were more like clay. Rice will be replanted here soon.
The Mekong River, or as the Vietnamese call it "Five Dragons River", begins in mountains of Tibet and flows through six Asian countries, finally entering the ocean in Southern Vietnam. The whole area is about 1metre below sea level and this mammoth expanse of river is as wide as two kms in places.
At Cai Be we were also joined by our beautiful local guide, Hanh as we boarded a traditional riverboat made from native bamboo, wood and rattan. We cruised through the floating market where vendors come from all around the Mekong Delta to sell their fruits, vegetables, firewood, sand (the rich silty soil from river is used for cultivation of crops) and other wares. Boats display what they are selling attached to a stick (eg sweet potato, mangoes).
We visited a home that was also an artisan factory making Vietnamese sweets - caramels, sesame sweets, dried noodle sweets, popped rice, dried and sweetened fruits - banana, ginger. Fascinating!
We then transferred onto a small wooden boat with Hanh and a local Vietnamese woman rowing us (similar to at Halong Bay) for a trip of about half an hour through a portion of the maze of narrow canals that meander like spiders webs between the islands of the river. Incredible to witness how these river people live!
Next stop was on the island of Minh, Hanh's home Island, which has four separate villages. Here in a home on a property of approx two hectares, we were served the most amazing lunch - Elephant ear fish (served whole, then wrapped in rice paper with vegetables); Spring rolls; BBQ prawns; Pork and vegetable soup; Braised Pork with rice; then fresh Banana and pineapple and Coffee (filtered) with condensed milk. Quite an experience with everything prepared to their local traditional methods and flavours.
Back on the boat Hanh had more Bananas, rambutans and longans for us to take back with us.
We were back to Cai Be to farewell Hanh at about 2pm and began our return trip
to Saigon arriving back at the Sofitel at 4pm. We will see Tam again in the morning for
another tour - though not before she managed to make us a reservation for tonight and give us many suggestions and options for things to do.
A quick cool off swim in the hotel pool (18th floor!) overlooking the city then we rang both Mum and Dawn to wish them Happy Mothers Day! We were in a taxi before 5.45pm heading to the Bi Texaco Financial Tower for our 6pm reservation on the 50th floor in Cafe Eon. Needless to say Tam had secured us a table by the window and we were just in time to witness the sunset - bit of cloud cover but still great. But even more spectacular from this incredible height to watch the colourful lights of this spectacular city. So good to recognise some of the landmarks we have already seen (Notre Dame cathedral and the post office building) plus others we hope to see. Awesome tower building, only three years old with a helipad just above us.
We enjoyed a couple of drinks and some more delicious Vietnamese food (not sick if it yet!) - BBQ prawn rice paper rolls and crispy pancake!
Wandered back to our hotel via some department stores for some shopping and taking in the Sunday evening family atmosphere of the city. Certainly a most memorable Mothers Day!