Hi all 

So we packed our bags for the final time in Vietnam (sniff) and boarded our bus for our 3 day tour of the Mekong Delta. 

Now I know this is quite bad, well really bad in fact, but I’m not 100% sure where it is we went. So everything from now on is based on looking at the map and trying to dredge up in my memory some familiarity with the place names on it. So this is probably going to be completely wrong. Although I’ve just realized that I remember all of ‘Stutter Rap’ by Morris Minor And The Majors and have been ‘entertaining’ Mand with it for the last 72 hours. Sweet. 

Okey dokey, so we started the day aboard a bus with maybe 15 other people. Off we set and after a couple of hours of gorgeous scenery we made a pit stop at a roadside café and got chatting to an Ozzie guy called Cameron. Now the word gimp was probably invented for this guy. If you look it up in the dictionary there is probably a picture of his huge head, treble glazed glasses and gormless expression. After a couple of minutes chatting to him I decided enough was enough and feigning a toilet break left Mand with him and sat down for a nice cold coconut juice. Beautiful. Especially as the waitress took a shine to me and sat with me looking foxy for a couple of minutes until Mand came over and spoiled it.

Back on the bus for another hour or so and we were at the river docks and ready for some of that Mekong Delta action, trying desperately to separate ourselves from Cameron, his constantly running nose and his relentless whinging. 

The scenery was, as expected, absolutely amazing. Not quite as breathtaking as our trip into Laos because there were actually people living here. So we were treated to views of life on the river complete with little fishing boats, sand barges, fish farms and all sorts of other s*** you normally only see on postcards. It was gorgeous. The banks were filled with dense jungle and coconut mangroves (if that’s the right word) and the feeling was like having stepped back in time to a place you’d never been before. I really need to lay off the drugs. 

So after a while of floating down the main river (and a side trip down a part that was given over to serious poverty stricken inhabitants) we came to a bunch of islands. Unicorn Island, Phoenix Island, Turtle Island, Dragon Island. At least I think that’s what they were called (‘Now hey there people won’t you lend an ear, cos I’ve a story to tell and I’m telling it here’). Either way we ended up on Dragon Island (possibly) where we had lunch (which was ok) and bimbled around in a garden taking photos of tree flowers, mainly in another bid to get away from our new best bud Cameron. It was at this point that I decided now was the perfect time to stop smoking.

Now I know that I’ve quit about 300 times before (for near on two years last time) but this time I had a few things going for me. The first was that I had no fags left and was in the middle of a f***ing great river with nowhere to buy them. The second was that Mand said she wouldn’t mind when I turned into a raging lunatic at the smallest provocation and even when there was no provocation at all.Thirdly, it was just me and her so I would be spared the influence of people around me sparking up more often than Fraser plugs www.lookupsport.com. Lastly, I need time for my body to regain some semblance of fitness before I go and get my head smashed in on a regular basis by some Thai guy the size of a small child. So, bearing all this in mind it was with great confidence that I crushed out the last of those crisp, delicious, smooth tasting beauties and set about trying not to think about how much I wanted one. Cool. 

So after lunch we headed across the river to a different island who for argument’s sake let’s call Unicorn Island (‘I was born in a town in the great UK, from a baby to a boy to a man today’). Here, we disembarked into smaller boats for a trip through the jungle. Now this was serious Apocalypse Now territory. It was fantastico. The river we were on was now only about 4 metres across and the jungle was seriously close. Past houses and small villages and farmsteads full of people eking out an existence in the jungle. Atmospheric as a Beatles reunion. Complete with Lennon and Harrison. 

Eventually we arrived at a little pier and disembarked to walk through some coconut groves to a little group of huts where they were making coconut candy. Mmmmm. This is as fresh as it gets. The coconuts are picked, crushed, mixed with other ingredients and packed right there in the middle of the jungle. All by hand and all tasty as me wrapped in a bacon roll. Once again, everything is used. The dried coconut remains are used to feed stock and the husks are used to fuel the fire that cooks the candy. Nothing else is used in the mix apart from sugar (produced locally from sugar palms) and malt. It was grand, so we bought ourselves a shedload (ok mainly me in order to try and cure the cigarette longing) and sat down for an afternoon tea and some entertainment. The tea was made from Chinese herbs, fresh honey and fresh lemon. The honey was produced by the bees they kept on site and the lemons were picked straight off the trees. How much fresher can you get?

While we were drinking this, a band played traditional Vietnamese folk music and I found myself once again entranced by the tranquil melody of the musicians and the soulful singing of the two women. I have absolutely no idea what it was they were singing about but it did what all good music does and stirred my senses. Maybe it was just the tea and nicotine withdrawal though :o) This heavenly time was completed by our guide suddenly getting out his snake and encouraging the girls to hold it. Easy now. It was a 5 foot tree python which was really beautiful, but unforunately this signaled the end of our visit.

We walked through the jungle a bit further and found ourselves by the side of an even narrower tributary. Into the even smaller boats provided (this time just me Mand and a couple of Japanese girls – sounds like some kind of fantasy to me) and off we went once again. This time, the dense jungle was so close you could reach out and touch it – at your own risk of course. Lions and tigers and bears…It was brilliant. It felt like you were in the middle of the jungle and you might see anything around the next bend in the river. Despite the fact we were still on a fairly small island.

After an hour or so of this, we found ourselves being shepherded off the boat for a short walk across the island and back on to our original big boat, for the short trip to our final destination. Which may well have been Vinh Long (‘And I’m a musical man and I’m a man of verse, but I’ve got a little problem and it’s getting worse’). Here is where the group got separated into those who were staying in a hotel (thankfully Cameron was among this group) and the six of us who’d decided we’d go for the home stay in a local village. Other than Mand and myself there were two other couples. The first couple were a Dutch couple. She was called Helga but it was pronounced like someone ejecting a huge black wad of phlegm from the back of their throat and we never did find out his name so let’s call him Bert – well why the hell not? They were about 25 – 30 ish and it turns out she was a copper in Haarlen and he was an environmental copper who used to be in the army and had served in Bosnia. This obviously got Mand into a lather on more than one occasion when he began telling us his tales from the war.

The second couple were from Spain. They were slightly older, maybe mid forties, and we never did find out their names either (we’re so friendly). He was probably called Pedro and she was probably called Maria, and their surname was probably Estevez. Now me and Mand, after our beautiful home stay in the Karen village outside of Chiang Mai had visions of something equally splendid in mind. Imagine our ‘surprise’ then, when it turned out we were staying in some rundown, mosquito infested bungalows on the side of the river miles from the nearest village. Hmmmm. By now my need for a cigarette was starting to kick in quite badly and it took much soothing talk from Mand and a few tears of absolute desolation on my part before I was calm enough to talk to our guide without wanting to string him up by his gonads and attempt to smoke his hair. It was in this state that we approached the main house for dinner.

I was getting seriously pissed off by now. The only ‘villager’ we’d seen was the guy who’d driven our boat here. And he was decked out in Reeboks, baseball cap and fake Armani Jeans. To say I was feeling robbed is an understatement. Then he brought out the food. Which looked like absolute s***. By now I was imagining the others sitting down at a large oak table back at the hotel, dining on roast swan and pate de frois gras from porcelain plates and silver cutlery, sipping ’69 Dom Perignon from crystal glasses and be waited on by 16 year old Vietnamese gymnasts in leotards. I would even have shared a bed with Cameron.

Putting such hallucinations down to nicotine withdrawal it was with a sense of great doom that I began tucking into the food before me. And it turned out to be pretty good. After a beer or two, the conversation also started to flow and I was once again subjected to that strange feeling I get when communicating with people of different nationalities in English. I think of it as a kind of cultural shame. Two Dutch, two Spanish and every now and then our Vietnamese friend all sitting round speaking in my mother tongue like it’s the most natural thing in the world. The feeling is made even worse when every now and then they’ll say something to each other in their native tongue and I have absolutely no idea on Earth what it is they are saying. ‘Pass the salt’ perhaps. Or ‘I wish this big eared fool would shut the f*** up and let me eat my noodles in peace, cos if he keeps this up I’m going to have to poke his eyes out with these chopsticks and bury him head first in the jungle’. I find it deeply shaming and more than a bit uncomfortable. Not enough to warrant actually getting off my arse and learning even the rudimentary basics of another language though of course. I mean what’s the point? Everyone speaks English anyway :o) 

Now after the dinner things had been put away something absolutely disastrous happened. Both couples pulled out cigarettes and asked if we minded if they smoked. Minded? Of course I f***in minded. Honest to god I was scratching like a junkie and looking at them with a mixture of loathing and longing in my eyes as they slowly slipped them out of their packets and placed them lovingly between their slightly moistened lips. And this was just the blokes. To borrow a phrase from Bill Hicks ‘each one of those babies looked like it had been made by God, rolled by Jesus and moistened shut with Claudia Schiffer’s p**** lips’. But I held firm, although I think the Dutch bird thought the overly long loving glances I was casting in her direction were some sort of come on. Her bloke definitely did.

I made up for not smoking by getting drunk as a skunk and looking at the table for far too long whenever someone lit up a cigarette, as I waited for the craving to pass. At some point, we were eventually joined by the owner of the house. And this was a house incidentally, not a shack or a bungalow. Sitting in this kitchen was like sitting in a kitchen in England having dinner and talking s***. Not quite the cultural experience I was after but too late now. This guy was actually a local business man and farmer. The business man bit meant running tours of the Mekong Delta (we saw him the next day) and convincing daft foreigners to spend the night at his house for an extra $5. Good on him. Twat.

However, he was a decent enough bloke and spent the next 2 hours giving us all a crash course in Buddhism and local traditions. He directed most of it at me because I was the only one who could really understand him properly and I spent most of the time ‘translating’ for the other smoking b******s. Eventually though, I got so drunk that I couldn’t understand him and they couldn’t understand me and with a resigned shrug he got up and f***ed off to bed. And so did we.

The thing I remember most about what he said was that the tradition in his neck of the woods is that the youngest son must stay at home with the parents, looking after them until they die. The thing is, this means that if the parents are poor, then the son remains poor. And there’s a saying over here that goes ‘no money, no honey’. In short, the youngest son in a poor family runs the very real risk of remaining in the family home, looking after slowly aging parents, with no chance of ever making himself rich, with an ugly wife. Gutted. 

After a night’s mosquito ridden, filthy sheeted, mouldy smelling sleep, broken only by my need to get up and have a piss in the shower (there was no toilet) and the ten minutes it took me to get back to sleep because Pedro (or possibly Maria) next door was snoring worse than Rip Van Winkle with a head cold, we were up for a disgustingly meagre breakfast and the boat back down to meet our comrades. Who it turns out had spent the night in a ridiculously grotty hotel complete with rats. Beautiful. But the day promised to be a great one, cos we were off to see the famous floating markets. 

The market could well have been the Cai Be floating market (‘M-my life was so well planned, surviving and a-jiving in a f-f-funk band’) but whatever one it was it was pretty cool. Huge boats packed to the top with various fruit and veg and baguettes. You just sail through and shout out to them what it is you want and they throw it over to you and you throw the money back. Cool. It was really picturesque and the smell was fantastic, and it was a really good glimpse into local life on the river. Better than say, spending an evening sitting in some bloke’s kitchen.

As we sailed away from the market the heavens opened and we once again found out exactly why they call this the rainy season. We got absolutely drenched and eventually the driver took pity on us all and we stopped at a riverside shanty and waited in vain for the rain to stop. It didn’t, but it did eventually ease up enough that our guide decided it would have to do. We were supposed to be headed for a second floating market, but by this time we were a little behind schedule and headed instead to a rice paper making factory. And I genuinely have absolutely no idea where that was (‘Cos rappin is my bread and butter, but it’s hard to rap when you’re born with a st-st-st-stutter’). I won’t bore you with the details, suffice to say it was exactly like the one we saw in Hoi An with the Easy Riders but with half a dozen or so women sitting around making the stuff. 

While we were eating lunch a vendor came by selling a bunch of s*** that you wouldn’t buy unless you were seriously mentally ill. However, deep in the recesses of his box of clutter Mand spotted something. They play a game over here (and I have no idea what it’s called) which involves booting a kind of hard wearing shuttlecock around, a bit like hacky sack. They play it everywhere and most of them can do all sorts of mad tricks with it. I kept wanting to have a go but knew I’d end up embarrassing myself severely. So I bought three of them off this guy mainly because it’ll give me something to do when we’re slowly dying in the desert in Oz. I ripped open the packet of the first with all the glee and trepidation of a kid at Christmas and me and Mand went out and played in the street. I’d like to tell you that it’s easier than it looks. But it’s not. And to be fair it was raining and the feather flights got soggy making it even harder. After watching us make fools of ourselves for a few minutes Bert and Helga (but thankfully not Cameron) decided to join in, and we spent the next three quarters of an hour throwing the thing to each other and every once in a while making contact with our feet. I think our record for keeping it up was a mightily impressive three kicks, although the third was more of a scuff. Mand and Helga eventually tired of it and me and Bert played on and by the time we finished we were actually getting a few rallies going. If four strikes can be counted as a rally. I have promised myself though, that by the time we come back here I’ll be proficient enough to play with the locals and not look like a total spaz when I do. 

After lunch those that were on the two day tour (thankfully Cameron among them) said their goodbyes to us and headed back to HCMC. This left six of us to continue on to Chau Doc (this one I do know – woo hoo), and it turned out to be the same six of us that had participated in the homestay.

Bert and Helga were headed back to HCMC but it turns out Pedro and Maria were headed into Cambodia the same as we were. The difference being that they were heading straight to Siem Reap by fast boat and we were heading to Phnom Penh by slow boat. Sweet. On the way to Chau Doc we stopped at a crocodile farm somewhere (‘Well no-one’s ever seen what I mean, from the age of n-n-n-n-n-n-thirteen’) and wandered around looking at various sized reptiles for a while. They export these crocs live to places like China (where they’re probably killed in a really disgusting and painful way and made into some kind of medicine) and they have thousands of them ranging from babies to fully grown adults. It was a pretty cool diversion and Mand obviously wanted to take one of the baby ones with her (‘Ooooohh lookie, he’s so cyyyoooooowt. He’s got little teeth and everything’) but after the realization that they wouldn’t stay quite so small and cute for very long had sunk in she soon went off the idea. The only bad part about it was that they also had bears there. About 4 or 5 of them kept in seriously cramped and squalid conditions. We didn’t ask what they were there for and the guide never offered to tell us. Presumably for export as well. Either way it wasn’t too pleasant to see. Although i didn't feel any kind of sorrow for the crocs. I've heard there's a reason for this, in that we identify cute with things that resemble us or that we can identify with. Or maybe it's just that bears are fluffy.

We arrived in Chau Doc just before dark and arranged to meet the other four downstairs in the hotel to go out for some food. Mand took absolutely ages getting ready (no, really?) mainly due to the fact that our shower was more of a dribble and it took her about an hour to wash the shampoo out of her hair. By the time we got down there Bert and Helga were already there and we decided to f*** the other two off and just go without them. This was more Helga’s idea than ours (although to be fair she did go up and knock on their door apparently) and I detected a slight undercurrent had developed in her relationship with them. So off we went into the hole that is Chau Doc.

There is absolutely nothing there for tourists. A handful of grotty hotels and about two restaurants. But, for some reason I’ve yet to work out, they did have a five star hotel and restaurant. A proper one. Part of the Victoria chain. Bizarre is not the word. Well, we headed there for a drink and maybe some food and were pretty shocked at the five star prices. $4 for a beer if memory serves me (it rarely does to be honest) and the food was exorbitant. But what the hell. We figured we really needed to spoil ourselves before we headed to Oz and began existing on Super Noodles and stale bread, and ate a hearty meal that was every bit as good as the price said it should have been. 

We meandered back to the hotel looking for anything that could even remotely be considered a bar but were disappointed in even this small hope. Everything closes at 10 o'clock we were told by the locals. So, it was with reluctance that we returned to our hotel where we sat and had a beer and watched the rats climbing the walls to our room. At 11 o’clock the porter declared that he was going to bed and that we had to as well. Woo hoo. Paaaaarty. Off to bed it was then and we were asleep within minutes. 

The next morning we were combined with another tour and separated into those heading back to Saigon and those of us heading to Cambodia. We said a sad farewell to Helga and Bert and boarded our boat for a visit to a fish farm on the river.

This was actually pretty cool and we learnt some very interesting facts about pollution in the Mekong and the Government’s attempts to ease it. For example, the Mekong winds it’s way through six countries before it empties into the sea via the Mekong delta. China, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. That’s six countries all pouring as much s*** into it as they can get away with. Nice. This s*** is obviously affecting the fish that serve as the area’s main source of income, along with rice. But people keep getting ill eating the fish which has hit exports as well as the locals who also eat it. To this end only specially raised fish or fish that have been treated with some sort of medicine can now be exported. This makes it expensive and so the price has gone up, putting it out of reach for most Vietnamese to buy. How f***ed up is that?

The Government is also in the process of phasing out (i.e. knocking down) the thousands of stilt houses and river boats that people are living in along the river. This is because they just throw everything into the river and their toilets empty directly into it. Well, the holes in their floors are directly above it is probably a better description. The Mekong delta is essentially a huge basin so this all just sits on the bottom and never goes anywhere. People here live without any running water and just bathe and drink this water every day. Not so healthy for anyone then. Presumably other countries are also taking action to try and stop pollution of the Mekong but I don‎’t know for sure. 

We spent the next few hours cruising up the river past yet more breathtaking scenery and views of river life to our border crossing and stepped over into Cambodia.

I have 100% fallen in love with Vietnam, it’s people, it’s culture, it’s cities, it’s beaches and it’s laid back but efficient attitude to life. I even love the non-stop hassle from touts. Most of all though, I love Phuong and Thu and we’ll be back to see them in January 2008 ish, when we return to Nha Trang to get our Divemaster qualifications. I’m in the process of trying to convince Mand to stay in HCMC for an extra six months after that too. I’ll need to earn money to finance the next leg of the journey anyway and there are some really well paid jobs teaching English there, as well as a few banks that I might be able to get work in. Might as well do something to improve my c.v. while I’m at it eh. At this rate I’ll be traveling til I’m 60.

But for now it’s Tam Biet to Vietnam and hello to Cambodia where we’ll be for about two weeks before heading to Malaysia to meet up with Kimbers, Andy and Laura, then two weeks after that it’s the mighty Australia. Sweet. 

Laters allxxxxxxxxxxxx