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Saturday November 1st- 3rd day in Nam
Today we woke up pretty early because we had plans to go to the Mekong Delta and wanted to be on our way by 8:00. The delta is the southern most part of Vietnam and is famous for its floating markets and rice paddies. It takes about an hour and a half to get there. Lacey, Erica, Raphael and I had asked around different tourist places in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh) and they all offered day trips for $60ish. So we decided to just wing it and hire a cab driver and just go.
We took the shuttle to the Rex hotel which is a 5 minute ride into town and we got a driver to take the 4 of us for $10 a piece. He would drive us there, wait for us to do our thing, and then drive us back. Not a bad deal. We were all really tired and all took naps on the way. Vietnam is very flat so there is not much scenery to see along the way other than small shops and a few small fields.
The cab driver took us to a boat tour place along the Mekong River in the city of My Tho. This is the main city in the Mekong Delta for tourists because it is the closest to Ho Chi Minh city. We haggled a price for a 4 hour tour on the river for $12. We visited a few islands and took canoe tour up canals. We were able to see a bee farm and taste fresh honey tee, see fruit orchards, see how coconut candy is made, and stop at a local restaurant for lunch. I had elephant fish for lunch which is a big fish native to the canals of the Delta. Raphael ordered a king cobra and they pulled it out of a cage, cut its head off, and squeezed the blood into glasses for us to drink. It was mixed with some sort of wine and this is a tradition of the delta. If the cobra were to bite you, you have no more than 5 minutes to live, and we were drinking the blood of one of the most venomous snakes in the world. When it was cooked it was very chewy and tasted like calamari. We made our own spring rolls with the elephant fish. To do this we wrapped vegetables in rice paper, which reminded me of a huge piece of thin skin. After lunch our tour was over and we headed back across the river to the tour boat place. Along the river were men wading through the shallows catching fish with their bare hands. There were also floating houses huge squares of netting in between them. These were fish farms.
It was very interesting to see the delta and say that we saw it but it reminded me of the Amazon. It was a lot of jungle and muddy water. We did not go deep enough into the delta to see the rice paddies and the floating markets start at sun up and last for only a few hours so we got there too late to see them. If I had to do it again, and had the time to spend I would chose to do an overnight with a family in the Delta in order to see all the classic sights and get away from the tourism aspect of it.
We fell asleep on the cab ride back to Saigon again. We ate dinner on the ship and then went out shopping again. The Ben Than market closes around 6 and a night market opens up right outside the market and on a few of the side streets close buy. There are make shift restaurants in the night market and they have fish tanks with fish, eels, frogs and shrimp that are all still alive and kicking.
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