Bryan and I showed up at the tour office a little early on the morning of our Mekong Delta tour, so we went across the street to a little cafe for breakfast. We sat down at a table next to a table with a couple of men drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. After we ordered our food, the waitress walked over and tapped one of them on the shoulder, and Bryan and I laughed when they got up, walked behind the counter, and started cooking our eggs!
After some delicious coffee we followed an incredibly fast-walking tour guide to a bus in an alley. We hopped on and in a few minutes the bus was lumbering through the early morning chaos of the Saigon streets. Our tour guide began talking and talking and talking, telling us about Vietnam, what we were going to do that day, how he'd learned English, the town he'd grown up in, and lots more. My favorite was when he talked about helping his parents harvest "weasel coffee" when he was a child. Weasel coffee is a Vietnam specialty, and it's about as bizarre a food as I've ever heard of. Coffee beans are fed to weasels, and the weasels digest them and...well, then they crap them out, mostly still whole. Farmers harvest the poo, wash the beans off, and then sell them to make coffee, which is sold at prices that are much, much higher than regular coffee. Our guide said that weasel coffee is best with some chicken fat and fish sauce mixed in. Yikes! He also warned us to be careful that we were getting the real thing, as some enterprising individuals sometimes try to pass off regular coffee as weasel coffee. I was struck by the hilarity of this situation- being duped into paying tons of money for coffee that has not passed through a weasel's digestive tract, and then presumably being angry about this, "I don't know honey...this really doesn't taste like poo to me. THIS IS AN OUTRAGE! I paid good money for coffee that had been crapped out by a weasel, and they try to give me this feces-free concoction! It's absurd!" So funny.
After our tour guide had yammered on for awhile, we stopped at a rest stop with a bunch of cozy hammocks. It was nice to kick back and enjoy the breeze. While we were there, a woman from another bus stood up and
slammed her head into a metal sign and started just
gushing blood. Despite the fact that her head had just spewed forth a quantity of blood worthy of a horror movie, she seemed to be all right. I felt awful for her though- it's bad enough that she got a head wound, but doing it in front of a bunch of people must have been mortifying.
There was lots of nice scenery out the windows during the ride, especially once we got closer to the Delta. I liked these tombs set out in the middle of lush, green fields. They seemed like a peaceful place for a burial site.
As we crossed a fancy, newly-built bridge into the Delta, we got a view of what it was like- the way people live and work right on the water reminded me a lot of what we saw on our
boat ride from Battambang to Siem Reap.
The trip from Saigon to Ben Tre, our first stop in the Mekong Delta, was about 2 hours including the stop. Once we got there, we walked a little ways through the wilderness to a pavilion where we were served tea and a sampler of tropical fruit- dragonfruit, pineapple, papaya, and jackfruit. Pineapple's always been one of my favorites so that was good, the papaya tasted a little weird for some reason, the dragonfruit was surprisingly delicious (better than the one I tried in S'pore), and I thought the jackfruit was icky. Apparently I have an aversion to all of the fruits in the
durian family. While we snacked we were entertained by some Vietnamese folk music. Some of the instruments they used were familiar, but the one they called the crane was something I'd never seen before. It's being played by the man on the left in the photo below.
After the music, we took a very scenic rowboat ride. As we climbed into the boat, we were handed hats to wear to keep the baking hot sun off of us. I felt a little silly wearing the hat, but I was grateful for the protection- that sun can be brutal! Plus it created a great opportunity for me to photograph Bryan wearing a hat with a lovely pink ribbon. (He switched to his own slightly more manly hat within about 5 minutes).
Having spent time in HCMC before visiting the Delta made us really appreciative of the serene environment. The river was completely calm and quiet, and the rowboat's slow pace was welcome after a couple days of dodging speeding motorbikes.
The rowboat dropped us off on the side of the river, in a place where locals raise bees and also make delicious coconut candies. It was pretty fascinating to watch the women make candy mostly by hand, with occasional assistance from some antiquated machinery. One woman was deftly wrapping candies one by one, over and over. My eyes fixed on her nimble hands, fascinated by her quickness. As I watched, the tour guide said that she's been doing this for 12 years, and she wraps 4000 candies a day! I can't even imagine.
The candy was made into long strips that were then chopped into bite-size pieces by a little lady with a mean machete.
I felt sorry for the chickens all over the place, trapped under baskets. It didn't look like a very fulfilling life for a bird.
These bees were pretty neat though! There were more adorable puppies roaming around too.
After watching the candy-making and trying not to get stung by bees, we browsed some of the things that the locals had for sale-mostly candies and other clever knickknacks crafted from coconuts. We bought a couple packs of candy, so if you're in Ohio or Montana, we'll be bringing some for you to taste! One thing we did not purchase was the so-called snake wine. There were tiny bottles filled with a sickly yellowish liquid. Stuffed into the bottle was a baby cobra, with its heart extracted and floating on top of the liquid. "Gross" doesn't even begin to cover it.
When we were finished with the candy-making portion of the day, we all clambered into larger boats to continue cruising around the Mekong.
I loved the seats on the boat- they were just wooden chairs roped together.
The bigger boat took us out onto deeper, more open waters. Out there we saw huge, rickety fishing boats and smaller skiffs that looked like they had people living on them. This lady hand-washed her laundry on her back porch as we floated on by,
The ride in the big boat went on for quite awhile before we stopped again to have lunch at a seemingly random spot along the water. We walked back through the trees and to a pavilion in the middle of the woods, where a number of tables had been set up. Drinks were brought to the table, and an ice cold 333 was very refreshing after all the sunshine. Lunch was fried rice with pork for Bryan, and vegetarian fried rice for me. I thought it was delicious, but Bryan was still hungry afterwards, and I think he was already thinking about dinner about an hour after lunch was over. Chickens pecked around our feet as we ate lunch, and eventually I began tossing them my leftover rice bits. Within a few minutes I had this one eating right off of my fork!
This little boy was playing right next to our table, struggling with an impossibly long fishing net, dragging it back and forth in the water. I guess they start training them early in the Mekong!
At lunch we sat with an Australian couple and a Canadian couple. It was interesting to hear everyone's travel stories- about giant centipedes coming out of the ground while camping in the Australian outback, sleepy fishing villages on the Thai coast, and orangutans swinging through the trees overhead in Borneo. Bryan and I had fun sharing our stories too- hanging out a monk and his English class in Cambodia, food poisoning in Malaysia, and big, goofy proboscis monkeys in Borneo. After lunch and back on the boats, we saw the bridge that we had driven in on.
The boats got bigger and bigger as we got closer to My Tho, the place where we were going to dock to meet our bus. We saw a bunch of these barges, which appeared to be hauling mounds of dirt.
I became totally transfixed by this boy flying his kite off the front of a boat while his little brother watched his every move with complete, childlike devotion.
A stately Ho Chi Minh awaited us in My Tho. The way he kept turning up reminded me a little of seeing Angkor Wat all over the place in Cambodia. In fact, there was a lot of overlap between the two places. Just like Cambodia, Vietnam has its own currency (Vietnamese
dong, pictured below), but American money is also widely accepted. And in the Mekong Delta, life revolves around the water to an extent that called to mind the people living along the river in Cambodia.
The bus ride back was nice. I was glad it was still daylight so that we could see the countryside passing by all around us. Of course, there was the ever-present swarm of motorbikes. I always feel nervous for the sweet old ladies on bicycles, bravely weaving their way through the faster, more powerful motorbikes, not to mention the cars, trucks, and buses.
We saw this colorful temple, but as usual our view was partially obscured by those pesky electrical wires.
As we got closer to Saigon, the sky began filling up with kites, and we saw kids everywhere, running with balls of string in their hands. The kites were all really colorful, and many of them were shaped like animals- lots of them looked like sharks with gaping mouths. I thought it was pretty neat to see so many kids playing outside, and it brought back happy memories of flying kites with my Dad when I was younger (although mine wasn't shaped like a shark- I had a pink Barbie kite!) Bryan and I had trouble getting good photos of the sky all filled up with kites, but we did get a couple of the ones that got snared on the power lines. We also finally managed to snap a shot of a baby on a motorbike. Just watching it made me cringe- I always feel so frightened for these little kids on these bikes! They just look so fragile!
As soon as we got off the bus, Bryan and I stopped at the nearby Highlands Coffee to get some coffee and figure out where we were going to go for dinner. We decided that we wanted to get some pho, but after checking at a few places, we were unable to find anywhere that had vegetarian pho for me, so we got Indian instead, at a place called Akbar Ali. I was kind of glad that we hadn't found pho, because the food at this restaurant was outstanding!! I had some of the best palak paneer I've ever had, and Bryan liked his chicken tikka masala too, although he wasn't raving about his food as much as I was gushing about mine. After dinner we spent a relaxing evening at the hotel, packing up our stuff and watching scary movies.
We had one more morning in Vietnam, but it was pretty short- we got up early in the morning (again) and got a taxi to the airport, weaving in and out of the traffic one last time. Once there, we scavenged for some breakfast and ended up at a small restaurant so that Bryan could have beef pho before we left Vietnam. It may sound like a strange choice for so early in the morning, but apparently pho is commonly eaten for breakfast! Here's Bryan with his pho (which he declared not as delicious as the vegetarian pho we had for the cooking class) and his Vietnam visa.
We hiked some of the trails that we'd bypassed on our previous trip. Along one trail, there was a huge swampy area FULL of mudskippers. I love the big, fat ones. Bryan had fun watching them make sudden, surprisingly agile leaps to catch insects and small crabs. They move in such a strange way, just kind of dragging themselves through the mud with their fins. As they move, they leave behind really bizarre trails that look like the tracks made by mountain bikes.
We also witnessed an epic ant battle! It took me back to a hot, dusty day in New Mexico when I had to spend hours outside, observing ant behavior for my Behavioral and Evolutionary Ecology class. Good times.
See if you can find the water monitor in this photo. I'll give you the answer later in the post : ) You can double click on the photo to make it larger.
We revisited my favorite sign in S'pore.
Sungei Buloh is known for being a haven for migratory birds, so there's always interesting birdlife around- egrets, herons, sandpipers, kingfishers, and more. The kingfishers were our favorite. The ones at Bukit Timah are usually just blue, white, and black, but the ones here were much more colorful- blue wings, golden chests, brown heads, and red beaks. They were beautiful, but difficult to photograph. Bryan was excited when he snapped one of them snatching up a fish, but disappointed when the photo turned out to be grainy.
There was a lookout spot over the river that we were walking along, and it was strange to feel like we were in total wilderness, but to still be able to look into the city.
As I was walking on a boardwalk, two huge monitors crashed out of the underbrush next to me and scared me half to death. I literally ran and hid behind Bryan. Very courageous of me, I know.
The water levels must have been lower than usual, leaving these trees a little high and dry.
When we got back to the Visitor Centre, I was thrilled to see that the otters were still around. Bryan and I sat down to watch them for awhile. This adorable turtle hung around us, staring up expectantly. I assume he's used to having people feed him.
At first, the otters were still being lazy, totally lounging around like they owned the place. We were curious about the sandbox-like structure that they were relaxing in, and then I overheard one of the NParks guys say that the otters hung out around the pond so often that eventually they built the little space especially for them. Despite the fact that it looks like they live there, the otters still come and go as they please.
Eventually the otters woke up and got a little more active. It was very bizarre to see otters and massive reptiles co-mingling peacefully. The otters were huge and it looked like they had pretty sharp teeth, but they still didn't look like much of a match for those monitor lizards and their long, leathery tails. The two species must be pretty evenly matched though, because the monitors did not appear interested in messing with the otters.
It was really fun to watch the otters ease down into the pond and swim around. They swam over and played right in front of us, but they were moving so fast that it was hard to get pictures. It was like trying to photograph a squirming mass if puppies. The one shaking the water off his fur was pretty cute!
Here's that lizard! It was a water monitor, and Bryan and I were amazed to watch it lumber awkwardly across a swamp, and then just go vertical and continue lumbering right up the tree. He found a great perch in the fork of some branches and cuddled right in. There's a close-up too so you can get a better idea of what's actually going on.
We'd taken a taxi out to the park this time. When we went out back in October, we'd taken public transportation (the MRT to Kranji and then a bus) there and back, but this time we figured we'd taxi out to save time and then take public transportation back. So when the park closed we headed out to the bus stop only to find that the bus runs ONLY on Sundays and public holidays. Given that that's the only bus and Sungei Buloh is in the middle of nowhere, we called for a taxi to come and get us, but were told that all of the taxis in the area were busy, so we started hoofing it in the hope of getting to a larger street where we might be able to catch a different bus or hail a taxi. Eventually a taxi pulled up behind us and we were able to hop right in. It turned out there was a bigger street close by anyway, where we would have been able to catch a bus. Moral of the story: If you ever find yourself stranded at Sungei Buloh, no worries. Just start walking, and it'll all work itself out.
