Vietnam – Day 2
We visited the Mekong River delta. The coach arrived late and the air was smoky as there were many other coaches lining the road. As we stood on the roadside waiting, another tourist near us was smoking! *double choke*
On our journey south, we passed by many shop houses on both sides of the road. Further on, the scenery became more rural, with huts and sheds.
Along both road shoulders, cyclists and motorcyclists headed in the opposite direction. About 20 minutes into the journey, our guide and driver stopped the coach to help a colleague of theirs, whose own coach had stalled on the roadside.
Our guide was knowledgeable, but I could not understand what he was saying sometimes. Funnily, even our own Vietnamese host, who was accompanying us for the trip (and spoke better English), couldn’t totally understand him!
We got into a noisy motor boat and went past many floating houses and fish farms. You could smell the fish sauce that someone was making. The muddy waters looked rather fertile. 23m deep in some parts!
A monk used to live on one of these islands. He ate only coconuts and bathed using coconuts. He founded a coconut religion. We went to the coconut candy factory and sampled some fresh hot sticky candy. It tasted nice but the thought of so much saturated condensed fat put me off! We had lunch, then visited a bee farm to drink honey tea. We also listened to traditional Vietnamese music. Then we made our way back … under a bridge that was so low (during high tide), that all of us had to duck when our sampans passed underneath it!