Students Of The Globe - A Family Travels The World: Bike Tour in the Mekong Delta

We woke up our second morning of our Mekong tour and were served a breakfast of eggs, baguettes and sweetened condensed milk to dip them into, and pomellos. This was funny, because it was exactly what our kids had just whispered that they hoped breakfast would be - having enjoyed baguettes in this manner the previous morning and curious to try the pomelo fruit. They brought coffee for dad, who has now figured out how it works, and that the coffee itself is quite sweet and doesn't even really need condensed milk.

Baguettes with sweetened condensed milk and pomelos - larger
than a grapefruit and a bit more bland than one

Pomelos on a tree

After breakfast we walked a short ways to pick up our bikes near a weaving shop. We met women weaving mats that locals prefer to use as their beds, as mattresses are too hot. These women work in pairs and are able to make roughly 5 mats a day. We hopped on our bikes and then rode around the neighborhood, through rice fields and to various businesses.

Women work in pairs to make sleeping mats

The chain fell off of our oldest's bike, so Ha (driving a scooter)
push/kicked him to a local shop that could help us fix it!

We learned much about how coconuts are harvested and used in Ben Tre Province, which is famous across the country for its 20 million coconut palm trees and products. One business will focus on cracking them. They will sell the husks to another business who will shred them and used them for weaving mats. A different business fried up dried coconut chips, while another specializes in making oil. Nothing gets wasted. We enjoyed sampling coconut products as well as dried ginger and amazing banana candies with ginger, sesame seeds, and nuts wrapped in rice paper. The kids favorite was the coconut jelly, which actually was strips of dried coconut coated with sugar.

Boat transporting coconuts!

Coconut factory

This guy cracks about 1000 coconuts a day... for roughly $4

Kids with a local who runs a small coconut factory and makes wonderful coconut sweets!

After our bike ride we headed back to the house for lunch and made our own spring rolls using rice paper before buying some of the chopsticks Mr. Mui makes as a side income and saying good-bye to our sweet hosts.

Good bye Mr Mui!

Good byes can be hard sometimes.

Following lunch we were driven to an area where we grabbed a wooden boat and headed to a brick making factory. The machine that makes the bricks out of clay looks like a large "play-doh" machine, and we enjoyed helping throw clay into it to form the bricks. We learned how they use the left over husks from rice as the fuel. It takes two weeks to bake a batch of 1000 bricks this way with the fire and beautiful kilns having to be watched constantly. The workers maintain 12 hour shifts and have to shovel husks roughly every 15 minutes. The husks are obviously tiny so they burn fast but they are used because they are cheap and plentiful. The ash created gets sold to a potter who plants seedlings--again, nothing is wasted. It's hard work for the workers, who make... yes, about $4 a day.

View of the brick factory as we approached it by boat.

Helping throw clay into the brick-making-machine

In front of rice shafts used for fuel

Brick oven

Kids in front of a beautiful kiln that has baked bricks inside.

Inside of brick oven - 15000 bricks stacked in here and cooked for two weeks

This woman was pushing a cart of bricks down the street to a construction site!

From there we headed back to our van and drove further south, crossing on the Dinh Khao ferry on our way to Can Tho, where we would sleep in a hotel. Here part of tour included two hotel rooms, with a bed for everyone! They had nice hot showers, towels, a blow dryer and cable TV - such a treat! We grabbed an early dinner at a local restaurant and even found a Baskin' Robbins for dessert. We enjoyed walking around as they were decorating for Tet, their New Year's celebration, and had many lights up, but we headed to bed early in preparation for an early start the following day.