Bike Tour in the Mekong Delta - Day 3

Our third morning we rose at 5AM to meet Ha, and headed to the floating markets.  First we visited Phong Dien, a smaller retail market with many locals rowing boats out to get the day's fresh produce as the sun was just peeking out above.

Sunrise on the Mekong

GOOD MORNING Mekong Markets!

Phong Dien Market - the Mekong Delta version of a "Target run"

This cheerful lady has a fast-food breakfast service

This man mixes coffees on his boat - the floating Starbucks of the Mekong River

Our boat is even equipped with a coffee holder!

Man loaded down with his many goods!

Unguarded bananas in a pile on the side of the river
-no one sells or steals these as they are so plentiful here

View into a home on the Mekong

Woman walking her wash down to the river

Woman doing her wash in the river

This is "monkey bridge" that is literally just branches - one has to climb and swing their way across!

We stopped for a quick visit at a local river-side village where we learned about the unbelievable form of labor-intensive processes for planting seeds to create nurseries - this process has not changed for over three generations!  One person will use banana leaves and roll them to form tiny hollow tubes.  Another laborer will fill the tubes with a mixture of soil and ash from the kilns used to bake local bricks.  Another laborer will plant a seed in each tube.  Each of these laborers will make roughly $4-5 a day.

This man has rigged up a high chair and infant carrier
to keep this child safe while riding on the motorcycle

Banana leaves rolled into "cup" that will biodegrade when planted in the soil

Mixing soil with ash

Soil & ash mixture fill each "cup"

These wooden planks set on top of the banana leaf "cups" so that laborers
can squat and plant the seeds without squishing the "cups"

Laborer squatting to plant seeds

Look at them grow!

We saw this fisherman empty his morning catch!

From the village, we traveled to Cai Rang, the largest market on the Mekong and one of the main attractions of the tour.  It's a wholesale market so the people buying tend to take the goods to sell elsewhere.  Many will boat from other parts of the country and stay about 3 days to get their supplies full before heading back to their homes to sell the goods.  Boats will put up a small pole with the items they are selling tied to it, to indicate to buyers what they have to offer.  Most of the boats are about 3 generations old and look like something out of a movie set.

Approaching Cai Rang Market on the Mekong River

This boat advertises that it is selling squash

This woman sells beverages and behind her a multi-level boat is selling pineapples

They call this Mekong rugby - items are thrown from boat to boat!

Following the markets, we began our journey back towards Saigon, stopping at a Cao Dai Temple to observe their noon ceremony.  Cao Dai was founded in Vietnam in 1926 and requires daily ceremonies to worship the Supreme Being at 6:00am, noon, 6:00pm, and midnight, as well as practicing vegetarianism ten days each month to purify oneself.  The Cao Dai religion has elements of Buddhism, Taoism, and Roman Catholocism as its saints include Confucius, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Muhammad, Pericles, Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc, and Victor Hugo, a famous French writer.  This religion, whose purpose is to create a more tolerant world, grew in popularity during the war because if you lived or worked in a temple, you were not called to fight and were considered "safe."  However, today less than 5% of Vietnamese claim to practice Cao Dai.

Woman walking into worship at the Cao Dai temple

Worshipers inside temple

Interesting altar designs

SJ's first squatting experience nearby temple

Outside the temple, men play dominos

Ha dropped us off, after stopping for our tenth bag of lyches (local fruit we love) and we thanked him for the amazing tour.  We learned so much about the culture and people of this area of Vietnam and are so grateful for this background and experience as we spend the next week exploring Ho Chi Minh city, or Saigon as the locals call it informally.

Bike Tour in the Mekong Delta - Day 2

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.

In Asia everything is eaten with chopsticks -even pizza!

Stopping at 31 Flavors was a huge treat!

Street lights show the festive spirit in anticipation of their New Year celebrations

We found it interesting that this is all FAKE!
The trees, the grass - everything is in preparation for New Years!