Another early start, so we wouldn't combust in the midday sun.
We still aren't fans of the early morning.
The crepe-style banana pancake from our hotel helped, with its tasty coffee and condensed milk sauce. But the iced coffee helped even more, though I think Husbear could have used a double espresso.
Then, we all piled back into our small SUV for the ride to Sam Mountain just outside of town. Our guide told us there was no room for him to sit, so we'd be riding to the temple, seeing the floating village, and then going straight back to HCMC without the promised stop at an incense factory. He'd be taking the bus.
How stupid is that? Because the tour company underprovided transportation, we'd be missing out on part of the tour we paid for? And our tour guide would have to take a bus the six hours back to HCMC?
We insisted that we'd squeeze.
Husbear got to sit in the front seat, while I shared the middle bench seat with three other people and our new long-legged Kiwi friends, freshly arrived from Cambodia, sat three across in the back. It was worth it to get actual information about the places we'd be seeing, though!
Our first stop was Sam Mountain, about 20 minutes or so outside of town, and Chua Hang, the cave pagoda. Here's where we were happy we started early.
Those stairs might have killed me at high noon.
Climbing them is worth it, though, since you get a great view of the Cambodian border. It was as close as we'd get.
Chua Hang was very nice, though it's not the most famous of the temples on Sam Mountain. All the way inside was a small cave surrounded by fake snakes (it was too dark to get a good picture!), and the outside was all airy porches and painted detail.
Sweating like, well, us, we got back into the SUV and drove several cramped miles down to the river, where we paired up to get in small boats rowed by local ladies. We would be bobbing by a floating village, where fish are raised in pens under each house and dried for sale on racks behind the house.
Oh, was it hot out on the water. I though it would be a good idea to get some sun on my legs (it wasn't, I burned both of them), but the Kiwis had a better idea. Lacking hats, they used what came to hand.
We progressed slowly through the floating village, watching people tend their schools of fish (perhaps "herds of fish" would be more appropriate here?).
There were even some fish out drying behind one of the houses. I'm sure this sun produces dried fish in seventeen minutes or so.
It was still strange to us to see the water really being used as a thoroughfare! There still aren't roads in to a lot of these towns, and I imagine this may have been what the Mississippi was like a hundred years ago or more.
The floating village wasn't what I was expecting. I had been thinking houseboats, easily portable units, but these were actual homes built on boats and pontoons and plastic barrels. Most of them had TV antennae! I don't think they could have been easily moved.
At the other end of the floating village was a rickety dock, where we disembarked.
The dock led into a Cham minority village. The Cham are Muslim and are famous for their weaving. We had a weaving demonstration and I bought, oh, eleventy-three beautiful silk scarves for people at home.
Then, we had a little free time to check out the village. Almost immediately, we were surrounded by very young children selling snack cakes.
We were in the village at the end of the dry season. Had we been there now, after it's been raining for a couple of months, things would have looked quite different - here's a support where the high-water mark is recorded every year.
We climbed some stairs and walked along a raised sidewalk towards the main road.
If you walk the fifty yards or so through town, you'll reach a two-lane main road that seems pretty well-traveled. Motorcycles whizzed by us and women pushed carts overflowing with vegetables and fruits. Across the street was the Mubarak Mosque, a light, airy structure.
Note the girls selling cakes down at the bottom - they stayed with us the whole way!
We couldn't pass up taking a picture of these beautiful girls standing by the door to the mosque. Don't worry, we did ask!
After visiting the mosque and the town, we were shuttled on our little boats back to our big main stormy boat from the day before. This time, the novelty of the top deck having worn off, we stayed in the blessed shade underneath. That's Husbear in the back, trying to catch a cross-breeze to dry his clothes.
As we chugged along back up the river, luxuriating in all the room we had to stretch our legs (for now), we noticed something new. Water-based bird farms!
At least they have room to move around, I suppose.
There were a few people out on the river, though not nearly in the numbers we saw the previous day around dusk. This kid saw us and executed a perfect flip, but I'm not sure his friend was too impressed.
We were sort of coerced into ordering lunch from the boat, since there would be no other opportunities to eat anything until we got back to HCMC. Luckily, lunch turned out to be delightful. Of course, we were really hungry, but we're also always picky, and I thought they did a good job.
Pineapple, of course - nice as a refreshing palate-cleanser, but not quite as wonderfully fresh as the market lollipop-version we'd had previously.
Both of us chose the vegetarian lunch, which turned out to be a large pile of noodles topped with still crunchy, lightly stir-fried vegetables with a delicate sheen of oil, two generous pieces of flavorful, savory/salty glazed tofu that had a great chew (often a problem with tofu), and a generous pinch of delicious Vietnamese ground pepper.
We relaxed on the boat for another hour or so, drinking water and beer. When we pulled to the shore and disembarked, somehow out trusty old tiny SUV was waiting for us again... so the 9 of us folded ourselves back into the car and drove a ways down the road to a small wooden house on a busy street.
Walking inside, we saw this:
We had arrived in a small-batch incense factory! Our guide gave us a brief rundown of how this kind of incense is made. Resins from a particular tree are mixed with a wet binder that aids in burning (I believe this is called makko), and then wrapped around a stick of prepared wood. The incense then dries outside for several hours.
The whole street outside was lined with different kinds of incense, drying in the sun.
At this point, our guide took his leave of us. He said that, were we to get pulled over, our driver and our guide would get a ticket for overloading the car, so he opted to take a bus back to HCMC. We halfheartedly tried to argue with him, but he was insistent, so we tipped the man and piled back into the car - now only eight.
Still pretty crowded, but a little better...
The ride back to HCMC was interminable. We waited for two separate ferries, for at least an hour total. We got stuck in traffic just as bad as that on Mount Etna, but this time we had no trusty guide to get things going again, so we had to turn around and wait for a ferry... again.
At least we got to check out the motorcycles.
We finally got back as far as Can Tho, where we stopped at a place billed as a bonsai garden. It was more like a tourist center, selling admittedly beautiful purses and mosaics and paintings and clothing for well above the prices we'd been seeing.
They did have great coffee, though, and we had two.
We finally did get back to HCMC, where we were luckily dropped off right in front of our hotel. We checked back in, dropped our bags, and walked back down the street to the Ben Thanh Market. At night, the market itself is closed, but the streets just around it turn into a packed thoroughfare of restaurants and stands selling T-shirts and cheap bags.
We walked all the way around the market, comparing menus at all the restaurants and trying to ignore the touts.
There were two places that looked really great, and we settled on one called Huong Que.
It's just amazing that all of these restaurants disappear by day. They're full kitchens at night! Here's the one at Huong Que:
First out were goi cuon, or the fresh summer rolls. My favorite. These were better than some we'd had, but they were still a little dry and tasted pre-made.
Next was something we'd been wanting to try. The Vietnamese are big fans of all sorts of snails, and we picked out a likely specimen from the tanks in the front.
Meet Jumping Snail with Tamarind, or oc nhay rang me.
These were good, though I'm such a sucker for tamarind that's probably why. They were prepared well, with a good texture - not overly chewy. A little hard to get out of the shell, though, and with a hard thorn at the end that you really don't want to chew on.
Last, we opted for a sour shrimp soup. With the tamarind being sour and the soup being sour, I think the balance of our selections was a bit off. This soup could have used a little more flavorings, but it was nice and brothy. Brothy soups were our best friends in Vietnam and Thailand.
We walked slowly back to our hotel, stretching out our legs with each step.
I'd say the trip to the Mekong Delta was definitely worth $28. We got to see an awful lot in three days, though I'm pretty sure that the only reason we went to Chau Doc on the border with Cambodia was to serve as a meeting node for people who bought trips to enter and leave Vietnam. We spent a lot of time over those three days sitting in cars and boats, but we did have some great experiences and saw a lot of things we probably wouldn't have on our own.
I'm not sure we'd do it again, but it was a good introduction.
