Another early start for our last big day in Vietnam. Hanh (sorry, spelt her name wrong before) picked us up at 8 am to take us off to the Mekong delta.
It was an 80km drive to the harbour where we boarded a motor boat to take us down the river. That's about an hour and a half's drive
Hanh entertained us with more snippets of information.
There's not enough schools in Vietnam, so children have two school shifts. The first shift is 7am to 11.30am. They then have lunch and in the afternoon have additional tutoring if the family can afford it. At night they do about two hours homework. During the holidays and at weekends they do part time work selling at markets or to tourists, or helping out in the family business in order to earn money to pay for their education. Are you listening kids?
We were regaling our experience with the drunk Russian the other night; apparently Russian tourists quite often don't pay for their booze bill at their hotel because they run out of money. They can't even afford a taxi to the airport. They also have a habit of ignoring the tour guides when they go out on tours and return back to the bus later than they should. In these cases the guides are quite within their rights to abandon them in middle of nowhere if they don't meet the bus!
Chinese tourists are up there with Russians when it comes to bad behaviour. Apparently they are excessively noisy late at night. The tour organisers make sure they are quartered in China town where they are much more at home and can be as noisy as they like to all hours of the night. Sleep is very important to the Vietnamese because they get so little of it. The average Vietnamese day goes from 5am to 11pm, including children. They have a siesta at lunch, which begins at 11am. There's an old Vietnamese saying they use for bad tourists - "A monkey with a crown it's still a monkey". I guess "you can't polish a turd" doesn't translate.
On a sadder note she was telling us of the times after the reunification. She was from the hills of Dalat about 300km from Saigon. Her family had a large house and were quite wealthy farmers with a lot of land. All of their land was confiscated and their house taken over for visiting northerners. Her father and uncles were sent to re-education camps where they died being "re-educated", or tortured as end call it in the west. All of the children from their village were taken away to a new village some distance away from the old one to be re-educated without the corrupting influence of their parents. Her family managed to recover her back to the mountains where she lived with relatives. Whilst this was good, she got persecuted by her school teacher who was not as smart as her. Teaching qualifications in the north are much easier to come by - she had actually been to school for longer than her teacher.
Part of the grand communist plan was to make sure that there was even distribution of rice. The effect of this was that there was no incentive for farmers to grow any more rice than they needed to live. Any that they grew beyond what they needed for themselves was taken away to be distributed. This resulted in lack of food for everyone and people resorted to eating sweet potato and other root vegetables. In 1986 they changed the rules so farmers we're able to keep any excess and sell it. Within two years Vietnam was exporting rice again.
We got to the harbour where we donned our conical grass peasant hats and boarded our boat. This was a canopied motor boat with a row of garden chairs down each side and a couple of banana chairs at the back. Quite sophisticated really. We had a coconut juice drink just after boarding. Ruby had a competition with herself over who could get the most waves from passing boats.
Our first stop was at a brick makers. Whilst that sounds pretty boring, it was actually quite interesting. They make the bricks the old fashioned way in massive brick kilns. The clay for the bricks comes from the rice paddies and each brick is hand made using a very basic clay squeezing machine - a bit like play dough. The only fuel they have available is rice husks which they feed slowly into a furnace at the base of the kiln. The ash from the husks is sold back to the rice farmers for fertiliser.
Next stop after turning off the main river was a coconut processor. The side rivers were more like the type you see in an Oliver Stone movie, lined with water coconut palms (those are different from normal coconut palms). Callum was first off the boat and slid straight into a pile of gunk, dirtying his new Arsenal shirt. The nice man got him to strip off his shirt so he could wash it off. Callum's florescent body garnered much attention from the workers, most of whom were from the same family. Coconut processing is hard manual labour with each person performing a vital piece of the production chain with some extremely sharp instruments. None of the coconut is wasted. The husks are used for fuel and coconut matting.
Finally we arrived at a rest stop where we had refreshing fruit for morning tea. They had a python there that they we're showing off to the tourists (they keep it for keeping down the rats). Ron and Angela tried on the snake for photos. At the same place were some women making coconut candy. Again another labour intensive process where the candy is manually cut up and wrapped into small packets. We had to buy some because it tasted so good.
After this we mounted push bikes for a tour of the village. Unfortunately Ruby was a bit too small to ride the bikes that were available, so she doubled up behind Jonah, Ron or Kyra, depending on who was feeling most confident at the time. I'm happy to say the proverb is true. Riding a bike really is like riding a bike. I haven't ridden any distance for many years and I managed to stay upright. I don't remember them being so wobbly though; I don't think that was me but it's hard to tell. There was one minor panic point where my hat fell in front of my face and I had to stop blindly.
We pushed on through the village cutting through paddies and back yards down a narrow path used by other scooters and native cyclists. At one point we startled some feral scooters feeding of the desiccated corpses of some abandoned Russians.
We stopped for a breather at a small house where they were weaving various mats. Angela and Kyra bought a rather nice picnic rug made of woven grass. Don't know whether we'll get that through customs but it's worth a try.
The stakes were raised at the next stage of the route because we had muddy water on both sides of the path; there was no room for error going around the 90° corners. It had to happen eventually and it was Jonah, with Ruby on the back that ran off the path and narrowly missed going head first into the water.
Shortly after that Callum's hat fell over his face and he shot off the side of the path into the bushes - fortunately there was no water at that point and his pride was hurt more than anything.
We finally dismounted at our lunch spot and had a beautiful lunch of spring rolls and lemongrass chicken before heading back to port. The trip finished just in time because the heavens opened for a torrential rain storm as we were driving back to the hotel.
After a short break Kyra, Angela and Ron went back to Ginkgo again to get even more tees (yes we really do like their gear).
On their way back they found a cheap restaurant a few doors up from the hotel that we went to for dinner. Unfortunately that was a complete disaster. The food was shocking. And they tried to give us warm beer. Nobody could understand a word of english and all of the kids were complaining that their food was horrible. After much discussion with the waitress we thought she said she would settle for 10k dong a head, so we dropped the money on the table and left, only to be chased down the road by a pack of anxious waiters demanding more money. We got one of them to go back to our hotel where we asked the receptionist to explain that we didn't want to pay because the food was so bad. Unfortunately there's no such thing as consumer rights in Vietnam. We had to fork out for the $30 bill.
It's a real shame that after three weeks of fabulous food we were let down on our last night. We had to go back to the markets to get the kids a pork baguette each as they were still hungry.
On the plus side, Jonah finally found a shirt he liked in the markets!
It's our last day tomorrow as we're off to the airport and back to Brisbane at about 4pm.
I think there's more shopping planned for tomorrow and a longer look around the day markets.
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