Mekong Delta One-Size-Fits-All
11 January 2012
It’s our second day of travel in Vietnam, and my main regret could be that I did not order the sautéed ox’s penis for dinner last night.
Coudla shoulda woulda. As we zip around Saigon, the mantra is, ‘Try it now or you may never get another chance,’ but then I think… well, we have about 17 more days left in Vietnam and maybe there will be a spare ox someplace for next time. And his delectable sautéed penis.
But today we were bold. We did eat crocodile
and a crisped-but-tasty fish splayed out on a rack atop our table with his eyes warning us not to overindulge.
We did try to be adventurous. Yes, that is because we booked a tour. You see, a few hours after arriving in Saigon, still with brain clouds swirling and our feet a bit wobbly as they are after twenty or more hours of atmospheric cabin pressure, we hastily selected a canned tour in our guidebook: the Mekong Delta One-Size-Fits-All Tour Package. It sounded reasonable: not too long, not overnight on a souped-up floating tourist trap, not too expensive. Granted, the guide book warned that you sometimes get what you pay for in Vietnam, and to watch out that our hotel might book a renegade tour in place of the one we requested. But we paid no attention and booked it through the hotel anyway, because we were in a rush on our first Saigon morning, ready to leap out onto the chaotic streets for a confusing self-guided day of foggy, jet-lagged museums.
We reasoned that our second day in Saigon should be more low key, hence the snap decision to take a US$15 per person tour that bragged it would include one full day from 7:30 am until 4:30 pm with the following opportunities: transportation from hotel, boat ride on Mekong River, coconut factory candy tour, honey bee farm visit, fruit sampling in local village with native music,
canal river trip, horse cart ride through small village, and bicycle ride. Yes, all that for $15. I gritted my teeth and agreed as Don handed over 630,150 Vietnamese dong for the trip. WOAH, sounds like a lot. But remember the thousands of dong actually equal only $15 US for each of us.
On day two, we awake early so that we don’t have to miss breakfast at our hotel. It’s not a fancy place, but clean, with a cream and gold marble lobby that includes one coffee table and four chairs and a floor-to-ceiling glass-fronted facade overlooking the busy tree-lined street. The small hotel has seven stories with about 28 rooms at most, and complementary breakfast features a savory assortment of noodle soups, egg and fungus dishes, pork-rice-noodle offerings, and sticky coconut/bean creative dollops of I’m-not-sure-what-they-are-but-delicious, fruits like dragon fruit, stiff Vietnamese coffee (hopefully not the variety made from weasel turds), tea, and if you must, granola and milk. I always go for a hearty bowl of noodles with bits of vegetable and dumpling. It is fantastic.
I guess the hotel doesn’t think we should start our tour day so early; they don’t have the noodles and soup going yet. But this is travel, right? And we are flexible, reasonable visitors. Without complaining, we settle for picking at miscellaneous second tier morsels with our chopsticks, until finally the hard-working breakfast girl brings out a mouth-watering tray of tardy noodle bowls. I try not to knock her down as I set out to get my quota before the tour leader can arrive at our hotel to capture us. It was, after all, my husband’s idea to do this skanky tour. Tomorrow I intend to not book anything so that I can truly appreciate the hotel breakfast.
Predictably our tour van arrives before I can fully enjoy the seductive breakfast, so I set out on this bargain basement tour with a cranky attitude. As we barge out into the waiting van, I wonder what other dorks must also have booked this cheap-ass tour. We will be sorry, but I know we deserve it. A horse cart ride? You gotta be kidding.
Now we will have to be patient. There will be other travelers on the tour who will take up all the good seats and ask stupid questions. I brace myself as we drive around Saigon to various hotels selecting victims, and when everyone is finally loaded, we total two Aussies, two New Zealanders, two Swedes, two Spanish, the guide named Jung, plus Don and me. I look around the van during the 1-1/2 hour drive to our destination, taking in the snooty Europeans with their carefully arranged neck scarves and the hung-over Kiwis, and I know that by the time we have finished touring the coconut candy factory, it will be obvious whether the tour melds either into a crazy Vietnamese pho, or does battle down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Jung begins to chat us up, and we strain to understand his Vietnamese-accented English. He says we will dine today on dog meat. I know he must be joking. But the Spanish guy calls him on it immediately, and says not to make light of dog meat, because he has already been in Vietnam for two weeks and seen lots of dog on the menus. The Swedes pretend not to comprehend, but they are growing pale in the front seat, and everyone knows that Swedes speak all languages so they darned well understand about the upcoming lunch. Then the conversation gets better when we all begin discussing things eaten in our countries; the Swedes are aghast at eating rabbit (a Spanish favorite) because so many Swedish people have pet rabbits running around their homes. I am beginning to feel better about the tour as we pull up to a Vietnamese botanical garden and pile out to order thick cups of Vietnamese coffee.
In ½ hour we will board a long chunky boat with a plastic canopy roof for a cruise on the Mekong, enroute to the jungle coconut candy factory, the fruit tasting and more. Just before the wheezing wooden boat pulls into the Mekong current, Don and I spontaneously purchase classic woven conical Vietnamese hats.
Our tourmates break out in broad smiles as we board the boat. We are soon underway, with one activity after another woven together by Jung’s light-hearted narrative and the heady musk of Delta mud.
Our tourmates break out in broad smiles as we board the boat. We are soon underway, with one activity after another woven together by Jung’s light-hearted narrative and the heady musk of Delta mud.
Rather than give away all the tour’s secrets about making coconut candy, such as mixing coco flavor with durian fruit, and how water coconuts differ from regular coconuts, and that the coconut candy factory is really a Vietnamese family’s backyard in the Mekong Delta where they are cooking, cooling and tediously wrapping five different varieties of soft coconut candies, let me emphasize that every person on our tour pays attention as though believing coconut candy is the main reason we all came to Vietnam. We learn the proper names of all the fruits and taste bee pollen grains as we begin to fall in love with our tourmates, people who it turns out have ridden bicycles through Cambodia, who have bought suits and party tuxedos in Hanoi made overnight and delivered to their hotel rooms, who have lived in Brazil and Palestine, who play Australian rules football, who have travelled in over 50 countries, who have parents from Vietnam and Malaysia and are visiting their parents’ homeland for the first time, who ride a bicycle professionally on the New Zealand National Team, who work for a major Spanish futol club, who design hair products for emerging cultures---people who all enthusiastically agree we should try the crusty, scabby deep-fried fish propped up on our table at noon, as well as crocodile and durian and 333 beer.
We laugh our way through fruit tasting, applaud village singers and musicians in exotic costume, talk about amazing fruits we have discovered as well as those we are sampling, put bee pollen in our tea, help arrange a python around one another’s necks,
hoist rafts of honey bees in our arms,
learn how to make Vietnamese spring rolls with the scary, toasted fish,
race down muddy mangrove-lined canals guided by gracefully masked boat rowers
who allow us to help row if we desire, and ride barely-fastened-together bicycles with flat tires and corkscrew handlebars through overgrown villages of tolerant and smiling Vietnamese.
When our rickety horse carts patter down the narrow paths through jungle and villages,
we laugh and take one another’s photos. Over ice-cold beer, we finally sit down to lunch on a pitted wooden deck overlooking a muddy canal, where we discuss world economics, politics and the atrocities of war, especially the scarring legacy in Vietnam. The talk is grave, with each person hoping someone else will have the courage to give a hopeful light.
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| [Masks in SE Asia are worn for protection from the sun, germs, pollution and as a fashion statement, as above!] |
Fifteen dollars. The price of our tour would consume three days of wages for rural Vietnamese where a typical farmer earns $150 US per month. Vietnamese city-dwellers earn about $200 US per month, enough to feed their families. The Vietnamese people pay more for petrol than we do in the US. In fact, when comparing gas prices paid by all the people on the tour, the cheapest petrol rates were in the USA, and the most expensive in Sweden. It turns out that on our tour, we did not contemplate merely how to make coconut candy or whether to order squirrel, prawns, snake, or fish for lunch, but we also thought about how different we all are, and yet, how we are so much the same, striving to understand one another’s cultures and values. No one signed up for the tour who did not want to capture the taste and spirit of Vietnam. During the course of the day, we rubbed shoulders; we slowed down to pick up each other’s cadence and adaptation of the English language; we asked questions about Vietnam that translated our curiosity and ignorance, and revealed why we all had gone on this singular journey. We acknowledged the power of yearning for a better understanding of the world, whether flopping along on a flat, wobbly bicycle tire that hardly got us down the road or grasping a piece of jackfruit or rambutan. It pulled us together.
I hope I will again meet my Mekong Delta tourmates sometime or somewhere, whether in a cart, aboard a sputtering, dilapidated boat, on a rickety bicycle, or inside a sweaty van. I would pay ten times the price of this tour for that chance. After my day in the Mekong Delta, I know that for world peace to occur, it will be priceless.
Peg’s comment=
I do believe that I’ve had ‘sauteed penis’ before, or so it seemed.
[Ed. note--Thanks for that, Peg (Nabe)]
For those of you who wish to see a few more pics of this part of our VolkVenture, click on the photo below to follow the link to a Picasa web album, click on "slideshow" and "enjoy."
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| Mekong Delta |
Our Vietnam VolkVentures gets us started on our bike trip in our next blog. I can hardly wait!
