Mighty Mekong

I woke up on 1/8 early to go on a day tour of the Mekong Delta. I finally got a Vietnamese breakfast sandwich- a baguette with a fried egg, cucumber, tomato, cilantro, and chilli sauce. I love the French-Asia fusion stuff.

I slept on the bus to Cai Be, where we got on a 20-seat motor boat and started to cruise. The water was opaque, choppy, and brown, and covered with vegetation that the river had ripped from the shores. In places the river seemed more like a lake, the shores barely visible in the distance, but soon we turned into an offshoot off the river's main course. In slowly became narrower and more shallow. Villagers in groups fished by standing the the water with a huge net rigged with plastic bottles for flotation, manually gathering the thing up. The process took 10 people 10 minutes, and in the end netted only 2 small fish.

We got off the boat to visit a candy-making factory. They pressed coconut juice from the meat, recycling the pulp as fertilizer. The juice was boiled down to a caramel on a fire fueled by rice husks and nut shells, then mixed with chocolate and poured into hand-made wooden channels to cool and harden. Apparently they also use banana leaf and durian as flavorings, and do plain coconut candy, but the chocolate is for the foreigners, who prefer it. Besides the woman stirring the coconut caramel, there were 3 women at the candy-manufacturing table. One woman pulled strips of hardened candy out of the channels, cutting them with a giant cleaver. Another wrapped them in rice paper, apparently necessary in the humidity, and the 3rd wrapped the rice paper and candy in wax paper.

At another part of the factory (which, by the way, was a thatched, open-air hut, if a large one) they made a sort of rice crispy treat. They mixed rice into hot black sand in a cauldron, which popped the rice into puffed crisps. A sieve above the cauldron received the mix from below, letting the sand fall back in and leaving the rest to be transferred to another sieve a few feet away. This separated the husks, which fell into a pile on the floor which would fuel the fire under the cauldron. The puffed rice was then bagged and sent to the next station, where it was mixed with sugar syrup and stirred in a pot. It was then poured onto a greased sheet, maybe 8'x4', and rolled out and cut into cubes by two men with heavy steel rollers, cleavers, and a straight edge. I tried the finished blocks, but as a bit of a rice crispy treat snob, I found them lacking the certain je ne sais quoi imparted by bottled marshmallow fluff and sticks of butter.

They made other candies there, as well as distilling disappointingly uninteresting banana and jackfruit liquor, but I didn't see any of that in progress. The still was very simple, and I wondered afterwards how much methanol I got in my liquor samples. They also hawked tourist crap of all kinds there- low quality silk goods, the same paintings you see everywhere here, tea leaves, even carved wooden pigs (seriously, what the fuck). My big gripe about the place was how touristy it was, but I guess I wouldn't have seen the cool, primitive, assembly-line candy making otherwise.

We left the factory and moved farther up the river. The river narrowed and became too shallow for our boat to continue- it kept jarring as the propeller hit the mud bottom. It was low tide, and the mighty Mekong had been reduced to a sliver lined by swathes of mud. We switched to 4-person canoes, narrow and low, piloted by a guy standing at the back with two paddles. Actually, mine was piloted by a guy, but the other 3 were old-Vietnamese-lady-powered. Mamma-san-powered, if you will. These boats were uncovered, of course, and the mid-day sun was brutal. I was fine, and got to only for the second time use the sunblock I'd bought, but I felt sorry for the drivers working in the heat.

The muddy banks were crawling with amphibians, invisible, either because of their native color or a mud layer, until they moved in quick bursts. The water was perfectly calm except for bubbles rising to the surface all around, I assume from decomposing plant matter releasing CO2. UNder the calm surface, the clouds of mud looked like crumpled silk, motionless until broken by an oar, when the silk vanished in a puff of smoke. It was quiet and I found myself thinking about the spirituality of the river, bringing flooding death and rotting end, at the same time the genesis of the green surrounding us, and enough rice to feed millions upon millions. It was hard to picture navy boats interdicting sampans running guns.

Eventually the channel became more of a puddle, and not even the low-draft canoes could continue much farther. The pilot began to pole us, then jumped out and pushed, finally inserting a peg and shoving on that for the last little bit. We stopped for lunch and to wait for the tide to come back, pooling a tip for our poor pilot, at $2.50 probably his day's wages over again, as we left.

Lunch was boring and touristy, but afterwards the restuarant let us borrow bikes to explore. I separated from the group and got lost on dirt paths. I dodged motorbikes, then, as the path got smaller, only dogs and chickens. The path had tiny, arching stone bridges over the canals. I passed graves and temples; open, airy houses strung with hammocks; and children playing in the dirt.

I don't know whether I've mentioned this before, but many of the graves here are above-ground. On the train through the countryside, passing rice paddies, the fields were like a flooded lake. Rising a few feet above the lake would be an island with the house, sorrounded by a club of vegetation. Farther out into the fields would be a smaller island with stone boxes and grave tablets. The farmers work on the family land in constant sight of their ancestors, a clear look at rural culture here. Land profiteering, buying and selling and moving for a profit, doesn't exist. You don't own the land in Vietnam, at least culturally, you're simply its caretaker for your children. Without land you're not only a vagrant, you've literally and figuratively lost sight of your ancestors. I think that's part of what kept the villagers in place through napalm and search and destroy teams and chemical defoliants.

Anyway, I got lost on the back roads, and kept my tour group waiting for 15 minutes while I found my way back. Thankfully one of the other passengers reminded the guide I was missing, or the guy would have left without me. The tide was back in, and our motor boat had come up to meet us. I felt bad for keeping people waiting, but if I hadn't I would have missed out on the back roads that only I saw, and ended up being my favorite part of the day. So I told them I was sorry, but I lied.