Mekong Delta

I took a two day trip from Ho Chi Minh city to the Mekong Delta to see the wonders of this part of Vietnam. The trip consisted of boat rides around the Delta visiting floating markets, and places where coconut candy, rice paper and rice krispies are made. My first impression of the tour wasn't very good as the first floating market that we visited was pretty dead as all the action happened before 11am, the time that our bus got to the delta. After that we enjoyed a free lunch with "unlimited fresh fruits", which turned out to be only a handful of leeche fruits and rambutans. Needless to say the tour could only get better.

After lunch we got back in the boat and went to tour the coconut candy and rice paper shops. These were fairly ordinary but the coconut candy that was freshly made was delicious.

The following morning was spent going through another floating market. This time though it was 8am so the market was full of life and much more interesting. Each boat had people on it and everybody trying to sell something, from what I could tell it was mainly fruit for sale. After the floating market the tour stopped at a rice krispie shop where the rice krispies squares were being freshly made from the nearby grown rice.

After the tour it was a 4 hour bus ride back to Ho Chi Minh to spend the night and then on to Nha Trang.



Typical Mekong Delta setting, for one of the smaller river branches.













Rice paper drying in the sun














The floating market, the items displayed on the bamboo poles are what each boat is selling





















Making kice krispie squares

Saigon photos and Cu Chi Tunnels

As mentioned before, Saigon seems to be dominated by motorbikes. So I've put a photo of a SMALL parking lot for motorbikes. They are everywhere.














Trying to cross the road (the picture doesn't do it justice)









The wiring system in Saigon seems very unsafe. I can imagine that one day one of the telephone poles holding all of the wires is going to break creating lots of problems.






From Saigon I took a half day trip out to the Cu Chi tunnels which are located just to the North of Saigon. The tunnels here are a remainder of the tunnels used by the Viet Kong during the Vietnam war. In this area only they extended for over 200 km and were all dug using small hand shovels and baskets to move the waste material. The most difficult job was disposing of the waste material as any large piles or newly dumped soil would be visible from the sky and American bombers could easily bomb those targets. Therefore to keep the tunnel locations hidden the Vietnamese could only dump the waste material into existing bomb craters or carry it all the way to the Saigon river and dump it there. The tunnels themselves are all quite tight and the deeper underground they go the smaller they get. The average height of the tunnels is approximately only 60 cm high and 40 cm across, a tight squeeze for someone like myself crawling through them. They also went to depths of 30 meters to be able to survive bombs; however, they contained several "fighting rooms" at only a few meters depth from where they would attack any soldiers.






Entrance to one set of tunnels
















Tunnel system (60 cm high x 40 cm wide)







In addition to the tunnel network in the area the Vietnamese created several traps for any American soldiers to fall into and die. Most of the traps were some sort of covered hole in the ground filled with sharpened bamboo stakes ready to impale anyone that fell in.



Trap with bamboo stakes

The Adventure Starts

Today marks the first day of my trek around the world. I landed in Ho Chi Minh city (still called Saigon to all the locals) late last night and was kindly picked up from the airport by Kevin Meyer.

Saigon is a city that is owned by motorbikes, it seems that everyone here drives one. If you can imagine thousands of motorbikes, some cars and buses and very few rules of the road you can get a sense of the chaos of the streets here. Crossing the street is a major undertaking as no body seems to stop, ever. All you can do is slowly move across the road and hope that all of the vehicles miss you.

This morning I visited the War Remnants Museum which goes through the Vietnam war of the 60's. The most interesting and gruesome part of the museum was all of the information covering the chemical weapons that the Americans used. The amount of damage that these chemicals caused on both the environment and the people was devastating. Entire forests were destroyed and the number of people living with diseases or birth defects caused by the chemicals is massive. The majority of the museum was photographs with descriptions but it was a very eyeopening experience about the harsh reality of the war.

More updates with some photos will follow later as I experience more of this amazing city and the surrounding country.