Puffed Rice and a Respite for our Backsides

Well well, we woke this morning to the sounds of a Vietnamese family going about their business....at 5am.  Yes, those walls that don't touch the ceiling let sounds in as well as out.  Truth be told it didn't matter much as we had to be up at the crack of dawn because low tide was at 7.30/8am and we needed to be off the homestay island by 7am.  Neither of us had slept well and for this young man there was to be no cycling today.  Unfortunately Cambodia had beaten me and dehydrated as I was it would have been folly to push through and complete the planned 30 odd km.

Worst job in the world, collecting clay from the river bed

A view out onto the delta

The Delta....shallower than it looked

After fond farewells we all got on the boat and it made it's sluggish way up the river towards a real floating market.  I say real as this was a working market - one designed for river people and the locals, not for tourists.  That's not to say that the Vietnamese passed up an opportunity to cater for us "hard currency rich fools"!

On the way our guide had proven once again that we've been very lucky.  One of our group needed a pit-stop and in attempting to moor our boat to a riverbank Lam (the guide) fell straight into the river mud.

The "eyes" to ward off evil spirits

Talk about going over and above the call of duty.  Between the receding waters and the deep mud, he couldn't get us moored, so we had to move on and the lady in question had to use a bucket with us gentlemen averting our eyes.

Is it a Junk?  Or a mini-village?

The boats were a revelation.....like mini-Villages in themselves, with chickens in baskets, bicycles and all sorts hanging off the various elements of the junks.


We learned that the way to tell what the trader was selling was to look for the tall pole (not you Jarek!) and see what had been pinned there; for instance a pineapple on the top of it meant they were selling pineapples....simple really.





The canal itself had vague reminiscences of Venice, with it's church at one end and...actually well, that was about it, but work with me here :)

Like the Grand Canal....only less Grand

Lady making rice paper

We stopped and disembarked to have a tour of a little production line for coconut and rice goods - everything from coconut sweets, to rice wine with scorpions and cobras embalmed in it.  The highlight for me was seeing how they puffed rice.  Having tried this at home on numerous occasions with no success and fantastic frustration, I realised I was missing an ingredient.  Sand.  Yup, they heat up the sand then toss in the rice (husk and all).  The rice pops out of the husk like popcorn and then they sieve it through a couple of sieves to first remove sand then the husks.  So simple.

Puffing the rice in black sand

Back on the boat and it was a short ride to our bikes.  Tim, my partner in pain (though to be fair to him he was properly ill, I just had rotten guts), was kitted up to get on his bike.  Urgh, the shame.  However when we got there, it was too much so I had company on the bus of shame :)

Kind of sums up how Tim and I felt about being on the bus

Julia cycled the first 10km happily and I felt quite gutted to have missed out, but the next 20 were fairly uninspiring and so it all kind of balanced out.  After that 30km, everyone was back on the bus, sweaty, stinky and dusty and we had a nice long drive to Saigon (or Ho Chi Minh City).



Arriving in the hotel felt wonderful, we had 9 days ahead of us here.  9 whole days to do......nothing. See the few sights, read our books, sit by the pool, go to the gym and generally chill out.  Lovely.  Normally the prospect of 9 days doing nothing would make us both twitch convulsively, but not this time.

Tet Crowds in Saigon

That night we did a short walk through the lunacy that was Saigon preparing for New Year - or Tet.  Then we were taken en masse to a lovely restaurant, the Temple Club, that pulled off beautifully a nod to the old colonial French past.

Us at a civilised dinner at Temple Club

Next day was a day of goodbyes as we checked out of the arranged hotel and moved into our new home for the next 9 days.  We had some great times with this new group of friends and would thank them all for some wonderful memories.  Most thanks go to our guides and support crew who truly made it all possible.....they were amazing.