Mekong Delta Tour
8/28/14
After doing some research we decided the best way to see the Mekong Delta was to buy a tour. Neither of us had ever been on a group tour before but we wanted to give it a shot so we signed up for the two day trip with a local tour agency. For $22 per person (including lunch, hotel, and all transportation), we figured there wasn’t much to lose!
Some eye-catching mosaics at a Buddhist pagoda...
We were in a group of about 20 other Vietnamese and international tourists led by our guide, “Hi,” who had a nervous giggle and spoke so quickly we could barely understand him. The tour felt a lot like a school field trip.
Parts of it were totally ridiculous, like when they loaded us all into little horse-drawn carts to “see the village.” We literally trotted down one street for about 2.5 minutes, slammed on the breaks, spun around and trotted back to the place we left from.
But we were glad to be able to see so many little things we would’ve missed on our own like a honey farm where the bees raised on nectar from lychee flowers and the honey tasted just like the fruit. We had a honey tasting with tea, bee pollen, and also tasted some banana wine which were delicious.
We also got to see how coconut milk is produced and watched a row of women individually wrapping coconut candies by hand at lightning speed.
Once outside of Saigon, we travelled between destinations sometimes by large boat and sometimes by small boat. These 6 person wooden canoes were especially fun to ride in. One person at the front and another at the back guided us through canals too narrow for larger boats to travel through with wooden oars.
As we were entering the boat, we were each handed a Vietnamese hat to wear during the trip much to the disappointment of Chris who, like me, feels the only people who should be wearing Vietnamese hats are Vietnamese people and not tourists. I was already wearing a hat so Chris was on his own with the goofy hat...
The noodle factory was really interesting too. Here we learned how rice grains are crushed into flour and combined with cassava into a batter which is then spread paper thin onto large circular burner like a crepe. The burner is stoked with rice husks...
After it cooks for a few seconds, it is carefully removed with a special woven reed, bat-like tool and placed carefully on a wicker stretcher to cool and harden in the sun before being run through the noodle cutting machine.
The noodles are then ready for packaging! We tried some in a pork soup... delicious!!
And of course, no Vietnamese noodle factory would be complete without grilled rats and a petting zoo python...
The tour also included a trip to a fruit orchard where we walked through rows of dragon fruit. They looked like something out of Doctor Seuss and somewhere between a tree and a cactus.
Turns out the fruits come in two varieties, white flesh and red flesh, the red being the more sought after for its sweetness. The papaya was grown on the farm too and was AMAZING.
Our tour ended with a monsoon. Chris and I were two of the lucky few who ran through the streets from the boat dock and made it to the restaurant before it started pouring but many others in our group were not so lucky.
The grill master made do under an umbrella.
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