Sunday 8 April 2012

The Mekong Delta (2) To Vinh Long and Can Tho: Vietnam North to South Part 15

Fruit, Bricks and Music

Vietnam

From our Homestay to a Fruit Garden

After breakfasting on omelettea and French bread – a welcome relic of colonialism – and yet more fruit, and we said farewell to our hosts.

About to leave our hosts, Mekong Delta

It had not occurred to me that the Mekong was tidal, but it is here and there was insufficient water for our boat, so Trang found a man who would row us to a larger stream where we could make a rendezvous.

Although it was early, the sun was strong and the boatman lent us local conical hats which, he insisted, would be far more effective than our own. I looked and felt a bit of a fake, but he had a point; they are made for the climate and are amazingly light and cool.

Floating through the Mekong Delta in the right sort of hat

It seemed the moment to forget about a war which had finished almost forty years ago and just enjoy the sunshine and the sensation of moving almost silently along the waterway, surrounded by the life of the river and the dense vegetation.

Life in the Mekong Delta

As our boat nosed its way through the rafts of floating water hyacinth we thought we heard the ooh-ooh noise of a monkey. ‘It’s not a monkey,’ Trang told us, ‘it’s a bird, a coucal’. He scanned the vegetation just above the waterline and then pointed. We were moving and wildlife rarely stays still for long, so I saw nothing but Lynne glimpsed a bird the size of a large magpie with a blue-green head, a brown body and a long blue-green tail (for a YouTube video of a coucal, click here). It is, I learn, a non-parasitic cuckoo which is quite common from India eastwards, though not always easy to spot.

We eventually reached a larger stream after a pleasant and restful journey - at least for those not providing the motive power. Our boatman from yesterday was waiting to meet us.

We reach a larger stream, Mekong Delta

After a short trip up river we dropped in on a fruit garden. We saw all the fruits we had eaten the day before and some extras - star fruit, which we have encountered before, and mangosteens, which we have not and look nothing like mangoes; they will not be ripe for a month or two. And then there were durians. A ripe durian smells like a badly maintained chemical toilet; it is reputedly illegal to carry one on public transport in Malaysia, and if that is not true it ought to be. There is a school of thought that says that once you have got past the smell they are wonderful. Lynne and I disagree. We each ate a durian pastry once – we bought them in a dim sum restaurant without knowing quite what we were ordering (we do this a lot). We ate it, but it repeated all afternoon with a flavour we would have dearly loved to flush away. [update: Our 2017 trip to Malaysia persuaded us to soften our stance on durians. 'Smells like hell, tastes like heaven' as the Malays say.]

Lynne under a jackfruit tree, Mekong Delta

Visiting a Brick Works

We crossed an even larger branch of the river, busy with fishing boats and rice barges, to reach a brickworks.

Rice barge on the Mekong

Being Easter Sunday the factory was quiet – only 10% of Vietnamese are Christians, but the French legacy includes a proper respect for ‘le weekend’. Some bricks were being made, though, a labour intensive process requiring the clay to be thrown in at one end, and the bricks to be manually separated from the excess clay at the other.

Brick making in the Mekong Delta

The kilns were also loaded and unloaded by hand, which at least allowed for a quality control process.

There's something happening in this kiln and I'm looking into it

They did not just make bricks; other earthenware products could be found in the kilns – I always wondered where those wretched gnomes came from, now I know.

Bloody gnomes

The original owner of the factory became rich, and when he died he had himself buried on the factory floor so he could continue to keep an eye on the workers.

The boss (retired)

Music

Another short potter up the river brought us to a garden house rather like those in Hue. We sat in front of the ancestor altar – an impressive cabinet inlaid with mother of pearl - and were treated to tea and fruit.

Cabinet inlaid with mother of pearl

We were entertained by two musicians, one on guitar, the other playing a variety of traditional instrument, and a singer. It was less traditional Vietnamese folk than the Quang Ho musicians we had seen near Hanoi, and their songs dealt with contemporary themes. This was clearly Trang’s sort of music and several times he was invited to join in. ‘This music’, he said regretfully, ‘is too sad for the new generation of young people.’ They seem to prefer their sounds Gangnam style.

Folk musicians who resolutely ensured all photographs would be taken into the sun

Through Vinh Long to Can Tho

Forty minutes sailing brought us to the city of Vinh Long where we said ‘goodbye’ to our boatman and ‘hello again’ to our driver.

Dodging the motorbikes with his customary skill, he quickly drove us to Can Tho, the largest city in the delta and, with 1.2 million people, the fifth biggest in Vietnam. The Vinh Long to Can Tho journey time has been much reduced by the Can Tho bridge which opened in April 2010. At 2.75Km it is the longest cable span bridge in South East Asia.

Approaching Can Tho bridge

Once we had arrived, lunch became our first priority. Trang took us to a large restaurant packed with local families and, we were pleased to note, no other foreigners. They did, though, find an English menu and we chose spicy frog, squid in oyster sauce and soup with pork, squid and prawns along with assorted vegetables and the inevitable rice. And excellent they all were, too.

It was an excellent meal and that look on my face is supposed to be a smile. Oh well,

A Hot Afternoon in Can Tho and a Hot Pot for Dinner

Well fed we checked into our hotel and, once the hottest part of the day was past, took a walk along Can Tho’s very posh corniche. They have a statue of Ho Chi Minh, who like the musicians, was looking at us out of the sun. Unlike the musicians, though, we had an opportunity to return next morning when the problem had solved itself to take this picture...

Lynne and Ho Chi Minh on the corniche at Can Tho

After buying some clothes for our grandson in the smart little market we wandered back to the hotel thinking that the roof bar might be good spot for a coffee. It was closed, but the roof did give us a fine view across to the bridge and demonstrate just how much water and how little land there is in the delta country.

The Can Tho Bridge

Back out on the street we found a café and were brought two small cups with metal filters on top - the usual arrangement, at least in the south. We sat for a while watching Can Tho pass by. Then, as there was no coffee in my cup despite repeated fiddling with the filter, I sent it back; its replacement worked only a little better.

Following the ‘safety in numbers’ rule a group of four foreigners spied us from the far side of the park, made a bee line for our café and sat at the next table. We should have asked for commission.

We walked back to the hotel passing these two men playing Chinese chess (for more street chess in more countries, click here) and beside them a sugar cane crusher. Drinking crushed sugar cane on a hot afternoon is always refreshing, although Lynne is a little squeamish about the juice flowing over ice presumably made from tap water. Not letting this put us off we exchanged a few thousand dong for a couple of glasses. The drink was resorative, and did no harm.

Street chess, Can Tho

In the evening we went with Trang to a street restaurant. Metal tables and plastic stools were set out beside the road and food appeared from a small kitchen in a hole in the wall. We had hot pot, a cook-it-yourself arrangement with a lot of green vegetables, some buffalo meat and buffalo liver. We never did manage to cook the buffalo to a reasonably degree of tenderness, but the liver was good, though Lynne thought it a little more strongly flavoured than she would have liked. There was also a huge plate of roasted chicken, so there was plenty to eat, beer to drink and remarkably little to pay.

Lynne, Trang and a hot pot, Can Tho

Vietnam North to South

Prelude: Raybans in Heathrow and Saigon
Part 1: Hanoi (1) Ethnic Minorities, The Old City and Water Puppets
Part 2: Hanoi (2) Bat Trang, Quan Ho Music and Fighting Cocks
Part 3: Ha Long Bay
Part 4: Lao Cai, Coc Ly Market and Sa Pa
Part 5: Trekking from Sa Pa (1), Sa Pa to Ta Van
Part 6: Trekking from Sa Pa (2) Ta Van to Ban Den
Part 7: Trekking from Sa Pa (3), Around Ban Den then back to Hanoi
Part 8: Hanoi (3), The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum and the Temple of Literature
Part 9: Hue (1), The Citadel, The Battle of Hue 1968 and Some New Things to Eat
Part 10: Hue (2), A Self-Immolating Monk, an Impotent Emperor and Imperial Dinner
Part 11: Da Nang
Part 12: Hoi An and My Son
Part 13: Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)
Part 14: The Mekong Delta (1), Can Bei and a Cornucopia of Fruit
Part 15: The Mekong Delta (2), To Vinh Long and Can Tho
Part 16: The Mekong Delta (3): Cai Rang and My Tho
Part 17: The Cu Chi Tunnels and the Cao Dai Great Temple

THE END

Saturday 7 April 2012

The Mekong Delta (1) Cai Be and a Cornucopia of Fruit: Vietnam North to South Part 14

Making Sweets, Eating Elephant Ear Fish and Lots of Fruit

From Ho Chi Minh City to the Mekong Delta

Vietnam

The next morning we left Ho Chi Minh City and drove south west into the Mekong Delta.

We were crossing one of the most densely populated parts of a densely populated country, so even after escaping the urban sprawl we remained in continuous ribbon development. According to the map we passed through several towns, but as in the drive from Hanoi to Ha Long, it was impossible to tell where the ribbon development widened into unmarked towns.

Most of the way we stayed in the outside lane of the dual carriageway, leaving the inside lane to the motorcycles. To overtake our driver pulled right, hoping the shoal of bikes would make space for us – it was in their interest to do so.

Driving from Hi Chi Minh City towards the Mekong Delta

At first the land was merely flat, but as we crossed into Tien Giang Province we passed over several canals, indicating we had reached the delta area.

Entering the Mekong Delta region

Boarding Our Boat

Approaching My Tho we turned right to drive a few miles parallel to one of the delta’s main branches, then left to reach the waterside at a small jetty behind a large car park.

Boarding a local ferry

We said goodbye to our driver, at least for the day, rounded a milling group of French tourists and reached the jetty. After watched people boarding a local ferry, we boarded our own boat. It was large enough for twenty, but for the next 24 hours it would only carry the two of us and Trang.

All this boat just for us

Cai Be

We cast off and pottered upstream on a section of riverseparated from the main branch by a long, low island surrounded by mangroves. We reached Cai Be 15 minutes later. The delta is densely populated but with few nucleated settlements outside the main cities; Cai Be is one of the rare villages.

The village stands at the mouth of a large side-stream. Turning into it, we chugged past a floating market which, at 11.30, was finishing for the day. Markets are always interesting, floating markets doubly so, but we were planning to visit the larger Cai Rang market later so did not mind missing this one.

Going home from market, Cai Be

Passing a church bedecked with Easter bunting.....

Cai Be church

....we entered a smaller stream and moored at a jetty. We were to walk through part of the village, but not before we had waved goodbye to our all our earthly possessions – at least those in the same continent as we were – leaving them in the care of a boatman we had met barely 20 minutes before.

Our boat departs

Making Rice Paper, Cai Be

Spring rolls are ubiquitous in Vietnam and as most of them are wrapped in rice paper, its production is an important, albeit cottage, industry.

We dropped into a one room factory to watch the manufacture of lattice rice paper. The process is simple. Using cans with holes in the bottom, a rice flour and water mixture is drizzled into a lightly greased pan with a circular sweep of the wrist. In seconds the liquid is transformed into a papery lattice which is quickly flicked over. Seconds later it is done and must be removed from the pan before it starts to brown.

The four or five girls working here are paid according to the quantity they produce. The relentless pace of the work - each girl operates two or even three woks - and the utter tedium of the task meant there were few smiles. I could think of no better argument to persuade a girl to stay on at school.

Making lattice rice paper, Cai Be

Fish Sauce, Sweets and Rice Wine, Cai Be

Further down the road we found a fish sauce factory where nothing seemed to be happening. Given the importance of fish sauce in Vietnamese cooking this was a little disappointing.

Idle fish sauce factory, Cai Be

From there on it was difficult to know if we were seeing different parts of one factory, or several different concerns in adjacent huts.

We passed a young man using a rotating machine to rip the flesh from coconuts.

Stripping the flesh from coconuts, Cai Be

In the next room coconut syrup was being boiled up. The resulting slab of toffee was cooled before being cut and packed by hand.

Boiling up the cocnut syrup, Cai Be

Next door was a still producing rice ‘wine’….

Distilling rice 'wine', Cai Be

… and next door to that a manufacturer of the more usual design of rice paper…..

Making traditional rice paper, Cai Be

The door from the yard where the rice paper was drying…..

Drying rice paper, Cai Be

>…led us into another, larger confectionary factory where popped rice sweets were being produced. Black sand was brought to a high temperature in a large wok, then rice was mixed into the hot sand causing the grains to ‘pop’.

The rice goes into the hot black sand, Cai Bei

The rice and sand mixture was dropped into a sieve, the fine grained sand passed through to leave the popped rice completely clean.

The popped rice was next pounded into hot syrup.....

Pounding the rice into the syrup, Cai Be

and the resulting mixture emptied into a wooden frame where it was cooled and rolled.

Rolling out the rice/syrup mixture, Cai Be
The 'packing department' is sitting at the table behind

The rollers, as Trang shows, are shell casings filled with concrete. Inventive recycling is a local speciality.

Trang with the shell casing rollers, Cai Be

The sweets were then cut up using an ordinary school ruler to get the blocks the right size, before being passed on to the next table to be wrapped and packed.

We sat at a small table with a pot of tea and a tray of mixed sweets. I particularly like the coconut toffee and the strips of dried ginger, but they were all very more-ish, as sweets tend to be, and we sat there nibbling long enough to drink several cups of tea (well, they are small cups).

Tea and sweeties, Cai Be

To Lunch and Elephant's Ear Fish

By now one o’clock was approaching and lunch was three quarters of an hour away, so we reluctantly dragged ourselves from the sweets, walked across the road and down to a jetty where, as if by magic, our boat was waiting.

We sailed back through Cai Be, turned upstream when we approached the mangrove island and shortly afterwards emerged onto the Tien Giang, the main eastern branch of the Mekong after which the province is named. The Tien Giang is about a mile wide here and we crossed it angling slightly downstream, apparently aiming at the endless line of mangroves on the far side.

Cai Be

Eventually we could make out our destination, a wooden structure on stilts over the mangroves with a jetty leading out over the water hyacinth that had collected at the river’s edge.

The jetty over the water hyacinths

We landed and walked up into the restaurant, its sides open to the cooling breeze – although electric fans were helping nature along.

We started with fried elephant’s ear fish, pulling the fresh, white flesh from a fish mounted in a swimming position. There was, perhaps inevitably, rice paper to wrap round mint and lettuce, prawns, pork and rice, vegetable soup and, definitely inevitably, spring rolls. European convention demands that soup must be served first. This does not hold in East Asia, where soup can, and will, turn up any time during the meal. Then there was jackfruit and pineapple. As breakfast had finished with banana, papaya, and water melon that made our fruit count five for the day. It was to climb higher.

Elephant's Ear fish mounted in a swimming position

We shared the restaurant with ten Canadians and their guide. Orders have to be placed in advance here, and there had been some mix up. The guide, who may or may not have been deprived of a fish – I could not be bothered working out the exact problem – kept mithering at the restaurant owner; being rude and obnoxious, largely in English and always in a loud voice. Trang went quiet, eventually he said, ‘He’s Cambodian. I met too many like him when I was there.’

Trang seemed rattled. With his eyes on the Cambodian he gave us his opinion of the Khmer Rouge which I might paraphrase as ‘inhuman, murderous bastards’. This is, of course, the received wisdom, but Trang’s opinion came with the force of personal experience, not from newspaper reports. In defence of this particular Cambodian who was certainly boorish but hardly murderous, Trang himself pointed out that he would not have been born when the Khmer Rouge were on the rampage.

When the Canadians had gone, the owner’s young son came and stood by our table. Trang started teasing him in a good-natured way and the child responded by bursting into tears. It had not been a good lunchtime for Trang, and this seemed the moment to move on.

Upstream to our Home Stay

We pottered upstream for a while and then turned into one of the many small waterways that criss-cross the islands of the delta. It was pleasant floating down the channel, surrounded by the dense vegetation and with the boat nosing its way through the water hyacinth. We passed a few moored boats, their owners, who probably lived on them, going about their daily business.

Pottering along the waterways of the Mekong Delta

There are hundreds, more probably thousands, of these channels. Our boatman had lived here all his life and knew his way around, but to us every waterway looked like every other waterway and alone we would have been hopelessly lost within minutes. As at My Son I started imagining what it would have been like if there were hostile eyes watching me from the jungle as I struggled, without the benefit of our amiable and knowledgeable boatman, through a totally alien environment. It was a scary thought.

I was dragged back to reality by coconuts. I am not sure where they came from, but Trang was chopping the tops off and soon we were sucking up the sweet and refreshing coconut water; fruit number 6.

Lynne and a coconut, Mekong Delta

We bumped into the bank by a tiny landing stage; it seemed that we had reached our destination.

Crossing a footpath, we went through a brick arch and found ourselves in the garden of a large wooden house, at least there was a thatched roof and a floor and lots of pillars; in this climate walls are not a high priority. At the front was the ancestor shrine, in the corner of the patio was a brick kitchen, while round the back was a separate shower and toilet block. Along one side a series of bedrooms had been built with rough planks and an external wall with open latticework where the windows might be in cooler climes.

The ancestor's shrine

After we had been introduced to our hosts and selected a bedroom, Trang suggested we rest during the hottest part of the day, and take a walk when it was cooler.

After making appropriate use of the shower block Lynne demonstrated how to relax in the Mekong Delta. She may look comfortable, but she did not stay long in the hammock, soon wearying of the continual struggle to avoid being tipped out onto the floor. I opted out, unconvinced that my weight would not topple the whole building.

Lynne secure in her hammock

More Fruit, Including the Answer to a Mystery

An hour or so later Trang roused himself from his hammock in which he looked only slightly more secure than Lynne, went into the kitchen and returned with a huge mango and some rambutans. Lynne is not a great fan of the mango (she says they taste like swede!) but even she had to admit this one was magnificent. We halved it, removed the stone and scooped out the soft, sweet, perfectly ripe flesh. Rambutans were new to me; a relative of the lychee and longan they have a spiny skin which you peel off to reveal the glistening white sphere within. That brought our fruit count to 8 for the day.

Those who have read Hue(1) will know about the mystery fruit we encountered in the market and later in the fruit bowl in our hotel room. We had decided, with no great conviction, that it was probably some sort of apple. The garden here contained a number of trees from which the mystery fruit hung in profusion. Clearly they were not highly prized - left unharvested they were dropping onto the paths – and, equally clearly, they were not apples. It was time to ask Trang.

An Phuoc plums

I still find it difficult to believe they are actually plums. A decade ago longans were the fruit of the moment and farmers across the delta rushed to plant longan trees. Then the price plummeted. Five years ago An Phuoc plums, for such they are, were fetching a high price, so the farmers chopped down their longans to plant plums, and did so in such quantity they the price of plums collapsed and is currently below the cost of harvesting them. Many small farmers lost money, first on longans then on plums.

A Walk and More Fruit

It was time for a stroll, so we went back out to the waterway and walked along the path between the papaya trees and banana plants.

Trang and I walk between the papayas and the banaas

Turning right we followed a well-made path away from the water. On either side were large houses surrounded by fruit trees groaning under the weight of jackfruit, papaya, pomelo, and mango to name but four. With such a variety of fruit hanging within easy reach of anybody who wanted it, we felt as if we were walking in the Garden of Eden.

Large houses amid the fruit trees

The houses could only be reached down the narrow lane by bicycle or motorbike, and occasionally we had to step aside to let them pass, but that hardly spoiled the idyll. Eventually we reached a road wide enough for four wheeled vehicles. There was a fruit stall on the corner and Trang paused to make some purchases.

Trang buys some fruit

>We walked along the road a little way, then turned down another cycle path back towards the waterway. Trang pointed out two small mounds in a garden, the graves of two villagers killed in the war. What appeared to be rubbish strewn around were cards, cigarettes, money and other bits and pieces required to keep their spirits happy. To entirely dismantle the aura of paradise, Trang pointed out that the chicken wire fences were made from rolls of wire left behind after American bridge building operations, and the barbed wire on top had been recycled from defensive positions. Et in Arcadio ego as somebody, possibly Virgil, observed – I (Death) am even in Arcadia.

Graves in a garden

Dinner - and a Little Fruit

We ate on the patio while Trang joined the family at a table near the kitchen. Our hostess produced an excellent meal of fried perch, lettuce and herbs with rice paper to wrap round them, spring rolls with prawns and beansprouts, chicken soup and duck in a clay pot with rice. It is ‘working duck’ she said, not farmed for the table. By the time we had finished, its working days were over. Dessert was jackfruit, a fruit we had already eaten so could not count again, but Trang also brought us a pomelo and a guava. The pomelo was magnificent, the individual segments required peeling but the flesh inside was juicy and sweet, exactly what a grapefruit would be if it had a less acid temperament. The guava was sadly under-ripe but as it was our tenth different fruit for the day and the only one that was less than perfection, we felt we had done well.

We played cards while Trang and the family watched television, the man of the house lounging in a hammock and occasionally swishing the air with what looked like a stringless badminton racquet. The sharp cracks and occasional flashes coming from it indicated another insect meeting their doom.

Retiring to our wooden box of a bedroom, we discovered the mosquitoes had ambitions to be as well fed as we were. After smearing antihistamine cream on the bigger lumps we ensured our mosquito nets were well tucked in. With plenty of fresh air and cooled by electric fans we slept well - at least I did; Lynne was less convinced.