Mekong Delta

VIsiting the rice fields in Tien Giang Province, Viet Nam

Up close and personal with newly picked rice. Here the rice is drying in the sun for a week before going to the processing plant for husking(?) and packaging.

Diving board??

My friend Nick paddling his cousin and me up the river for an ice coffee.

Perhaps you remember hearing about the Mekong Delta during the days of the Vietnam War. There was some pretty fierce fighting in that part of Vietnam and the bomb craters are now filled with water and are used to raise catfish. I guess that is an example of lemonade from lemons.

I had an invitation to visit the village of a friend who was raised in the Mekong Delta last Sunday. To go there I had the option of riding on back of my friend's motorbike for about 60 miles or going by bus. I chose the bus. We left Ho Chi Minh about 11AM and got to our destination 2 hours later. Thirty miles per hour is average for travel here so it is fortunate that it is not such a big country.

My friend was raised by his grandmother but she was not home. His sister was there and she served lunch which was rice, fish and vegetables. For dessert we had mangosteen, a new fruit I discovered recently. Normally dessert is not a part of Asian meals. We ate typically Vietnamese style sitting on little plastic chairs about 20 inches high that are the same as kid's picnic chairs they sell at Walmart. An uncle came and ate lunch with my friend and me, and , also typically Vietnamese, the men ate before children or women. Fortunately no chickens flew up on the table as I had experienced when visiting a friend in a rural setting in Thailand.

After lunch we rode in a dugout canoe on the river up to a cafe for an ice coffee. I was pretty nervous the canoe that it would tip and the water was about as nasty looking as any I have ever seen. I did not want to swim there. The little boy in the pictures is a neighbor/cousin and he swims in the river every day, however.

This is rice growing country and the rice fields are lushly verdant. I have never seen rice that has been cultivated but not processed, and I suppose many of you have not either. I took a macro pic of this most basic of foods in this part of the world to show what rice looks like before before it goes to the factory for processing and packaging in plastic. (I reminded myself of a friend from Hawaii who visited me in Florida during the peak of corn season and he had never seen corn that was not canned or frozen. What comes around ....)

This was a hot and tiring day. Our return bus broke down about 30 minutes into out trip and we had to wait for another ride to come by. We made it back to Ho Chi Minh on an unairconditioned bus sitting on the very back seats. I hope my next travels are more comfortable. Speaking of next travels, I am still anticipating going to Seattle next week but flights are not looking so great for standby.