The Mighty Mekong

The previous night’s nightmare turned out to be far worse in reality. How I managed to haul myself out of bed is beyond me…let alone squeeze everything into my bulging bag and stagger down the road to the travel agency in good time. There were a few people milling around waiting to be picked up by bus for transportation to the river dock…I couldn’t have told you a thing about them if they hadn’t been on the boat with me for the next three days…what with the sunlight and traffic noise, my ailing brain was too overloaded to assimilate any new data. I pulled on my shades and hat and retreated into a cocoon of trance and Catch 22 for the best part of the morning.
As it turned out, my chosen unsociability went un-noticed by my companions – our boat was extremely noisy and the sun was mercilessly hot. The former meant that conversation was frustrating, the latter that most people were too torpid and lethargic to make the effort in the first place. After the worst of my hangover had passed, I eventually struck up conversation with a New Yorker and a Dutchman. Jonah Leff (the American) had spent three years teaching English in Japan and was now heading slowly back home, Erich was on a 4 week holiday through Vietnam.
Everywhere along the river’s steep banks shanty towns encroached – some shacks constructed sturdily with corrugated iron, others flimsily leaning out over the river with their bamboo frames and palm frond walls. Even from these humble abodes, sprang the ubiquitous television aerial. Young children seemed to have nothing better to do than wait for tourists to drift by, before performing acrobatic dives or dropping their pants to salute…the more retiring ones merely shouted and waved. Older children cycled by, school uniforms flowing elegantly behind them as they crossed creeks and canals on the way from school. All around, as we cruised south away from the city towards Mytho, you could see the importance of the river in their daily lives. To these people the Mekong serves as bathtub, washing machine, larder, sink and (rather grimly) toilet. Its tumultuous floods bring destruction and chaos during the wet season, but also the rich alluvium that fertilises the rice bowl of Vietnam. If the country were reduced to living on rice and fish alone, the Delta’s fecund lands could support the entire populace.
For all the life that teems on its many banks, there is just as much activity on the river itself. For longer trips or freight, it isn’t possible to use the mainly narrow riverside tracks. Everywhere there are small boats, passenger ferries, fishing boats, cargo boats and the leviathan dredge barges with their tugs. Every boat has a pair of eyes painted lividly on the prow, signalling the Mekong as home waters and scaring off potential predators – both mythical and real. The dredge barges are the most unsettling sight on the river: seemingly impossibly laden with the riverbed’s fine alluvium, they nose up the middle of the current under the power of an attendant tug. All other traffic cedes right of way to these lumbering hulks – not least, because a collision with such an unstoppable force would only produce one outcome. As they chug by, waves break over their seriously low bows and you wonder how many have been sunk due to that crucial extra half-ton dumped on top by a reckless dredger operator. Immediately after their passing, of course, its all hands on deck in the smaller boats to prevent them being swamped by the wash.
After a poor lunch of instant noodles and vegetables we disembarked at Mytho for a tour round some of the local islands. We visited tropical fruit farms (one of the main suppliers to the celebrated floating markets – more of which, later), honey farms and witnessed the production of coconut candy…which was a useful supplement to lunch. Highlight of a hot, sticky, hungover afternoon was the appearance of a python who I immediately made friends with and found much to my surprise (despite numerous people telling me that this was the case) that his skin was extremely smooth and almost supernaturally dry.
We took small boats down myriad side canals, hemmed in by dense foliage and swarming with mosquitoes and the calls of tropical animals. This murky-watered maze of waterways was reminiscent of scenes from Apocalypse now…a little mist and the distant chatter of machine gun fire would have completed the illusion.
Later, by a combination of boat and (blessed) air-con coach, we arrived at our evening’s destination in Can Tho.
As a group, we went for dinner and I got talking to Aussie-English Pete and Kulli and Joti from, of all places, Ealing. A brief discussion ensued about the various merits of Thai and Vietnamese restaurants in their neighbourhood, before promises to try them out together next time I was there. After my earlier befriending of an innocent snake, I turned Judas by having one of his cousins for dinner in an onion and garlic sauce. Very tasty, if a little chewy.