Dan's Adventure

I hadn’t read too much about the Mekong Delta before booking a trip to go there, I had visions of rural country life, floating villages, fishermen and not a lot else. I thought I would be sailing along the Mekong, drifting along gently and enjoying a beer or three on the deck. Perhaps this would have been the case several years ago, but not any more.

From Saigon it took several hours by bus to reach the starting point of our Mekong excursion. Arriving at the first of several large cities it was obvious that I had been very naive in what I had imagined the Mekong Delta to be like. Outside of the cities many people do still live on the river, in floating villages and on the small islands of the delta, but times are changing and the people of the Mekong Delta are progressing. By boat we visited a couple of islands where we were introduced to the creation of coconut candy, dried fruit sweets and rice paper as well as a fruit farm. In addition to fishing, this is how the people living outside of the cities in the Mekong Delta make a living.

The second part of the trip was the highlight. The fast boat from Chau Doc in Vietnam, across the border into Cambodia and on to Phnom Penh. The fast boat still took around seven hours, but it was seven hours of fantastic scenery. Certainly worth the $2 upgrade from the slow boat! We passed numerous floating villages, houses on stilts, fishing boats and little villages on island, all with young children shouting hello, waving and smiling as we passed by. A very nice welcome to Cambodia.