Last activity in Vietnam and it’s another boat trip lol
The Mekong Delta is a network of smaller canals that feed from a huge river. This river starts in the Himalayas and passes through China, Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia before reaching Vietnam, which explains why the water looks dirty. More than half of Vietnam’s rice and fish come from the delta region, which earns its nickname as the rice bowl. Our guide mentioned there are over 300 types of fish! There also used to be crocodiles, not anymore. Seeing it is on a lot of the menus, I’m guessing they ate them all!
There is currently 17 million people living in mekong delta area, which is spend over 4000 islands. We passed 3 and visited 2.
The three we passed were:
- Phoenix Island – this island is famous for crating crafts and has 7 million people on.
- Dragon Island – this island is a lot smaller with only 2 million people. They are a fishing village and have designed their houses to accommodate this. With the hisses being 7 metres in heigh, however, 4 metres us underground and full of water to store the fish and keep fresh. The most common fish they catch is Basa.
- Turtle Island – this is the smallest of the 5 I mention on here with only 500 people living there. This island is very basic with no electricity and tradional means of life.
We then stopped on 2 of the islands:
- Unicorn Island – this was our first stop of the day. This island has 6 million people living on it and has a primary school and a market on the island.
Once off the main boat, we walked through their fruit and vegetable groves. We met some locals, and they sang songs to use about the Mekong Delta and love, with the Monochal – bamboo instrument.
They also provided us some fruit from the island, including Pinapple with chilli, Jackfruit, Sapodila fruit (looks like kwik), papaya, mango, and Dragonfruit.
There are two different kinds of Dragonfruit, white and pink. The tree they grow on looks a bit like catus, and we were told if the leaves curle up, its a pink fruit. They can get up to 15 fruits from 1 tree.
Another first for me was seeing Potatos growing from vines. Did not know that was possible!
We walked to another area of the island where they kept bees and produced honey and honey products. We had a lime and honey tea.. super sweet!
- Coconut island – we left Unicorn island on the bigger boat and then transferred to bamboo boats to travel down and onto coconut island. This island had 7,000 people living here, and they grow 50% of all the coconuts in the Mekong Delta. We also got to see water coconuts, which I thought looked like a very large star anise. They can eat the roots and fruit, it has a lot less flesh than the normal coconut.
Once off the boat, we went to a coconut shop, where they create crafts and sweets from the coconuts. They also had some rice wine, which strangely they store with snakes in! Though she said it was only 23%, it tasted over 40% to me!
The flowers on the island were beautiful and to finish the Coconut island trip we had a tuk tuk round the island, before getting back on the bigger boat to the mainland while Zam sung to us (badly bless him).
In the evening, we went to dinner at a homecook meal with Mrs Hang Troung from Phan Anh Backpackers Saigon. She has been doing amazing work with feeding the homeless and disabled people who wouldn’t otherwise have access to food or afford it. Our meal that g-adventures paid for, she sent the leftovers and extra she made to people I mentioned above.
Big Ginger Adventures Blog 