In the high-tide season, a lot of people flock to the Mekong Delta not only to drift on the swollen rivers but to know more of the hardships and the lifestyle of people in the Delta.
Not boasting clear, blue water, the rivers of the Mekong Delta are a humble dark red year round. The build-up of alluvium from way upstream enters the Delta and gives the waters here their special color. While tourists like floating on rivers to relax and forget daily worries, the rivers are house and a working place for residents.
On vacation, tourists are keen to discover new things in new places, so they are excited to take photos of boatmen, sellers on floating markets or residents washing clothes and dishes or cooking in riverside-houses or in boat houses. However, all these activities tell them that those are poor people with unlucky fates as they have no house on solid land but live on a boat. Every day, before sunrise, the boats, some from far-away places, drift to the floating market to sell products.
When the sun rises high at mid-day, tourists find a restaurant to have lunch as well as to flee the scorching heat, but the floating sellers still row under the sun with their tired advertising cries.
Mekong Delta tours visit romantic canals shaded by endless groves of coconut trees or mangroves and wonderful orchards. These canals link to various branches of the great river and make for relaxing boat trips. The experience of drifting on the canals is so great that many tourists forget their troubles in the peace and quiet.
However, tourists who talk with the boatman may learn that he gets only VND5,000 for each short canal boat trip. They wear traditional clothes with a conical hat and their smiles are always austere.
Most Delta tours also visit craft villages, coconut candy factories in Ben Tre Province or pho and rice factories in Can Tho City. Pho (rice noodle soup) is the pride of Vietnamese cuisine and most foreigners in Vietnam like it but few of them know that making pho includes many meticulous phases, from mixing and stressing the flour to steaming and drying it and then cutting it into pho.
“I really like Vietnamese food, especially pho, but I just learned that making pho is not easy at all, and it needs prudence and diligence,” said Isa, a tourist from Belgium.
“It seems that most people here are leading austere lives. Everyday, we eat rice but this is the first time my heart sank down as I feel moved by the misery of farmers here,” said Noortie, a girl from Holland.
We leave the Mekong Delta on a rainy afternoon by boat leading to the bus station. Boats drift silently before our eyes. Somewhere, we hear the weak cries of a female seller from a nearby boat, “Rau cai day, ca rot day (vegetables here, carrots here).”
The utter calmness and the silent rain drops seem to intensify the stirring of emotions that the river and its people instill in visitors.