Mekong Delta Memories

In the town of Ben Tre in the Mekong Delta, I hired a small boat to take me along some of the canals and through the river islands. At the last moment, the boat driver and I were joined by a middle-aged Vietnamese man named Bich. Bich served as my guide for the trip. He has a chatty fellow with a good command of English and a guttural laugh from a lifetime of smoking. He was in the South Vietnamese army and fought with the Americans, and he knew a lot of American slang (he told me that in his youth, he used to be a 'playboy'). As we punted down the canals, he would tell me war stories about bloody battles that took place here, and so-and-so lost a leg or got stuck in the mud, and then he would start laughing uproariously as if it were the funniest thing in the world.

After a while on a narrow canal, we stopped at a small shack and Bich introduced me to some friends of his, a mother and daughter. He told me that he and the mother used to be in love, but then they both ended up marrying other people. The woman had someone pluck a couple of coconuts from a tree, hacked them each once with a machete, and stuck a straw in them, and handed one to each of us. They were really friendly and refused to let me pay for the coconut, despite the fact that coconut farming is their living.

Back in the boat we continued down the canal. Eventually, the tide was dropping and the canal was blocked by water hyacinths and we had to turn around and go back to the main channel. On our way back to Ben Tre, we pulled into another narrow inlet and Bich took me to his house for some iced tea. He was clearly very proud of the house, which he said cost $100,000 to build. He told me his daughter in Sydney won $2 million in the Australian lottery and gave him the money to build the house. An unlikely story, but who knows.

In Can Tho, I took a boat ride with a woman named Nam. We cruised through some canals and she took me to a fish farm, which she evidently thought was a fascinating tourist attraction (it's smelly and gross). This morning, Nam boated me down to a floating market - an interesting sight, with a lot of large boats along the side of the river. The sellers hoist a sample of their wares on a bamboo pole, so you know where to get your watermelons, etc.



Then we mosied back to Can Tho through some different small canals, and stopped at a house of an old man and his family with a fruit farm. They served me all kinds of tropical fruit, and the man proudly showed off his diploma from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He had studied electrical engineering in for a year in 1968 in Virginia.

So this is the Mekong Delta for you - old veterans with war stories living on narrow river channels and growing fruit.