Day 1: Mekong Delta

Ok, so mea culpa. I screwed up on the date. We all got up at 6:15, packed our bags, had breakfast & then waited for the guide to show up. He didn’t and when I called, I had the date wrong. So we spent an uneventful day in Saigon, walking around. Ate lunch at a Pho place on corner about a km from our hotel. Had yet another banh mi for dinner, which wasn’t as good as we’d had in Hoi An or Hanoi, but serviceable.

So we made it down to Can Tho today, we stopped for a bit on the river outside HCM, went for a quick little river tour which included stopping by a lady who had a lot of fruit. We tried a few new ones we had yet to try – this milk fruit where you punch a hole in it with your finger & suck it out. Interesting. Then we had Jack Fruit, which is a huge fruit and it has all these small petals which kind of taste like Cotton Candy – Michelle agreed with  me, but Jackson didn’t.

 

Then we piled back into the car, saw an old Pagoda, and then we went to a local market where we got see all sorts of interesting things, including this huge shrimp that bit Michelle!

 

 

 

 

I’ll never get tired of seeing live fish. I swear that is why all the food here is so good!

 

 

 

The weirdest thing we saw: Live rats in a cage and frogs that were still alive but had their skin removed. They somehow have figured out how to skin a frog alive. wierd!

We ate lunch at our guide’s aunties house. Wow. What a meal. We got to help a bit making wontons and some egg drop soup.

The best part was they had this fish pond out off their back porch, and we had a steamed fish which was excellent!

It was a fabulous meal. Then we find out guide has made a DVD with our trip so far, including music & scene dissolves that lasted about 15 minutes! Pretty impressive. Then we conked out in the nice warm weather & took a 90 minute nap on their bed. It was really peaceful. We felt like Goldilocks even though we didn’t break the bed!

Then we drove down to Can Tho, and we have a really nice room, and enjoyed a rooftop beer looking down on the city.

Tomorrow, we get up at 5am to go to the real floating market here in Can Tho (it’s 1 km long!) and then leave back to HCM for a cooking class from 1pm-8pm and they’ll drop us off at the airport.

Hard to believe in a little more than 24hrs we’ll be starting our journey back. It’s been a quick 5 weeks!