A correction! Today’s guide on the trip to the Mekong Delta, Ungh, was suitably impressed when told that us old gits had crawled the entire 100 metres of the tourist section of the Viet Cong tunnel complex. “No”, he said, “You are wrong. Its 200 metres”. The trip started with a visit to the Vinh Trang temple and adjacent pagoda at My Tho, a name I remember from the Vietnam War days as the site of particularly savage fighting. It is now a fairly large bustling town of 240,000 people. The rest of the day consisted of a series of boat rides on vessels ranging from a large river boat to a small sampan, giving a flavour of life in the delta. Lunch at a restaurant in one of the four islands in the My Tho river (one of the many branches through which the Mekong flows into the sea) was delicious with a large fish caught in th river, roasted ten cut up into pieces wrapped with rice in rice paper, the biggest prawns I have seen and the local delicacy, Hu Tieu My Tho, a distinctive type of rice noodle soup. I particularly enjoyed the visit to the centres where they manufacture sweets from coconut and aphrodisiacs from dead insects and reptiles in large jars of liquid. Jennifer bought some sweets but we gave the aphrodisiacs a miss.
Entrance to Vinh Trang with our fellow tourists on the trip
The temple, surrounded by gardens with incredible beautiful flowers
Enormous Laughing Buddha
Founder of the temple
A bonze (monk) beating a drum to call the other monks to a singing session
The altar
Monks singing
The Reclining Buddha
The Pagoda
Crossing the Mekong
Short concert at the restaurant
Typical delta landscape
Sampans on the My Tho river
Traffic jam
Canopy over the river
Elevenses of honey tea, dried banana and coconut sweets
Bee hive
Demonstration of breaking open coconuts and making sweets
Our guide with bunch of palm coconuts. Aren’t eaten unless you are starving
Aphrodisiac beetle
Snake aphrodisiac. I didn’t buy it.
The fish we ate (not the same one!)
Strange fish with tentacles and gaping mouths as they were being fed.
Alligators. You can feed them with a dead mouse on a stick. There is a sharp crack as their jaws snap shut.
Our meal
The fish with chunks of fish wrapped with rice in green rice paper
Giant prawn
Coconut drink served on a boat