Vlog #11 : Contiki Big Indochina Adventure: Mekong Delta, Vietnam

httpvh://youtu.be/6aTwZVySHW0

If you recall this is not my first boat trip along the Mekong, back in Laos we did a two day cruise along the river. Now we are at the Mekong delta for another rather different boat cruise.

Floating Markets

To start off our adventures in the south of Vietnam, we took a guided tour through the floating markets to learn how some popular Vietnamese sweets were made.

First was a caramel coconut toffee chew, so much goodness in one bite. It is now probably one of my favorite sweets of all time, which is funny since I’m not a huge fan of coconut or toffee candies back home. Maybe the fact that it was made fresh from whole ingredients was the reason it was so good.

After that we got a chance to taste some snake blood whiskey, which I gracefully backed out of, since I almost vomited from the last experience with Risky Snake Whiskey.

I did however try these lovely rice paper crackers. You would think they’d be rather plain and simple, but they turned out to be very sweet and tasty, somewhat similar to a potato chip, but much healthier. It was quite fascinating to watch them make the rice crackers; they looked like stretchy pancakes left to dry in the sun.

Once we had sufficiently filled our bellies full of sweets galore, we jumped back into our canal boats and cruised along for another 40 minutes to a small tributary on the delta. There we had to hop into even smaller boats to take us up to our overnight stop.

No motors for this boat, only oars and this wonderful old lady. Kinda funny how nonchalant she was about rowing two grown men and myself around. Devon tried to help her, but she just laughed at him and continued rowing.

Our overnight stop was a home-stay by a lovely Vietnamese family situated in the  jungle.

They were wonderful hosts:

1. They let us hold their pet snake.
2. They performed a dinner concert for us.
3. They cooked and killed a fresh snake for everyone to try. I actually filmed the killing of the snake but I could not put it in the video. It was much to graphic and probably one of the most disturbing things I have seen. You’ll thank me for not including it.

It was also a good thing I brought lots of bug spray. Nowhere on my travels have I actually required a mosquito net to sleep, tonight it was a necessity. Regardless, after a few glasses of “jungle punch” which shall remain ingredient-less, it was off to bed.