Vinh Long and Ben Tre, Vietnam's Mekong Delta

Leaving the luxury of Holiday One Hotel in Can Tho, we took the local bus to Vinh Long, about 45km east. For once, the bus dropped us in the central bus station. Usually we get dropped in the middle of nowhere, without a map, and have to rely on over-charging moto-taxi drivers to take us to the centre (we ask for the market which tends to be the central hub of any town). It made a nice change to be able to walk away from the bus station and find our way around but the downside of walking to your own choice of hotel is that the heat of the day is unforgiving when you're carrying 15kg on your back. 

Eventually we found a hotel, showered and explored the small riverside town. The market was a chaotic hive of activity with stalls spilling out down the narrow lanes surrounding it, selling everything from roast duck heads to rice tacos. To cool down we stopped for an ice coffee at a riverside cafe.

No other country in the world (that I have visited) has such a coffee culture as Vietnam. From road side stalls to expansive elegant gardens, Vietnamese coffee is everywhere. Coffee cafes (selling only coffee, as the name suggests) are everywhere, they outnumber restaurants by at least ten to one and are always packed with people no matter what the time of day. Vietnam is the second biggest exporter of coffee after Brasil and its brew is served strong, sweet and black. It comes in a metal filter, hot, along with a tankard of ice so you can cool it down once it has completely filtered through. If you ask for milk you get a dense slug of condensed milk at the bottom of your glass. The combination of strong coffee and sickly sweet milk is as delicious as it is addictive.

Ca Phe Sua - Vietnamese coffee with sweet milk.

 We booked on to a tour of the river islands and floating market for the next day. Private boats were $25 or a group tour was $6 per person. We went for the cheap option but when it came to get on the boat in the morning we found we were the only people booked on the tour! We got a private tour for the price of a group tour. We set off along the river and stopped at a local market for breakfast where for about 40p we got a meat baguette and some coconut milk rice cakes. 

The produce at the local market couldn't get much fresher!

We crossed the Mekong and passed floating excavators that were removing sand from the bottom of the river. The sand is used for building and even for cooking as a substitute for oil.

Next, we went around Cai Be floating market. It wasn't as busy or as touristy as Cai Rang floating market in Can Tho and felt more authentic. The boats sold wholesale fruit and vegetables which are sold on at the local markets in the surrounding towns.

Boat selling a variety of fruit.

Cai Be floating market, Vinh Long.

After the market we stopped at some factories to learn about the production of local products including coconut caramels, rice paper, rice wine and popped rice crackers. It was interesting to see how no material is wasted; even the flesh from the coconuts and the husks from the rice are dried and burned as fuel. At the factory we saw the rice wine that Ric got drunk on at Mui Nai beach in Ha Tien. It's made from dried sticky rice and bananas and is flavoured with different fruits or snakes! We tried some rice wine with fermented poisonous snakes, yummy! 

Snake wine.

 We made the most of the free samples of all the delicacies, walked through the village and then boarded our boat once again for a relaxing cruise through the canals to a river island where we stopped to have lunch at a homestay set in tropical gardens and fruit orchards.

Ric enjoying the boat trip.

 The people at the homestay dropped us off at the local bus stop and we caught a local bus to the next town in the delta, Ben Tre.

Arriving in Ben Tre was a little bit more complicated than our arrival in Vinh Long. The bus took us to an intercity bus station in the middle of nowhere, they must have thought we were catching the bus straight to Saigon as no tourists ever visit Ben Tre, least of all on the local bus! Following quite a kerfuffle in the bus station, where nobody spoke English, we eventually got back on another bus and got off in the middle of town. Our problems didn't end there; once we got to the centre we couldn't find a hotel anywhere and the only person we could find who spoke English was a very pushy tout for a local homestay, who wanted to charge us the equivalent of two days budget for a one night stay. 

One hour and several litres of sweat later, we found a bed for the night and set off to explore the town. The waterfront was alive with a vibrant night market selling clothes, shoes and accessories. It really felt like we were off the tourist trail as people in the streets would stop and stare at us. 

We later found out that there are several hotels around a small lake just two blocks back from the river, too bad there wasn't anybody around able to tell us that when we were roaming the streets asking for a hotel!

Ben Tre's small lake, fringed with hotels and coffee cafes.

After nine nights in the Mekong Delta region we were ready to move on to the bright lights of Saigon. We'd crossed into Vietnam at Ha Tien, then stopped at Chau Doc, Can Tho, Vinh Long and Ben Tre. In some places we felt like we were the only tourists in town, in the last two places I'm certain that we were. It's been nice meandering slowly through the rivers and canals of the delta, we've enjoyed the laid back pace of life in the small towns and have been blown away by the kindness and welcoming attitude of the locals, even in the absence of a common language to communicate in. We've traveled on local transport as the high-priced tourist buses don't run much further south than Ho Chi Min City (Saigon). It's been a fun, cheap, sweaty, uncomfortable and interesting experience. On the bus between Chau Doc and Can Tho, for example, the driver and several of the passengers chain smoked for most of the three hour journey, whilst incense burned en masse on the dash; and we shared the back seat of the bus to Ben Tre with a drunk man asleep between us, who flopped alternately onto our shoulders every time we rounded a bend.